Stop and Think: Learning about differences

     I would say that my earliest memory of realizing that some people were different from me was in Kindergarten and I came home and announced to my mother that "I made a new friend who has brown skin."  I went to Kindergarten at a magnet school in North Carolina, and the school was made up of mostly African-American children, but I dont remember it being unusual to be around so many children with different color skin that I had.  I also had a kindergarten teacher that was of spanish descent, so I knew she had a different accent that I did, but I never distinctively thought about them as being completely different than myself.  My parents, especially my mother being an elementary school teacher, made sure that I knew about other races, religions, and languages, but they didnt teach them to me as being unusual, just a different way to be.  My mother also read a lot of books to me, written by authors of different races so I learned about different cultures that way. 
     I think the moment that changed my ideas and really brought an awareness that people from other backgrounds were different than myself was when my family moved to South Carolina in the fourth grade, and I was put into a predominantly white, middle-class school, which greatly differed from my last school.  Being around more children that shared my own race, economic status and home language made me realize how different the other children at my other school were.  I then considered an "ordinary" person to be english-speaking, caucasion, in a family with two parents and living in a neighborhood like I did. 
     I believe that how children perceive their own social identities depends on their upbringing, their environment that they grow up in, and peer influence.  I think, when children are young, it depends on how much their parents embrace their own culture and how their parents react around other people with different backgrounds.  I also think that the environment that they are in greatly influences their perception of how their social identity compares to other social identities.  For example, when I was in the school with children from many different backgrounds, I thought being different was the norm, but that perception changed when I moved to the school with the majority of children that shared my own background.  I also think that children's social identities change as they become older and they hear comments from their peers, teachers, or other people in society and these comments have an influence on how they see themselves.