Strategies to Foster Healthy Ethnic-Racial Identity in Infants and Toddlers
Anissa L. Eddie, Claire D. Vallotton, Sarah N. Douglas, and Holly E. Brophy-Herb
The themes of identity, inclusion, and belonging are becoming increasingly elevated within the field of child development( NAEYC 2019, 2020; Meek et al. 2022). Children are born actively observing and making sense of the variations they see in the world, and it is the responsibility of the adults in their lives to offer meaningful guidance( Wood 2010; Hooven et al. 2018; Buchanan et al. 2020; Braveman et al. 2022). However, disparities based on ethnicity and race continue to be perpetuated because of historic and current injustices that are embedded in social systems— including early care and education( Iruka et al. 2020; Sykes 2022).
Early childhood educators must be aware of this reality and equipped with the knowledge and tools to address it( Curenton & Iruka 2013; Durden & Curenton 2021). Dr. Eddie( the first author) initially developed the framework introduced in this article as a doctoral student at Michigan State University. Her coauthors, also steeped in early childhood care and practice, collaborated with her to refine and strengthen it. The resulting I Can / You Can framework offers developmentally appropriate ways for educators and other adults to help our youngest children cultivate healthy ethnic-racial identities. These practices are aligned with the social and cognitive development of infants and toddlers and aim to disrupt the emergence of harmful biases.
In this article, we outline the importance of children’ s developing racial and ethnic identities and discuss how the messages they receive from individuals and society can affect them. We then present the I Can / You Can framework as a tool that infant-toddler educators can use to support children’ s healthy identity development. We end by showing what the framework’ s practices look like in early learning settings serving children birth to age 3. While the I Can / You Can framework was developed around racial and ethnic identities, its design can also support development related to other aspects of an individual’ s multiple social identities, such as gender, disability, and religion.
Ethnic-Racial Identity and Socialization
Beginning in infancy and toddlerhood, children start to receive and process information about race( Umaña-Taylor et al. 2014; Williams et al. 2020). As such, they begin to understand themselves in relation to their ethnic heritages and racial backgrounds( Rivas-Drake et al. 2014; Williams et al. 2020; Umaña-Taylor et al. 2024). This is called ethnic-racial identity.
In the past, ethnicity and race were often thought about separately( Umaña-Taylor et al. 2014; Doucet et al. 2016). However, more recent scholarship combines the two terms to acknowledge the ways that individuals are racialized in the United States based on both their ethnic heritages and their phenotypic, or observable, features( skin color, eye shape, hair texture)( Rogers et al. 2020). For example, a child’ s ethnic heritage may be Yoruba, and their family may identify racially as African American; however, those two identities in the US are typically compressed under the racialized label of Black. This is also seen with the racialized term Asian, which does not account for an individual’ s specific ethnic heritage( Markus 2008). Furthermore, an upcoming change to the US Census will list the ethnicity labels Hispanic and Latino under the same section as racial categories( Schneider 2024).
84 Young Children
Winter 2025