The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

Sadly, I have witness several experiences related to bias towards children professionally and personally. Just recently in the Head Start that I work in we had an open house, in this open house we screened the families to see if they qualified for our program. It is common thing to have all the family come that day, so we need to be prepared with crayons, some paper and toys.  That day a mom came with 3 of her children and one of them in particular, was running everywhere and it was precisely the child that would possible enter our program. The first think that my co-worker told the mom is that it seemed that she didn’t have any control with her child, and that he was to hyperactive. That if he was not yet evaluated by the district, she should look into it. You could notice in mom’s face how bad and worried she was feeling by the comments that my co-worker brought up, without first inquiring with the parent about his behavior. Then she tried to model to mom how to work with her child, which didn’t work at all, and what it did was make things worse as the child got frustrated and got him crying to the point that the parent had to reschedule the appointment for another day. Then she shared with other colleagues that it is common on Latino parents to not take their children to be screenings, or if they are too active they don’t know how to set limits and children know that.

First of all the way my co-worker handled the situation was very impropriate in my opinion, by making the assumption that mom didn’t have any control over the child without first actual assessing the situation with moms feedback. Also by trying to model to the parent techniques to work with the child in a time and place that was not appropriate made things worse for the child and the parent since we had several other parents and children present observing and hearing her comments. I can see how she might have mean well, and unconsciously behaved in a bias way by her actions and comments to the parent, but as a parent I can imagine what the parent was feeling and probably would have looked for another place to enroll my child were they actually could speak to me in a way I could understand and help my child not it a way the makes us feel less, discriminated and devaluated. By being participate of this incident,  made me realize how important it is to know a families culture before make the mistake of trying to share our expertise with the parents without given them  opportunity to share their experiences , challenges as well as what has worked or not worked with their child.  Then  work together to create a plan that might help the child succeed as well as including the help of other professionals that can contribute their knowledge in this plan. I consider that in order to avoid incidents such as this one, is that all staff and professionals working