ROOTS

Rising Out Of Two Stories
Parents & Caregivers

Your Racial Lens as a Parent

Intended Outcome: Caregivers begin exploring how their own racial identity, life experiences, and socialization shape the way they understand and navigate parenting a biracial child.

 

• Builds awareness of the unspoken beliefs, fears, and assumptions caregivers may hold.

• Encourages reflection without shame—just truth and responsibility.

• Reinforces that unexamined lenses can lead to misattunement, harm, or invisibility.

• Opens the door for curiosity, learning, and loving accountability.

​Proximity to Whiteness, Power & Control

Intended Outcome: Caregivers reflect on how proximity to whiteness affects parenting instincts, discipline, advocacy, and assumptions about success, safety, and social norms.

 

• Encourages examination of where control, perfectionism, or fear may be rooted in assimilation or respectability politics.

• Unpacks how whiteness as a standard shows up in parenting styles, expectations, and conflict resolution.

• Reinforces the need to center the child’s lived experience—not the caregiver’s comfort.

• Builds awareness of the impact of generational pressure, external gaze, and internalized narratives.

​Talking About Race at Home

Intended Outcome: Caregivers begin building confidence, language, and intentionality around discussing race, identity, and belonging with their children.

 

• Encourages naming race without fear—centering honesty, not perfection.

• Supports development of age-appropriate conversation strategies.

• Validates discomfort and offers tools for practice and repair.

• Reinforces that racial silence at home can send louder messages than we realize.

​Avoiding Erasure & Saviorism

Intended Outcome: Caregivers learn how to affirm their child’s full racial identity without overshadowing, minimizing, or over-centering their own experience.

 

• Unpacks how “I don’t see color” and overprotectiveness can unintentionally cause harm.

• Encourages curiosity about the child’s lived experience, without defensiveness.

• Supports building language that uplifts both sides of a child’s heritage.

• Reinforces that children need to see their full identity mirrored, valued, and defended.

​Affirming Identity Without Projection

Intended Outcome: Caregivers learn how to affirm their child’s identity while allowing the child full ownership of how they see and name themselves.

 

• Encourages caregivers to recognize and release the urge to define identity for their children.

• Unpacks common patterns of projection rooted in pride, fear, or longing.

• Supports respectful inquiry, listening, and affirmation—without assumptions.

• Reinforces that children’s identities may shift, grow, and challenge what caregivers expected.

​Supporting Both/And Belonging

Intended Outcome: Caregivers explore how to nurture a sense of belonging for their child in multiple racial, cultural, or social spaces—without requiring them to choose or prioritize one.

 

• Encourages reflection on binary thinking and cultural loyalty pressures.

• Supports caregivers in helping their child feel confident navigating “in-between” spaces.

• Builds language to affirm multiple heritages as whole, valid, and valuable.

• ​Reinforces that true belonging doesn’t require picking sides—it invites wholeness and integration across all parts of identity.

​Addressing Internal Bias & Discomfort

Intended Outcome: Caregivers examine internalized beliefs and emotional discomfort that arise in moments of racial tension, challenge, or unfamiliarity—and learn to respond with curiosity rather than control.

 

• Encourages recognition of personal triggers and blind spots.

• Builds emotional regulation skills to stay present during hard conversations.

• Reinforces that discomfort is not a signal to retreat—but an invitation to grow.

• Validates that bias lives in all of us and can be addressed without shame.

Family Histories & Racial Storylines

Intended Outcome: Caregivers reflect on the racial narratives passed down through generations—both spoken and unspoken—and how those stories shape parenting, identity, and family culture.

 

• Explores whose stories get centered, hidden, or mythologized in the family.

• Encourages naming patterns of trauma, silence, resilience, and pride.

• Supports integration of complex histories while modeling truth-telling for children.

• Reinforces that healing begins when families start telling fuller, more honest stories.

​​​Discipline, Fairness & Double Standards

Intended Outcome: Caregivers examine how discipline and fairness are influenced by cultural expectations, racial perceptions, and their own upbringing—and begin creating consistent, affirming approaches for their biracial child.

 

• Unpacks how external judgments or internalized fear may influence parenting responses.

• Supports developing discipline strategies that are aligned, transparent, and identity-affirming.

• Encourages consistency across caregivers and awareness of racialized double standards.

• Reinforces that equity, not equality, is the goal when parenting across identities.

Who Gets Seen, Heard & Believed

Intended Outcome: Caregivers explore how bias and perception affect which children are validated, protected, or questioned—and examine how to advocate for their child’s full dignity and truth.

 

• Unpacks the racialized dynamics of authority, trust, and protection in school, healthcare, and public settings.

• Supports caregivers in role-playing how to advocate for their child with clarity and courage.

• Reinforces the importance of believing, uplifting, and affirming children—especially when the world may not.

• Encourages practical tools for navigating systems while centering the child’s experience.

Being a Safe Base

Intended Outcome: Caregivers learn how to become an emotionally safe, culturally attuned, and dependable base for their biracial child to return to, explore from, and be fully themselves with.

 

• Encourages reflection on how caregivers respond to vulnerability, grief, and joy.

• Supports strategies for co-regulation, affirmation, and consistent presence.

• Unpacks what emotional safety really looks like in moments of conflict or confusion.

• Reinforces that being a safe base doesn’t mean perfection—it means availability, attunement, and care.

Repairing When We Miss It

Intended Outcome: Caregivers learn how to respond when harm has been done—whether through silence, misattunement, or unintentional bias—and how to repair with humility, clarity, and love.

 

• Builds capacity to model accountability and emotional repair for children.

• Supports self-reflection without shame or defensiveness.

• Offers tools to acknowledge mistakes while affirming the child’s full experience.

• Reinforces that rupture is inevitable—and repair builds trust, not weakness.

Centering Joy & Visibility at Home

Intended Outcome: Caregivers explore how to intentionally cultivate joy, pride, and visible celebration of their child’s full racial identity in everyday family life.

 

• Encourages joy not as an afterthought, but as a core parenting strategy.

• Supports daily rituals and cultural expressions that affirm identity.

• Validates that joyful representation is a protective and healing force.

• Reinforces that celebration helps anchor children’s sense of worth and visibility.

Teaching Resilience Without Erasing Pain

Intended Outcome: Caregivers learn how to nurture emotional resilience in their biracial child without dismissing or minimizing the very real pain, confusion, or isolation their child may experience.

 

• Encourages honest dialogue about struggle while still uplifting hope and strength.

• Supports balance between protection and preparation.

• Unpacks the difference between bypassing pain and helping children process it.

• Reinforces that children need both validation and tools for navigating a complex world.

​Collective Reflection & Commitment

Intended Outcome: Caregivers close the ROOTS journey with deep reflection and intentional commitments for how they will continue showing up for their children with courage, clarity, and love.

 

• Supports integration of new insights, tools, and practices into everyday parenting.

• Encourages shared celebration and community witnessing.

• Offers space to name personal growth, ongoing questions, and emerging commitments.

• Reinforces that parenting racially conscious children is a lifelong practice—rooted in presence, not perfection.