Bringing up 'difference' in a world of prejudice

"Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike."

This is the experience of Pecola, the young girl in Toni Morrison's heartbreaking novel The Bluest Eye.

Pecola is fictional, but many real children have the same sense of shame about their looks.

"The first time I dated a guy, he told his friend: 'I know she's a bit fat but ...' I didn't hear the rest," said one of my teenage clients. Another teenage boy told me:

"I got cross in class and the teacher said I was displaying 'small man's syndrome'."

It can be hard when our children look different from the norm. We live in an age of political correctness, where prejudice towards people's race, culture or religion can get you into a lot of trouble, but many people still think it's okay to disparage someone's appearance.

We see this trend everywhere. In everyday conversation people often preface insults with words such as "fat", "little" or "ugly", whether or not the person even has that physical trait. Those adjectives are no longer physical descriptions but attempts to explain personality.

But looking different is not a pathology. It doesn't determine who you are and what you become.

A friend of mine, who is naturally bony and thin, says that otherwise sensitive people have no compunction in telling him, "You must put some meat on those bones. Are you okay?"

He finds it embarrassing that he often has to deal with these passing comments and defend his emotional state, and he's an adult. Imagine how much more difficult it can be for children who are dark-skinned in a pale school world, blistered with acne or who wear glasses for a squint.

What do you do if your child looks sufficiently different that people notice? You don't want to pretend he doesn't look that way, nor do you want to say something essentially meaningless such as "Well, just be positive."

If just being positive worked, the world would have no problems and psychologists like me would be out of work.

Pierre Brouard, a Pretoria-based clinical psychologist, has coined a term which he calls "Modelling, Buffering and Responding", and I think it's a useful way for parents to go about raising children who look different.

Modelling means treating difference, in word and deed, as a normal variation. It's how you act: comfortable in your own flabby-bellied flesh on the beach so you can swim with your toddler; standing proudly in a room full of giants even though you're a Lilliputian. It's how you talk about all the human differences that seem to get some people so riled up - the black and white, the thin and fat, the big and small, the albinos and the scarred.

Buffering means mediating or lessening the impact of something so as to protect your child - being your child's public defender.

For example, if you're a white mother who has adopted a black child, you may choose to limit contact with your unapologetically racist uncle in order to avoid exposing your child to an inappropriate and destructive environment.

If your child has an extra nipple (Wikipedia says one in 18 males do) you might want to write his school a letter asking them to allow him to skip the gala or swim in a shirt.

Responding obviously refers to how you respond to cases of stereotyping.

A short male friend of mine has a number of stock lines he uses when people refer disparagingly to his shortness.

"To be honest, I only think about being short when other people remind me," he says, or "Oh, I wasn't aware that being short was a syndrome."

His humour, pointing out the display of prejudice to the speaker but not being sucked into it, is a good balancing act to try pull off. Give your child an arsenal of such responses that he can use because almost as bad as doing nothing is becoming too defensive.

Don't be tempted to tell a child who looks different that it is for a reason, or that he is therefore in some way special and gifted.

This is disingenuous and serves only to trivialise real difficulties.

But you can make use of the opportunity to build resilience and self-acceptance.