Luke Lightner and Nathaniel Chalfant catch up on their reading. Memorable and colorful images are valuable tools in teaching diversity awareness and an appreciation of difference. Photo by Tonee Harbert

"Does her skin stay brown after she washes it?"

"Why don't they celebrate Christmas?"

"Why does she talk funny?"

Such were the questions many of us blurted out when we were very young. And our parents' answers probably were: "Isn't it a nice day!" or "Eat your spinach, dear."

These were things parents just didn't talk about, for fear of confusing children or embarrassing the people whose differences had piqued their curiosity. The unspoken message was that if we didn't call attention to such things, maybe they would go away.

They didn't. But the notion of "the norm" has. Even in places which, at first glance, might seem as homogeneous as Maine.

Migrant workers, resettled refugees, adopted children from other cultures are only part of the new Maine demographics. Behind the postcard images of a traditional (i.e., white, rural, Protestant, middle class, puritanical) New England is a growing realization that there were many differences - ethnic, racial, religious, above all economic - along, but people avoided talking about them, at least in public.

And least of all with children, To suggest that the world was a complicated and often puzzling place seemed to violate the innocence of childhood.

Today, we know from research on cognitive development that children notice differences - of skin color, body shape, language, family structure - from a very early age. It's taken adults longer to figure out what to do about it, but we are now beginning to understand how to channel these perceptions in positive directions while teaching basic moral lessons about fairness and tolerance. Working with very young children and the people who take care of them, our Born To Read "read aloud" program has helped us to see all of the Council's programs through the lens of diversity.

Born To Read is developing, for example, a statewide training program which aims- through the use of high quality children's books to provide childcare providers with language to respond to the whole spectrum of these questions of difference. In addition, the Council's New Mainers Book Project is commissioning new children's books dealing with diverse ethnic groups, beginning with the Sudanese and Cambodian communities in Maine.

"By the year 2010, children of color will outnumber white children in the United States," says Denise Pendleton, co-director of Born To Read. "If that's not the world we see right now in Maine, it's the world our children will be living and working in."

"We're trying to help people learn how to deal with children's sometimes awkward questions about the world - questions that still make some adults uncomfortable," says Audrey Maynard, a child development specialist who has studied how small children develop notions of "us" and "them." (See interview, pages 4-5.)

She has already succeeded with a very different age group - the retirees in the Born To Read Volunteer Readers Program who have gone through a first round of training in Saco with Maynard. "They love the books we've chosen. They want to make sure that children aren't growing up being bullied or teased. They all have stories from their own experience about that. 'We just won't let this sort of thing happen again!' they say.