Start Them Brave:
The Cost of Underestimating Our Youngest Allies
COMING SOON
Children are already noticing difference. They are already forming ideas about identity, fairness, belonging, and whose voices matter. They are already encountering bias—sometimes as witnesses, sometimes as participants, and sometimes as its targets.
The question isn't whether children are ready.
It's whether we are ready to recognize what they're capable of.
Start Them Brave challenges the assumptions that have led adults to underestimate young children's capacity to engage thoughtfully with identity, bias, discrimination, and injustice. Because while some of us have the privilege of waiting until these conversations feel comfortable, children experiencing discrimination don't have the privilege of waiting until everyone else feels ready.
This book asks what becomes possible when we stop treating children as too young for anti-bias education—and start recognizing them as some of our youngest allies in creating classrooms and communities rooted in dignity, fairness, courage, and belonging.
About The Book
Start Them Brave is a research-informed, deeply practical exploration of what happens when we reconsider what children are capable of understanding, questioning, and doing about bias.
We often approach difficult topics in childhood by asking, Are they ready for this? But readiness is complicated. Children who experience racism, ableism, sexism, exclusion, or other forms of discrimination do not get to choose when they are ready to encounter them. And when their peers have been protected from conversations about identity and inequity, the children experiencing harm can be left navigating those moments without classmates who have been given the language, awareness, or confidence to stand beside them.
That doesn't mean giving children adult-sized problems to solve.
It means trusting them with developmentally appropriate truth.
Blending child development, anti-bias education, history, research, personal stories, and classroom-tested practice, Start Them Brave examines both the evolution of DEI in American education and what its original purpose can teach us now. It moves beyond political rhetoric to the deeply human work at its center: helping children understand themselves, understand one another, recognize unfairness, navigate difference, and discover that they have agency when something isn't right.
And it does so without asking already-overextended educators to shoulder one more enormous initiative. Rather than prescribing a stand-alone curriculum, Start Them Brave helps educators recognize the anti-bias opportunities already embedded in children's questions, classroom relationships, literature, play, conflict, community, and everyday life.
Why I Wrote This Book
I didn’t write Start Them Brave because educators need one more thing to do.
I wrote it because I have spent my career watching extraordinary educators do incredibly difficult work while the language surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion has become increasingly complicated, politicized, and—in many places—something to fear.
Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of how human this work actually is.
Before DEI became an acronym debated in school board meetings and legislatures, its foundations were already present in classrooms: in whose family appeared in the books on the shelf, whose name was pronounced correctly, who felt safe enough to speak, how children responded when someone was excluded, and what happened when a child looked at the world around them and asked, “Why?”
That matters even more in a moment when access to identity-affirming texts is being restricted. For young children especially, books are more than mirrors in which they can see themselves or windows into lives different from their own. They are access points.
A thoughtfully chosen story can give a five-year-old language for something they have noticed but cannot yet name. It can make an abstract idea like bias, identity, privilege, or belonging visible through characters and experiences children can understand. And for an educator who wants to have these conversations but isn't sure how to begin, a book can provide something equally important: a place to start.
When we remove identity-affirming texts from children's spaces, then, we aren't only removing representation. We may also be removing some of the most developmentally appropriate tools educators have for opening conversations about human difference.
That loss does not affect every child in the same way.
Children whose identities are marginalized can lose opportunities to see their lives reflected with dignity and to find language for experiences they may already be navigating. Their peers can lose opportunities to encounter experiences beyond their own, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and begin developing the understanding necessary to recognize bias when it appears. And educators lose a bridge.
That is why this book is a reclaiming.
I want to reclaim this work from the acronyms, the fear, and the political noise surrounding it.
I want to return it to its most human foundations: dignity, curiosity, fairness, belonging, courage, and connection.
And I want educators to feel empowered rather than intimidated by it.
Start Them Brave grew from more than a decade spent as an educator, teacher educator, and anti-bias trainer—but it also grew from becoming a mother and thinking deeply about the kind of childhood we create when we take children's questions seriously.
I don't believe educators need to have every answer. I don't believe these conversations need to be perfect. And I certainly don't believe meaningful anti-bias education requires adding another enormous initiative to an already impossible workload.
Sometimes it begins with something as ordinary—and as powerful—as opening a book.
Reading together.
Noticing what children notice.
Listening to what they ask.
And being brave enough to follow the conversation where it leads.
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