Earth Babies Blog

Posts Tagged ‘South Africa’

Strange topic for a ‘baby blog’ I suppose BUT babies, become children, become adults. What we teach them now is the basis for how they approach people in the future.
This contains lots of questions and I hope I get replies as I dont intend them as purely hypothetical. I am really curious how others see it – beyond the group I have discussed similar things with in the past (I tend to disagree with the approach of the majority).

What is your take on children being aware of colour? How do you approach it with your own children? Is recognising someone’s colour discrimination?

I think we are taking being Politically correct about colour way too far – I cannot tell you how many times people try claim that children “dont see colour” – Of course they see colour, they just dont care! But as adults trying to navigate the maze of rules as to what is ‘allowed and not’ we try to tell ourselves that they don’t see colour. Now if they can see that a boy has a blue shirt, or a girl has blonde hair – why would they not see that that skin colours differ?

What are we actually teaching our children by trying to make them stick everyone in one colourless box? Do YOU want to be colourless?

The whole colour PC issue is going the same way as the feminism movement, where in my opinion they lose focus of what is important. If we ignore colour we lose sight of all the wonderful unique attributes of people and actually I feel create a nation less tolerant of differences in culture ‘as we are all meant to be the same’. I WANT my children to recognize racial differences and learn to accept them. How do we expect children to learn about different cultures and respect them if we are teaching them in the first place not to recognise or acknowledge those differences?

For me respect is based in acceptance, and tolerance and not in being the same. Equality is based on respect and acceptance of others and not on overlooking differences.

How important is it to you as a South African consumer that products you buy are made in South Africa? Imports are often a lot cheaper but how much extra are people willing to pay to support industry in South Africa or is price the bottom line? These questions have been going around in my head as we once again face this dilemma ourselves as we source fabric for our nappies.

We try as far as possible to make Earth Babies as South African as possible and to support other businesses here in South Africa. It has not always been easy and especially with the fabric we use to make our nappies it has been hard to keep it local, but we did find a SA weaver and were proud that our nappies are made start to finish in SA. But even this might be a thing of the past soon as very few local weavers survive at the moment and most fabric is imported. Price and ultimately if these small weavers close might force us to import which is sad.

Please fill in our poll as I would love to see what motivates you when buying.