Books for Babes Big on Tolerance

Thirty-two thousand babies are born in Miami-Dade County every year. With those babies come 32,000 colors of eyes, 32,000 shapes of noses and a full pallet of skin shades.

Now, the babies will get a book, on the day they are born, with pictures of all kinds of noses and ears and mouths.

The books, created by the Anti-Defamation League and the Miami-Dade Family Learning Partnership and paid for by The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, have two purposes: encouraging parents to read to their newborns and teaching children about tolerance.

The ADL has paid more attention to early childhood development in recent years to deliver its tolerance message.

“If we could reach children before they developed biases and prejudices, while they were still young, then we’re ahead of the game,” said Frances Tropp, associate director of the ADL’s southern region.

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Photographs in the book depict smiling faces of all races, with gently lit, monocromatic backgrounds. The book’s title, All Kinds of . . . Todo Tipo de . . . Tout Kalite, is in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, as are the simple descriptions on its pages.

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