National Post - Pre-schoolers prefer same-ethnicity playmates

Along with finger painting and story time, Canadian preschools are also spilling over with ethnic tension, according to a study released by Concordia University. “We found Asian-Canadian and French-Canadian children seemed to prefer interacting with kids of the same ethnic background,” said report co-author Nadine Girouard in a Tuesday release.

Prejudice in children first starts to crop up right around the age of three or four, says Frances Aboud, a McGill University psychology professor specializing in the development of racism in children. The first time children come up against different ethnicities, their initial reaction is “nobody in my family looks like that, says Ms. Aboud. “Sometimes kids even go so far as to say that a child is intentionally trying not to look like him,” she says.