Children ' s interracial interactions and attitudes have been the interest of researchers for nearly 6 decades. The increasing globalized nature of society, including ease of movement to new lands, ensures that many children will continue to function in interracial contexts. Children ' s social development in interracial contexts has been of considerable interest to researchers for many decades, and this research has uncovered important insights into children ' s social development. For example, children develop notions about ethnicity and race early in life, oftentimes even before they have interethnic or interracial contact. Children learn about other social categories, such as gender -or age -related groupings, through extensive interpersonal interactions, but young, preschool children often learn about those who are ethnically or racially different in the absence of personal contact. Despite this social distance, the precociousness of children ' s learning about race and ethnicity suggests that they have strong motivations or natural inclinations to learn about social categories involving race and ethnicity.
Research into how children learn about race and ethnicity is particularly interesting because several popular notions regarding race and ethnicity have been contradicted by psychological research. For example, many presume that children start life with neutral notions about sociocultural groups and later internalize the society ' s ethnic and racial hierarchy. Analogously, many believe that children fi rst learned to differentiate among ethnic or racial groups and then develop attitudes toward those groups. In contrast, research suggests that children acquire racial attitudes prior to developing the ability to categorize by race and that the initial attitudes are not neutral but refl ect society ' s biases against certain racial groups (Hirschfeld, 2008 ). In short, it appears as if children fi rst The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development, Second Edition Edited by P. K. Smith and C. H. Hart