Many white parents are uncomfortable talking with their children directly about race. A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents. Our hope, often unspoken, is that not mentioning it will show our children that it doesn’t matter.

But research suggests the opposite: that when we don’t talk about race, our children continue to think about it — and what they think is that it matters too much to talk about. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman wrote about this gap between what parents think we’re teaching, and what children are learning, in their “NurtureShock” column for Newsweek in 2009. It’s the children whose parents do directly address race — and directly means far more than vaguely declaring everyone to be equal — who are less likely to make assumptions about people based on the color of our skin.

Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, 360, commissioned new research designed to look at this question further. They found that many more white children interpreted a neutral picture of an interaction between two students of different races in a negative way. One of the researchers who created the study, Dr. Melanie Killen, believes the difference comes from those different approaches white and nonwhite parents have to talking with their kids about race. White parents, she said, believe children are socially color blind. “They sort of have this view that if you talk about race, you are creating a problem and what we’re finding is that children are aware of race very early.”

Last week, I wrote about “the Talk” black parents have with their teenage sons, and how all of our children need to know why that “talk” is standard in the African-American community. But this is a conversation that should start earlier, and go deeper. Have you, as a parent — of any race — directly addressed the question of skin color and bias with your children, and how?

I have, in part because one of my daughters is from China (in our family’s travels in that country, we were in a decidedly conspicuous minority), and in part because of Mr. Bronson and Ms. Merryman’s work. A few years ago, I was given two apps created by the Race Awareness Project to encourage those conversations.

One had children play a guessing game on an iPhone or iPad, choosing one among many diverse pictures of people, and then challenging a friend or a parent to guess, by the process of elimination, which was chosen. The other directly invited children to “Guess My Race” when looking at a person’s photograph. It’s hard — and that’s the best part. If you can’t even tell what “color” the person in the picture is, how can it matter?

I was surprised by how delighted my children were with the apps, and with the freedom to ask questions that they conferred. We’ve had plenty of direct conversations since, and unfortunately, current events constantly provide us with the opportunity to have more. We’re not blind to race, or skin color. We talk about it — and about how little, and how much, it means. Probably not enough — it’s not some utopia of casual conversation about race relations around here. But the conversations do happen.

If you haven’t talked to your children directly about race, why not? Are you waiting for the right time, or the right question? And if you have, how did you open the door to the conversation, and how did your child respond?