This paper focuses on differences in Brazil and the United States in attitudes toward multiracial and multiethnic children and developmentally appropriate practice in education and child rearing. Child rearing in Brazil is characterized by a generally permissive approach with a high degree of patience, although parent-child relationships among the very poor are more direct and more punitive. The debate about developmentally appropriate practice in schools in Brazil, where the differences between the ruling class and the lower class are clear, is the same philosophical debate that drives all curriculum decisions: Is the role of education to perpetuate society as it is or to change it to what it should be? Brazil does take an approach to interracial marriage and mixed-race children that is very different than that traditionally taken in the United States. In the United States, racial classification is driven by genetics and the historical "one drop" of blood rule, but the Brazilian system is based purely on physical appearance and therefore open to individual judgment. Some argue that the Brazilian approach still places the black population at the bottom of the social order, but the approach is clearly much better for mixed race children, who find more acceptance than they would in the United States where they would be thought of as belonging to the minority race. (Contains 18 references.) (SLD)