Identity crises. Drugs. Low grades. Doom and gloom. But listen - much of this is not about race. It's about poverty, lack of education, bad parenting (see poverty and bad education), class, and where you live.

Black, white or brown, if you're living in modern deprivation then you're a candidate for addiction, under-achievement and misery.

The exception is identity. If there's a gap where your sense of self should be, written all over your body in your skin colour, you're in deep trouble. But it is simple: if a child knows who he is, then he knows who he is. So tell him. Tell him: your Dad is from Mali, your Mum is Scottish, so you are Malian and Scottish. Let's go to Edinburgh. Let's go to Dakar - and here the paths diverge: Parent 1: 'We can't go to Mali, I'm working all hours to keep you fed and clothed. They'll tell you about it in school - well, maybe not.'

Round here they assume anyone at all black is Jamaican. Not that there is anyone, apart from you. 'Well there'll be a book about it at the library - oh, the library's closed down.'

Or, Parent 2: 'Yes, let's go to Mali, lovely idea. And look, Salif Keita is playing at the Barbican, let's all go ... '

Yes, money helps.

And if one parent is gone, the remaining parent MUST hold on to the departed one's background. It is part of your child, and he needs to know and love what he is. Where it is visible - darkness in a white family, fairness in a black family - it's even more important. If the parent can't do it, the relatives must. Join in. Take turns. Don't let your mixed-race cousin feel she has to be all white to be in your family. Or all black.

In Ghana, where her father is from, my child is considered as white as she is black here. (Most white English people don't know this.) If adults don't make it clear to mixed-race children that they belong to both races, they may well assume they belong to neither - and that is where the depressed drug-taking under-achievement comes from.

Not from being what you are, but from not knowing what you are, and its corollary: feeling that you are nothing. Then there is always some ignorant little person who will want to tell you what "they" think you are. The problem, they'll say, is your skin colour - not poverty, insecurity, ignorance, bigotry, human weakness, a trick of fate ...

Don't leave space in the child's mind for this. Fill that mind with self-knowledge and self-belief. If we can send them out educated, loved and proud of who they are, knowing that racists are pathetic whereas 'they' are the future - heck, of course it won't solve every problem they ever have to face, but it will help .

Either we all include each other now or, as Warren Beatty's character Senator Bulworth says in Bulworth , there'll be no peace till we've all fucked each other khaki. Which may take some time.

· Louisa Young writes with her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young, under the name Zizou Corder. Their latest book is Lionboy (Puffin, £4.99)