{"id":26699,"date":"2018-08-14T07:30:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T11:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26699"},"modified":"2018-08-14T07:30:35","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T11:30:35","slug":"ten-books-for-ten-million-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26699","title":{"rendered":"Ten Books for Ten Million Kids?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Recently, a young woman in her mid-20s came into the store looking for a picture book to give her one-year-nephew, one that contained a same-sex couple, ideally aunts\u00a0or uncles, but barring those, same-sex parents. “I’m getting married to my fianc\u00e9e in two weeks,” she said, “and I’d really like to give my nephew a book he can understand, with a family like ours.” I scratched my head, trying to think of possibilities.
\nGuess what? It’s a publishing DESERT for young children of\u00a0same-sex\u00a0parents and\u00a0kids with\u00a0LGBT relatives.
\nThere are some\u00a0titles out there.\u00a0I remembered the two Bobbie Combs picture books from several years ago,\u00a0ABC a Family Alphabet Book<\/em><\/a> and 123 a Family Counting Book<\/em><\/a>, which continue to be\u00a0important additions\u00a0(but whose art I want to like better).\u00a0And there are several books\u00a0about having\u00a0gay parents, like\u00a0Heather Has Two Mommies<\/em><\/a>, Lesl\u00e9a Newman’s pioneering picture book from more than 25 years ago, and her more recent board books\u00a0Mommy, Mama and Me<\/em><\/a> and Daddy, Papa and Me<\/em><\/a>. And Patricia Polacco has a\u00a0warm-hearted book, In Our Mothers’ House<\/em><\/a>. There is also, of course, the charming And Tango Makes Three<\/em><\/a>.
\nBut I couldn’t think of a picture book where gay aunts, uncles, grandparents or other family members are\u00a0significant figures in\u00a0the story. (And please, dear readers, shout out in the comments if there are any!)\u00a0 A fact sheet on lesbian and gay parenting on the\u00a0ACLU website<\/a> states: “Researchers estimate that the total number of children nationwide living with at least one gay parent ranges from six to 14 million.” The number of children with a gay aunt, uncle, cousin, or grandparent must be exponentially higher than that.
\nWhere the heck are the books for these kids? How is it that, more than 25 years after Heather Has Two Mommies<\/em>, we still don’t have a significant body of literature\u00a0for these millions of children?
\nRecently, there’s been a surge in awareness of other kinds of diversity in picture books,\u00a0 including\u00a0gender\u00a0non-conformity\u00a0and\u00a0 the rejection of\u00a0social constructions of “girl” and “boy,” like the beautiful Juli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid<\/em><\/a>, Pink Is for Boys<\/em><\/a>, Jacob’s New Dress<\/em><\/a>, I’m a Girl<\/em><\/a>, Jerome by Heart<\/em><\/a>, and many more. It’s still a small percentage, but strides are being made. On the other hand, picture books for children of gay parents can be counted on two hands, and nearly all of them are issues-driven books, not storybooks.
\nTen years ago, when I\u00a0started blogging here in PW about the lack of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in children’s books, I asked authors and illustrators and publishers to be aware that white\u00a0is\u00a0not the default race. Now I’m asking authors and illustrators and publishers to\u00a0consider\u00a0the\u00a0actual world we live in, to\u00a0recognize that the ‘default’ family\u2014isn’t.
\nWe seem to cling to the nuclear (and still overwhelmingly white, not to mention straight) family structure in our books for very young children, when in fact less than half of families in the U.S. look like that.\u00a0Just as we need a beautiful array of multiracial families in board books, and books with single moms and single dads, we also need board books and picture books that have, as a matter of course, and without need for extra commentary,\u00a0LGBT family members. It can be as simple as showing a happy family around a picnic table, where one of the arm-around-shoulder couples happens to be two men or two women. Or a simple mention:\u00a0“The best birthday present came from my uncles, who gave me a unicorn.” You know, like that.
\nAs for my customer? The young woman getting married who wanted something for her one-year-old nephew\u00a0ultimately chose\u00a0Donovan’s Big Day<\/em>, in which a boy’s two\u00a0moms get married. It’s too old for him at the moment, and it’s not about two aunts getting married, but it’s a start.\u00a0Maybe when he’s two or three, the literary landscape will look a little richer.
\nUPDATE: Readers have written in with some wonderful suggestions! Some are out of print, but many are current, and\u00a0it’s clear that the search engines in the main distributor databases we booksellers use are not tagging these titles consistently, in a way that allows us to find them in targeted searches. That would be so helpful!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another pocket of children’s books lacking mirrors, windows, doors, and picnic tables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}