Here’s a helpful and thought-provoking read to start your week: a piece on how to make children’s books, even when not originally LGBTQ inclusive, more inclusive of queer families and diverse parental names.
In “Read Off Script,” Grover Wehman-Brown shares how she and her wife, along with other queer parents she knows, have been “changing up the parental characters and pronouns in children’s books from the beginning” in order to provide their children with representation of their family and others in the world around them. These adaptations, however, are not as common among heterosexual couples, she finds.
Nevertheless, she asserts, “Reading off script and incorporating a wide range of parental names into storytime with your young child is one easy way to prepare your child to be in a community with children of genderqueer and transgender people and other families whose caregivers don’t consist of one dad and one mom.” Additionally, “The need to incorporate diverse parental names into books isn’t limited to gender-non-conforming and same-gender parents. It’s also a valuable practice to respect kids whose parents use names from the majority of cultures and religions from around the world.”
Wehman-Brown, who also hosts the Masculine Birth Ritual podcast, suggests ways parents of all types can incorporate different parental names as they read books to their kids. To her great suggestions, I’ll contribute the list I’ve been compiling from so many of you since 2011, with nearly 300 answers to the question of what our kids call us. (Feel free to add your response, if you haven’t already.) Mix in some of these names to your reading, along with your own and those of the families around you.
Wehman-Brown stresses that these adaptations are for young children. Obviously, as children start to read for themselves, they’ll see that the printed words don’t necessarily align with what their parents or teachers have been saying. Nevertheless, I feel that knowing one can make substitutions to fit one’s family—or one’s friends’ or neighbors’ families—is an important lesson in and of itself.
If you’re looking for similar ways to incorporate queer themes for somewhat older readers, even with materials that aren’t LGBTQ-inclusive to start, I recommend checking out Reading the Rainbow: LGBTQ-Inclusive Literacy Instruction in the Elementary Classroom
Yes, it would be wonderful and amazing if we had more children’s books and other resources that were clearly inclusive of many different kinds of families and people of all genders. We need that. I don’t believe any of the authors above would disagree. But as they’ve shown, we can also take action to write ourselves into other stories that exist, when needed.