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The normalization of physical disability can and should begin in childhood. These creators do just that.

On the playground with his young children, UK author James Catchpole often finds himself answering questions from children about why he only has one leg. Catchpole responds much better to the question at 40 than he could at five, he says. But it still sends him back to his childhood and the awkwardness he felt when faced with that inquiry again and again.

That experience prompted him to write What Happened to You?, about Joe, who just wants to play pirates and is fed up with people on the playground asking why he’s missing a leg.

His book complements the very small, but growing, number of illustrated books featuring characters with physical disabilities. More books portraying disabled characters have been published in recent years than ever before. But while 26 percent of Americans in the United States have disabilities, in 2019, disabled main characters made appearances in just 3.4 percent of children’s picture books.

Like all children, disabled children need to see themselves in books – especially in stories that move beyond narratives of inspiration and trauma, such as the disabled child who is bullied or the disabled child who “overcome” their disability to achieve their goals.

Equally important is for non-disabled children to read disabled stories outside of able-bodied stereotypes — to see the beauty of all body and mind types.

Keah Brown

“[Disabled people] have joy. We get happiness,” said Keah Brown, author of Sam’s Super Seats, about a girl with cerebral palsy going back-to-school shopping with friends. See the article : Cindy Hubbell: Devil’s Lake Art Festival is coming July 30. “I really think [exposure to disability in picture books] opens up a whole world of possibility.”

The Schneider Family Book Award recognizes excellence in portrayals of disability in children’s literature. For every eligible picture book the committee received this year, it received three middle-grade novels, said Schneider 2022 committee member Scot Smith, a librarian at Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, TN. That is more than in previous years, when the committee often only received 10 to 15 qualified picture books, according to Smith.

The quality of picture book representation of disability has improved over the years, Smith said. But many disabled writers and illustrators I’ve spoken to (and whose works I’ve seen as a disabled book reviewer) continue to portray disabled stereotypes and symbolism.

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Francesca Cavallo

That’s partly why Francesca Cavallo, co-author of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, founded the Undercats initiative in 2019. With the mission to “significantly increase diversity in children’s media,” Undercats addresses ableism by publishing a series of picture book biographies about paralympic athletes.

“[Most of us] are only temporarily able-bodied,” Cavallo said. “We break limbs, we age, we have accidents. See the article : Prineville author Rick Steber says the High Desert Museum has “banned” his books; the museum says they weren’t selling. Our bodies change. But we want to live life as if disability did not exist, and that is the problem at the heart of ability.”

“The problem with books about categories of people who are underrepresented is that authors or publishers very often believe that their ‘good intention’ is enough to create a good book,” adds Cavallo. “Well, it’s not very big. We all grew up in a highly capable society, and we can’t get over our capability if we’re not willing to look at it and challenge it with brutal honesty.”

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Lucy and James Catchpole

Catchpole is also a literary agent, and he and his wife, Lucy Catchpole, have compiled a handy list of common disability stereotypes in children’s books on their Instagram account. Those range from “failure to focus on the disabled character, to play their disability for laughs, to catalog them by diagnosis, to make them an educational resource for non-disabled readers. This may interest you : “Digital Babies” and the culture of lifestyle over a life culture.” The Catchpoles also give illustrators tips when depicting disability.

The popular picture book about disability and being different Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be Be by Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor encourages children to ask others why they are the way they are. But this question can often be uncomfortable or even traumatic for disabled people.

Although children mean no harm by such questions, being asked, “What’s wrong with you?” is a kind of ability, say advocates. No one has a right to another person’s medical history. Catchpole’s What Happened to You? shows children how awkward and uncomfortable that question can be and calls on children to play together instead. The book also contains a useful guide for parents on how to respond when their children ask intrusive questions of a disabled person.

Brown felt called to write Sam’s Super Seats because of a lack of representation. “Growing up in the 90s, I didn’t really see books with disabled people in general, let alone a little disabled Black girl who has friends who love her, parents who love her,” said Brown, who also created the hashtag #DisabledAndCute and author of The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me. “She has dreams and hopes and ideas. I wrote the book I would have loved to see as a child. I want young children to understand who they are, in every way they are, valuable. It’s enough …. Your stories matter.”

Portrays joy

It was important to Brown that the focus of his story is joy, not a narrative of trauma.

“Don’t look at me as your worst-case scenario,” he said. “I’m my best case scenario, and I hope we can get to a place in my lifetime where we don’t look at disability as something to be ashamed of.”

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Kelly Fritsch

Handled well, books can show the breadth of the disabled experience and the many possibilities for humor and happiness.

Disability justice scholar Kelly Fritsch and author Anne McGuire felt the need to write We Move Together as they had read too many problematic portrayals of disability and had trouble finding books that focused on disability justice.

“Most books we came across didn’t feature diverse disabled characters or deal with disability as a social justice issue,” says Fritsch. “They rarely depicted disability or assistive devices accurately, let alone aesthetic expression. The books we found were more about how sad or tragic disability is, depicting disability as a purely medical issue, or as a problem experienced by one individual.”

Like Brown’s picture book, We Move Together centers joy alongside the disability experience. It depicts a variety of disabled children and adults gathering and moving happily in accessible spaces.

Accuracy issues

Ali Stroker

Although wheelchair users are the most common disability shown in picture books, the illustrations are often lacking in accessibility considerations or are problematic in other ways. A photo will show a child in a wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs or rolling up a hill through grass, for example.

At other times, wheelchair users are in the background of a location that has no accessibility considerations. Or a protagonist’s story is framed in a problematic way, as in a recent, award-winning statement, which confusingly compares a child in a wheelchair to a dog: “Mum calls, ‘Maisie, walk the dog, will you? ‘/ ‘Me too,’ said Jonah to his sister. ‘Walk me.'” Or picture books start with a sad parent wishing their child wasn’t disabled.

Ali Stroker, the Tony Award-winning singer and author of the picture book Ali and the Sea Stars, says it was vitally important to her to write a main character in a wheelchair, as she is, and to create a story that is “not that she is in a wheelchair.” The book shows how young Ali put on a musical show on the beach.

Leah Nixon

Best Day Ever! by Marilyn Singer and disabled illustrator Leah Nixon also features a positive, accurate portrayal of a young wheelchair user. Nixon says it was the editor’s idea to have the main character be a wheelchair user. The editor wanted an illustrator who also used a wheelchair to make the book as authentic as possible and looked at the work of several people before deciding on Nixon’s.

While Nixon founded the Best Day Ever! on her own experiences using a wheelchair and playing with her dog, she also reached out to families with children in wheelchairs to ensure her portrayal was accurate, as adult chairs are constructed differently.

“I tried to purposely challenge what it means to be a kid in a wheelchair,” Nixon said. “In one example, the child is in a sandbox. Children can move outside their wheelchairs, but many non-disabled people have the idea that people are always stuck in their wheelchairs.”

Ashley Barron and Darren Lebeuf

Often the best way to combat problematic symbolism and portrayals is to hire disabled creators, as Nixon’s editors did. This is not to say that good picture books with disabled characters written and illustrated by non-disabled creators do not exist. They are doing, although more work is needed.

Darren Lebeuf and Ashley Barron teamed up on three picture books about children noticing small things in their environment that other people miss, two of which include disabled characters: My Ocean Is Blue and My City Speaks, which won the 2022 Schneider Award. In both cases, the publisher decided to center disabled characters.

The editors let Barron choose what kind of disability to portray in My Ocean is Blue. In her research, Barron came across a blog by a mother that included photographs of her daughter, who has cerebral palsy and uses crutches, on the beach, and drew on that as inspiration. For My City Speaks, the publisher asked Lebeuf and Barron to include a visually impaired main character. This didn’t really change Lebeuf’s writing style, but it required a great deal of research from Barron. “It was worth the extra work,” Barron said. “You learn by making books.”

Non-disabled creators can also ensure accuracy by employing disabled people to critique the work. I asked children’s book authors and illustrators from the KidLit 411 group how they and their publishers go about portraying marginalized identities in picture books when they are not members of that identity. The overall response echoed the importance of hiring sensitivity/expert readers. Creators should include provisions in their contract about hiring these readers, they were advised, and insist on reviewing final copies to ensure non-offensive portrayals. Having a sensitivity reader look at initial sketches is also ideal, so there is plenty of time to review art.

Although creators wanted to see more representation of physical disability in picture books, many added that no representation is better than poor representation.

“If you can’t create a book where a disabled person is seen as a fully realized human being…you shouldn’t be writing picture books,” Brown said.

“[T]he industry needs to find disabled creators to write and illustrate books,” says Catchpole. “Perhaps the first step is to clear the space for those voices by refusing to publish any more poor representations of disability by non-disabled writers.”

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