Pride Month 2023

 

It’s June and that means it’s Pride Month, which makes it a perfect time to take a minute to talk about why we need to protect the rights of children to read about various kinds of children and families, including those similar to and different from their own.

I don’t want to dwell too much on recent discouraging news stories, like the new legislation in many states causing the Human Rights Campaign to declare a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the US, or how attempts to censor books, both in school and public libraries, rose dramatically last year, with a majority of the targeted books by or about LGBTQ+ people or people of color, or the defunding of a few libraries in Michigan because of LGBTQ+ books in their collection. You’ve likely heard about these stories elsewhere.

On the more positive side, you’ve likely also noticed an increase in both fiction and non-fiction children’s literature with LGBTQ+ characters and historical figures. There are many great lists already that you can find if you’re looking for reading recommendations, including lists of new releases for 2023. So, I’m not going to focus on this today either.

Instead, I want to share a couple of incidents from the school playground, which my six-year-old kindergartener Cecilia shared with me.

One day, the subject of daddies came up, and Cecilia said she doesn’t have a dad; she has two moms. Several of her classmates didn’t believe that it was possible. They tried to guess what happened to her daddy or think of ways that she could have another mom (one of the kids suggested she might have a stepmom, which she doesn’t), but didn’t believe that she has two moms who were married to each other.

It has been eight years since the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. While that isn’t a long time, it means that same-sex marriage has been legal longer than any of the kids in this story have been alive. And still they didn’t think it was possible to have two mommies.

It’s been more than 30 years since Lesléa Newman’s HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES was published. And still, none of these five- and six-year-olds thought it was possible.

Cecilia and her two mommies and two brothers

Later in the year, Cecilia decided to cut her hair (it seemed easier to her than brushing it). More than one of her classmates said it looked like a boy’s haircut. (It was definitely shorter than the other girls’ hair, but was also longer than the hair of all the boys in her class).

Please don’t misunderstand this as a complaint about her school, which has been very supportive, or her classmates or their families, who are very nice (and the kids stopped commenting on her hair or family structure within a couple of days). These incidents just made me pause and realize that there is so much about the world that kids (and adults!) don’t yet know about and so many ways for them to find out about these things. I wondered how the initial reactions of Cecilia’s classmates might have been different if they had encountered more diversity in characters in the books they were reading.  

The mirror aspect of LGBTQ+ representation in children’s literature remains important. After all, my children deserve to see families like ours in some of the books they read, and children deserve to see themselves represented as well. But the window aspect enables children to learn about how other people live and builds their empathy for the variety of people they’ll encounter in their lives, which is why it’s important that all children have access to diverse books.