Diversity in Children’s Books

This is my favorite graphic about diversity in children's books.

It's a couple of years old, yes, but there's been no dramatic change in the numbers. Good efforts and little steps forward, for sure, especially here in the SF Bay Area with Equal Reads and other organizations working to change these percentages.

It's tremendously important that children see themselves reflected in books, from the start. This graphic shows that if your child is not white, you need to work harder than parents of white children to ensure that your children do. Not fair, not easy. Important to know, for all of us. Of course it's good for us all to see and read about people not like us in many ways (skin color, religion, history, etc, etc,) but children need to feel welcome in and with books from the start. Babies are easily attracted to books with babies and children, especially when those characters look like them, like their families.

Feed their eyes and imaginations with images they can relate to and enjoy from the start. Imagination, once sparked, is self-expanding, they'll find their way much more easily into books and stories about Others if they get to know themselves in books first. They belong in books, books belong to them. Let them see that with their own eyes from the beginning.