How to use picture books to support children facing challenging circumstances

Transcript

Hello. Today I want to talk about picture books. Picture books are often quite undervalued, and sometimes seen as a stepping stone to 'proper reading'. But picture books can be transgressive and beautiful and complex, and also through reading picture books for children who may be facing quite challenging circumstances, they may enable you to explore quite difficult and intense topics. So these are some of my recommendations.

Books about family

So firstly, two that cover similar areas, one fiction and one non-fiction. So the fiction is Is That Your Mama? Words by me and illustrations by Diane Ewen. And My Family, Your Family. Words by Laura Henry-Allain and illustrated by Giovana Medeiros.

We still have an idea, deeply embedded, that families look like a mummy and a daddy who are married with two biological children. And we know also that families are all shapes, all sizes, all colours. Some children with their biological families or one member of their biological family - that might not be their mother or their father; might be an uncle or an auntie. It might be a grandparent. It might be a family friend. Some children are in foster care, some children are adopted. And we all don't always look like our family. And what these books do is certainly give children an opportunity to discuss what it's like to not look like the people that you live with.

But in My Family, Your Family, it also discusses all the different types of families that they are. They are all valid. And they all are normal.

And talking of families, I also want to recommend Hey You! The words are by Dapo Adeola. And it's a gallery of prolific illustrators: Diane Ewen, Onyinye Iwu, Jade Orlando, Bex Glendining, Derick Brooks, Joelle Avelino, Dunni Mustapha, Kingsley Nebechi, Chante Timothy, Nicole Miles, Camilla Sucre, Jobe Anderson, Alyissa Johnson, Charlot Kristensen, Sharee Miller, Reggie Brown, Selom Sunu, and Gladys Jose. I want to name them all because I think illustrations are so important.

This was Dapo's love letter to Black children, specifically coming out of 2020, when it felt a time where there were very difficult discussions about the value of different lives depending on children's ethnic background. And these conversations continue.

And what we have in here are lots of different types of families. Not all married. Not all a mummy and a daddy, so there's same sex parents here as well. And I think for anybody who is supporting Black children, particularly if you aren't African ethnicity and perhaps not have had these discussions yourself, this is a perfect book to validate Black children's lives, but also to understand the societal struggles that they will go through.

Books about grief and loss

I want to talk about a very big subject that impacts on children facing challenging circumstances and two picture books that will enable you, if you read them together, to maybe explore those very difficult and intense emotions.

And they are If All The World Were, words by Joseph Coelho and illustrations by Allison Colpoys. And Night Walk, words and illustrations by Jason Cockcroft. And both of them deal with loss and with grief and having someone you love no longer there.

So in a sense, they both explore bereavement. But of course, for many children facing challenging circumstances that would include maybe being removed from a family background, it may be a family separation, it may be family in different parts of the world. It may be family or close people who are no longer there. So quite traumatic circumstances.

And again, what these picture books will allow you to do, if you read them with children, is to have those conversations. But also as you look at the images they may draw out more stories. So again, it's not always about the words. It's about the pictures as well. The places, whether places that are outside or places that are rooms or furniture or even a pair of spectacles that might mean so much to a child because they connect them to somebody that is no longer there.

Books about waiting

Another book that I love, which is actually quite a funny book, is The Pirates Are Coming by John Condon and Matt Hunt. And really, I've included it because it's actually about waiting and it's about a little boy, and even though it's quite funny, he's getting more anxious waiting for the pirates to come. I won't tell you the punchline, because that's actually quite cute as well.

But so many children in challenging circumstances are waiting. They're waiting for visits. They're waiting for decisions to be made about their lives, they're waiting to know where they're going to live. They're waiting to know about maybe their status, living in a different country. They're waiting to hear, maybe, from people who they've not heard of for a long time, for maybe again quite difficult circumstances.

So although this is quite a funny book and a lovely book, again, it might help you with some of those conversations.

Non-fiction to try

I definitely want to include non-fiction in this. And this is We've Got This: Six Steps to Build Your Empathy Superpower written by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, the queen of non-fiction, in partnership with Empathy Lab, illustrated by Juliana Eigner.

And again, we do talk a lot as adults about empathy. And increasingly you still need empathy. We still need to understand each other. And I think what a book like this does, it allows us to talk to children about empathy and about how we step in someone else's shoes. But I think as adults, we need a reminder constantly as well.

And if you haven't come across the books, A Kid's Book About..., they're very clever. They basically distil quite complicated issues into very small amounts of text. And again, leaves you that space for exploration and discussion.

So this one is A Kid's Book About Diversity by Charnaie Gordon. Really, it's a very quick conversation, a quick amount of text with very strong graphics about what actually is diversity. What does it mean? Because sometimes it feels a very nebulous phrase. And it looks at empathy, equity, perspective, and uniqueness. So again, good for children, I think pretty good for us as adults.

Court and the law

And finally a slight wild card. This is Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, words by Afua Hirsch and illustrations by Henny Beaumont, and it was published by the Legal Action Group as a way really to talk about what does court mean, what does a high court mean, and what decisions are made.

So even though it is about Lady Hale, it's also about the Children Act. It's also about what does court do? And if we think again about the number of children in challenging circumstances who are facing court, how do we explain what the court is, how do we explain how decisions are made by people they may never have met sitting in this grand room, quite often wearing these antiquated clothes.

But also what I hope it does for children who are reading this book, for children who are facing challenging circumstances, that they think that maybe at some point in the future they can be that person. They can be that person with their lived experience sitting in court and helping other children make decisions about their lives.

Thank you.

BookTrust programmes for children experiencing vulnerability