Love Makes a Family

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What We Love: The story centers on Aidan, a trans boy, who shows the depth and complexity of gender identity. Aidan shows us there are many ways of being a boy, and there are many ways of being a kid. Just about every sort of family you can possibly imagine was included in this tale, including LGBT+, interracial, adoptive, and single-parent families. No matter who was being shown helping their child find a lost toy or having a tea party, the love that each parent felt for their child or children shone through in every scene. It made me smile to see how much effort the author put into focusing on what we all share in common no matter who we are or what we look like.

Love Makes a Family Donates Records to Yale: Connecticut’s Marriage Equality Story to be Preserved at Yale University," Yale University Library News, November 6, 2009, accessed December 19, 2009. My notion about a perfect family while growing up always meant a family who looked like mine. Because that’s what I saw around me. As I ventured out more into the world , I saw many different sets of family and strangely enough they never seemed odd even when they were different from my family. You know why ? Diversity 7: I can describe some ways that I am similar to and different from people who share my identities and those who have other identities. Diversity 8: I want to know about other people and how our lives and experiences are the same and different.

But love, being an emotion, is not constant or guaranteed - especially if people are encouraged to take their feelings as reliable guides to decision-making. My wife taught in the public schools for 17 years, until 2016. She saw first-hand what living in a household theoretically defined by love meant to her second-graders - uncertainty as to their place in the family, strange men moving in and out of their single mother's home, "siblings" who came and went - or if in a traditional home of married mother and father, uncertainty as to whether or not love would leave and divorce break up the household. It was difficult to teach kids when they were never quite sure of what was going to happen next in their house. Many people make the mistake of thinking that a family is an important thing – A family is not just that. A family is everything to a single individual. Valores como la igualdad y la defensa de la diversidad están muy presentes en este álbum que, por cierto, tiene unas ilustraciones preciosas. Si tenéis oportunidad, echadle un vistazo porque de verdad que vale la pena. Book: I Love Saturdays y domingos by Alma Flor Ada (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Reprint edition, 2004)

Something else that might be harder for tiny humans to understand is "what things can I be curious about, and what things should be private", and that leads us straight into What Happened To You? As a disabled person, the number of times I have been asked invasive questions about my health, my disability status, my wheelchair, &/or other more embarrassing private things about my body in public is really too high to count. And each disabled person has their own comfort level about questions and what they are willing to share: For example, I don't care if your four year old asks me what's wrong with my legs, bc I was a preschool teacher, and I'm used to answering those kind of questions from tiny humans. I prefer it, actually, to the whisper-yelling you think you are subtle about (you are not) when you're kid asks you, and you drag them away from me, which I think teaches them to be afraid of people like me. But I don't answer invasive questions from adults, and I get a lot of those too. Also, that's just me: Other disabled adults AND CHILDREN get to decide their own comfort levels with both the question and the answers they give, and that is 100% the point of What Happened to You?Family and love are two words that are inseparable from one another. Without love, there’s no family, and with no family, there’s no love. These two coexist peacefully and create a wonderful synergy.

Imagine a family without love – siblings fight, parents argue, and there’s no peace in a family. Such a place cannot be called a home, much less a family. Writing a simple but compelling board book for toddlers isn’t easy. Ms. Beer did an excellent job of plainly stating what she thought the smallest members of society should know about the beautiful diversity of family life while also including deeper meanings for the adults or older kids who will be reading this out loud to the little ones in their lives. Start by loving your family members. When you are able to give love to each and every one of your family members, then you can start talking about a happy friendship, workplace and even world peace. It is important that all students are able to learn about families that are similar to theirs as a way of validating and exploring their own identities. However, not all family experiences are highlighted over the course of the unit. Prior to teaching the unit, identify if any of your students have family types that are not represented and make a plan for how to bring their experiences into the unit.Book: My Brother Charlie by Holly Robinson Peete and Ryan Elizabeth Peete (Scholastic Press, 1 edition, 2010)