Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors

The traditional model of the nuclear family – married, monogamous, heterosexual parents and their offspring – has undergone enormous changes.  In Canada, family is now thoroughly unmoored from marriage, gender, sexual orientation, reproduction, and childrearing.  The presumption that domestic relationships are limited to two persons at one time is likely to be the next focal point of change.  As the meaning of family continues to evolve in Canada, and those who create kinship ties in non-traditional ways become more visible, we need to incorporate positive representations of these families into books for children and their parents. As Rudine Sims Bishop states:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.  These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author.  When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror.  Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. [1]

With a deep appreciation for reading as a means and act of self-affirmation, and as parents of children who have grown up in LGBTQ, non-traditional and multi-partnered, Polyamorous families, my partner and I embark on this project with the aim of of contributing to the huge task of representing diversity in children's books.

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[1] Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. The Ohio State University. Vo. 6, no. 3. Summer.