As an adopter, I find it really difficult to find books which represent my daughter’s reality. I’m not talking about books about adoption, which have a place, but can be confronting, uncomfortable even, and are rarely great stories in their own right. I’m talking about books with incidental representation of adoption, where families don’t all necessarily look alike, but it’s not the focus – it’s the backdrop to a high-quality, engaging narrative. One way to address this is through the personification of animals, a format regularly used in picture books, where the likeness of families is so obvious visually. In so many of these stories the mummy, daddy and children are all the same – think Julia Donaldson’s Monkey Puzzle (the very premise of which is about looking like your parents). However, there are books which use this format to subtly represent difference within families, though sadly they’re few and far between. One example of this is The Littlest Family’s Big Day by Emily Winfield Martin, in which a family of bears have a baby fox cub, a book I revisit over and over again for the conversations it facilitates. There’s lots to talk about – the pictures are a treasure trove of opportunities (including racially mixed family dynamics), the fact that the bear family have a baby who doesn’t look like them is just one of those. In being insignificant to the plot, not referenced in the narrative, but evident in every picture, the family dynamic can easily be mentioned in passing – casually, non-confrontationally – or not. Crucially, for my daughter though, there’s an opportunity for her to see her reality in a book, which she does. And, what’s more, it also enables me (or whoever is reading with her) to see into her world and to challenge our own perception of “normal”, valuable indeed.

There’s often a hesitancy, perhaps particularly in schools, in addressing difference or rather in tackling, big, potentially difficult topics which individual families may have (rightly) individual ways of talking about at home, which I can understand. Handling sensitive, personal scenarios needs care and caution – there’s no knowing what direction the conversation could go in. But that’s no reason not to have those conversations at all, and books in which difference is there, but not necessarily at the forefront, can be useful: it can be referenced in lots of different ways, or not at all.

As a family we are very open about our daughter’s adoption, the most important thing for us is that she feels an absolute sense of belonging. My worry is that somewhere along the way that sense of belonging has become synonymous with sameness, and that’s what I’d like us to question – openly and often, so as to disrupt that idea of “normal”. It’s a concept that creates problems for lots of people in lots of different ways, and books that call it out in one way or another can be very useful for schools to spark a discussion about that. How much children choose to divulge about their own experiences is of course, up to them, but surely having the opportunity – that pathway to openness and expression – can only be a good thing? Take Bug Club’s The Den in the Woods, where Laura’s family dynamic can be explored in different ways, to different degrees depending on need, relevance and applicability. And even if those explorations don’t happen out loud, the recognition of an alternative family reality will surely seep into many readers’ consciousness, gradually altering their perceptions of “normal”. If we can achieve that with a breadth of realities across a wide range of different, diverse scenarios, we’ll be heading in the right direction in terms of representation.

I for one hope that my daughter has the opportunity to have conversations and explore her background with different people in different environments as and when she wants and needs to in order to develop and support her understanding of herself. Books are one way – a non-obtrusive, gentle, often insightful way of enabling that exploration, as with so many topics and ideas, books open doors… we just have to be prepared to peer inside.