Disability Perspective in Children’s Literature: A Case Study

Abstract

Children’s literature plays an important role in influencing the socio-emotional development of children. Representation of different aspects of life in children’s literature has gained a focus over the past few decades, especially in terms of the display of diversity. An important aspect of diversity is disability representation. This study focuses on the collection within the Serving Every Ohioan (SEO) library system, which at the time of study included 99 library systems across the state of Ohio. Books tagged with terms ranging from “disability,” “Children’s disability,” and specific impairments in the juvenile collections were selected for review. A survey of 162 fiction picture books about disabled children were read for characteristics such as the disability focus, narrator focus, use of characters of color, and general themes. This paper examines the occurrence of these themes and proposes the need for more authentic representation of disability in children’s literature, for both disabled and non-disabled children. This research aims to illuminate patterns within children’s disability literature while also discussing the vital need for such literature on library shelves.