How to Write a Children’s Book That Embraces Diversity and Inclusion

A good children’s book should teach a valuable lesson about acceptance, inclusion, and the diverse world around them. While there are many ways to write a children’s book, it’s important to note that no two children are alike. The best way to teach children valuable lessons on acceptance and inclusion is to show them how differently children can look, act, and learn. You can do this using several strategies.

Teach a Valuable Lesson

The sky isn’t the limit with your children’s book. You can create any setting, from outer space to underwater to a typical, everyday suburb. Your story can be funny, colorful, inspiring, spooky, or mysterious, but you’ll want to teach a profound lesson regardless. You can do this with any genre, setting, or character, and the choice of the lesson will vary, but make sure it can help kids apply it to the real world. Perhaps a group of astronauts encounter an alien planet and assume the aliens are hostile when they aren’t; they must learn respect and avoid judgment based on prejudices. A family of sharks welcomes a baby shark that can’t swim well due to a small fin; they must adjust to this condition and find new ways to hunt and live. The possibilities are endless, but teaching a lesson makes for a great story and helps children (sometimes subtly) learn about the world around them.

Make Characters Relatable

Not all characters will look or act like your reader. Your readers won’t likely be animals, aliens, cowboys, or elves. On the more realistic side, your readers won’t always share the same race, gender, or culture as your characters. However, you will want them to be relatable in some way.  Include characters of different genders, backgrounds, and races to be relatable to more than just one type of person. Give them distinct personalities. Have them endure problems that can easily be translated to the real world. Kids can resonate with your characters better if they share at least one thing in common.

Consider Cowriting

Since you are only one person, you can only represent a small number of character backgrounds with familiarity. You can feature cowriters or coauthors to help you write characters different from you for the most authentic experience. Realism won’t necessarily apply if you’re writing nonhuman characters, but coauthors can still provide much value if nonhuman characters serve as an allegory for more realistic issues or cultures.

Research and Consult With Real People

If you don’t want to coauthor, you can do your own research and consult with real people for assistance in writing your book. Consult with people from different races, religions, countries, cultures, disabilities, genders, sexualities, etc. They can provide you with real insight into what it’s like to live with their background. You can credit them as sensitivity readers, consultants, and researchers in your book as a bonus. Your book will be more accurate and relatable to more children this way.

Celebrate Differences

You’ll want to ensure personality, cultural, and physical differences aren’t shunned, mocked, or discouraged. While your characters may be apprehensive about character differences initially, they should ultimately learn to accept traits and characters different from their own. If the character is not accepting, they should ultimately be portrayed as a negative influence. You don’t want kids to think that hating others for merely being different is okay! Behaviors like ableism, racism, and homophobia should never be celebrated.

Get an Experienced Illustrator

As a children’s author, finding an illustrator that works well with you is crucial. They should also be experienced in drawing all human and nonhuman characters. They should be able to draw characters of all races, appearances, and backgrounds without portraying them as offensive.

Avoid Tokenism or Stereotyping

Including characters of different backgrounds is generally good, but they shouldn’t just exist in your story to tick a diversity box or fulfill an inclusion quota. They should have distinct personalities and essential roles in the story. Their differences shouldn’t be watered down or ignored, but you also don’t want to stereotype by assuming every person in a particular group behaves or looks precisely the same way.

Include Sensitivity Readers

You’ll want to ensure your children’s book editor is experienced in critiquing characters from different races, ethnicities, religions, genders, backgrounds, sexualities, disabilities, and more. Of course, one person won’t be able to cover every single type of person out there, so you can hire multiple editors or sensitivity readers of various backgrounds to ensure that you’re not accidentally being insensitive when it comes to traits like race, disability, and gender. Sensitivity readers have extensive personal experience and knowledge with a particular group, and they can work as or with your editor to ensure your writing comes off as intended.

Conclusion

Many valid and intriguing ways exist to write a beautiful children’s book. The best children’s stories should include a lot of diversity in setting, story, and characters. Consult with people of different backgrounds to help portray realistic, essential characters and plots while avoiding tokenism and stereotypes. Make the lessons and problems learned translatable to real life. Allow differences to be celebrated.