Why Does Almost Every Character In Children’s Books Now Have A Disability?

Authored by James Dixon via Spiked,

Judging by some of my daughter’s picture books, the average British primary school is a bit of a bloodbath. Everybody seems to have been in the wars. Recently, I read one story about going back to school (my daughter’s about to start year one) in which half the characters were suffering from something: one had crutches, another was in a wheelchair and a third had hearing aids and glasses. Entire missing limbs are not uncommon. I couldn’t escape the notion that modern childhood seems to be a far more hazardous business than it was when I was growing up.

On the evidence of these books, I was worried my daughter might start her first day wondering whether she would be the odd one out for being able-bodied. Though she does wear glasses, at least.

I’m being facetious, of course. Deliberately callous. I know why publishers do it and it’s a laudable instinct. Disabled children should be able to see themselves in books. But it’s the sheer concentration that strikes me – the ham-fisted, clumsy authors and illustrators who pack their creations so that, dare I say it, they are signalling more about themselves than about the world around them.

We all know a virtue-signaler when we see one. Once you notice it, it’s hard to stop noticing. And it’s not just disabilities. In contemporary picture books, every classroom, playground and birthday party increasingly resembles a very carefully assembled demographic sample group.

Each one the same: there must be several different races and religions shown, several different family arrangements, someone in a wheelchair, someone with hearing aids or glasses, and several more moderate ailments on show. Ideally, nobody should look too much like anybody else.

I’ve been criticized over this myself. I’ve written a couple of young adult novels, and been told by family members that they’re not diverse enough. One was set on a remote Scottish island, the other in a small English village. If I’d set them in my native Lewisham, they would have looked a lot different. As it was, I felt they were quite true to life, and true to the aesthetic I felt most relevant for each story. But no, apparently even fiction has diversity quotas.

Children need to see themselves in books. Fair enough. This feels like a decent instinct, and it’s certainly a consideration I make while coming up with protagonists. And no child who uses a wheelchair should grow up in an imaginative universe in which apparently nobody else does. And nobody who is brown should struggle to find books about brown children.

So why am I so annoyed by it? Well, truthfully, I’m more exasperated than annoyed. It amuses me wryly up to a point. But it’s a real concern, and something that, if I could wave a magic wand, I would stop tomorrow. Because most of these illustrations are aimed over children’s heads, towards commissioning editors, parents, teachers and librarians. The perfectly inclusive cast becomes a sort of corporate badge: This is a Good Book, Made by Good People.

And isn’t that just repugnant?

We also face the very real danger that the map starts replacing the territory. Children’s books have often simplified reality. We turn the real world into a form more digestible for our children to enjoy and learn from. The world of Thomas the Tank Engine was never intended as a truthful representation of British transport. But there is a difference between simplification and systematic distortion. When every fictional classroom becomes a sort of demographic Noah’s Ark, we’re not really showing children the real world. We are, realistically, showing them a vision of our world as commissioning editors would have it.

Is it too extreme to call that social engineering? Of course, children’s publishing resembles wider culture. It’s common enough to see institutions anxiously trying to demonstrate the correct moral commitments, to represent a symbolic society that takes precedence over society as it actually is. Reality, then, becomes faintly embarrassing, as it fails to meet diversity targets. And representation ceases to represent anything beyond the political beliefs of progressive publishers.

I’m not in favor of returning to some 1950s Janet-and-John world in which everyone is able-bodied, white and heterosexual, in which there always seems to be a Peter and a Jane knocking about in the background. That would be its own form of social engineering. The world is not an Enid Blyton picnic, however much you might want it to be.

Good representation would mean actual disabled characters: funny, frightened, irritating, brave, selfish and adventurous children who happen also to use wheelchairs or hearing aids. Not tokens piled on ham-fistedly to show what a wonderful person the illustrator is. And unless the story demands it (maybe the characters are at a convention?), there shouldn’t be quite so many of them as I’ve seen in some of my daughter’s books. Because I can’t help but see a peculiar irony in announcing a commitment to diversity through a medium in which we increasingly see humanity depicted as a collection of boxes to be ticked.

My daughter’s classroom won’t have been curated by a publishing diversity committee. Some differences will be represented. Some children will look like her and plenty won’t, because they are a gloriously arbitrary collection of little, messy people, because the real world is not curated to fit anyone’s politics. And it should not be.

Children’s literature should acquaint children with lives both like and unlike their own. Absolutely, it should. But it should also have faith in children, and in reality. It should show confidence enough in both to stop trying to rewrite the world before presenting it to them.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.