Do your books have characters that look like the children in your neighbourhood?

Do the books on your centre’s bookshelves reflect the ethnic make-up of your families? Can every child in your centre read books, lots of them, every day, about children who look like them?

These are important questions for anyone responsible for young children’s wellbeing.

If you are of European descent, you’ll find thousands of picture books filled with people that look kind of like you, but if you have some ancestors from any other part of the world, it may be trickier to see yourself in books.

As Soraya Chemaly writes in the Huffington Post:

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education has conducted a survey of children’s and young adult books published each year since 1985. Of an estimated 5,000 books released in 2012, only 3.3% featured African-Americans; 2.1% featured Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders; 1.5% featured Latinos; and only 0.6% featured Native Americans. God forbid you have the audacity to be a girl of color and expect to see yourself as cherished by our culture.

That’s obviously a problem. So today we have some ways to help you make sure your home or education centre isn’t contributing to this huge imbalance.

Your community will have its own unique mix of families so I won’t try to make a list here of books with characters who may or may not match your reality – homes and centres in Nigeria will need to have a differently-balanced book collection from those in Canada or Australia.

Instead, what I have is two lists: one of some recent, fantastic picture books that have characters with a range of skin tones and ethnicities, suitable for any centre or family, and another with a bunch of links to specific lists that might be useful in your neighbourhood.

Fantastic books to buy for your centre

These are books that not only feature characters with a range of skin tones and ethnic backgrounds, but also have positive messages in terms of gender equality, different kinds of families, and other great values.

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury