Children with disabilities are few and far between in children's fiction. The only ones I could think of straight off was the boy in ‘A Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time’ by Mark Haddon and of course ‘Katy’, both in the original by Susan Coolidge and the newly up-to-date version by Jacqueline Wilson . It is almost as if children with any sort of disabilities do not exist except in specialised books of the sort ‘I have Asthma’ or ‘I use a wheelchair’ variety.
I am aware of this lack, as my son has Type 1 Diabetes and he has one very American book of short stories in which diabetes is the defining factor in all the plots, rather than an incidental fact of life, as it is for him. He likes this book and often asks for us to read it to him as a bedtime story, and he also likes the book entitled ‘Why do I feel tired’ also about diabetes. But he has no heroes who have diabetes, except the real life sporting hero Steve Redgrave and now Theresa May. Quite a few celebrities like Tom Hanks have announced they have Type 2, but not only does he mean very little to an 8 year old, it is also an entirely different condition. My son, like many other children with a range of disabilities, needs heroes in books to just be that way as a matter of course and deal with it in the way he does.
I’ve noticed on television there are now a range of characters with disabilities and rather than it being the plotline, they just happen to be that person with a particular difference. That is really the crux of the matter; if managed well a disability is no longer disabling, rather something that just makes a child different. No-one looking at my son would even know there was anything out of the ordinary with him and his school has given him the chance to be entirely enabled rather than disabled by his condition. So where are these children in books?
Here is a challenge for you– if you cannot find the children with disabilities in books, write them in yourself. You meet them every day, you know them well, they are in your classrooms. Start telling stories about them and stop them being the invisible children– and send me a copy when you get published!
