Love Makes a Family

Product Information

Imagine a family without love – siblings fight, parents argue, and there’s no peace in a family. Such a place cannot be called a home, much less a family. What We Love: This book highlights diverse families and kiddos, touching on gender identity and sexuality. Kindness Makes Us Strong, the follow-up to Love Makes a Family, was published by the glorious Little Hare/Hardie Grant Egmont in May 2019! What We Love: This touching board book helps teach children care-taking and empathy (and is part of a series focused on feelings). Through the minimalist illustrations, the little girl examines how she can help her father feel better — from reading him a story to drawing him a picture. This unit builds student understanding of the following Learning forJustice Social Justice Standards:

Familial love is much more important than anything else to me. Their love for me gives me the strength to go through the day, and the motivation to be better at everything I do. I literally know of no parents my own age or younger, who haven't - at the very least - done a shitton of self reflection and tried a different way, when they realized something they were doing (yelling, spanking, bribing, fawning, helicoptering, whatever) wasn't giving them the results - attentive kids, better communication, clean bedrooms, less spoiled brat behavior, etc - they were hoping for. I want to tell my family that I miss them, and I love them. The words may not come out, but each and every one of us knows that we love each other.When we first knew no one else – friends, partners, classmates and colleagues, our family members were there for us first, guiding us on what it means to be a good person. That is love. Every strong family legacy starts with one crucial element; love. Without love, there is no support for one another, and a family that does not fully support each other will never rise to be a great family. It is not the job of students to teach other students about a particular type of family. For example, if you have one student in your class with same-gender parents, be mindful of not putting that student on the spot and requiring them to teach others. What We Love: The unnamed niece in the story is living with her aunt and her uncle as she waits for her parents to migrate to the U.S. This provides an opening to discuss family separation with your little feminist(s). Happiness is being loved in your own family, whether close or far apart, whether a large family or a small one – it’s all going to be the same as long as there is love.

Something else that might be harder for tiny humans to understand is "what things can I be curious about, and what things should be private", and that leads us straight into What Happened To You? As a disabled person, the number of times I have been asked invasive questions about my health, my disability status, my wheelchair, &/or other more embarrassing private things about my body in public is really too high to count. And each disabled person has their own comfort level about questions and what they are willing to share: For example, I don't care if your four year old asks me what's wrong with my legs, bc I was a preschool teacher, and I'm used to answering those kind of questions from tiny humans. I prefer it, actually, to the whisper-yelling you think you are subtle about (you are not) when you're kid asks you, and you drag them away from me, which I think teaches them to be afraid of people like me. But I don't answer invasive questions from adults, and I get a lot of those too. Also, that's just me: Other disabled adults AND CHILDREN get to decide their own comfort levels with both the question and the answers they give, and that is 100% the point of What Happened to You? The ending of this book steals the show! In her classroom, the narrator is hesitant to share what makes her family special, thinking no one’s family is like hers. You soon discover her classmates have all sorts of families! We saw that society expected us to be independent, but that, as we got older, intradependence is what saved us, so we started teaching empathy and community and communication, even though we had to learn it from scratch then too. We saw that "hey you can't depend on your job for everything - maybe you can't depend on it for anything" and we started to tell kids to focus on things that made them feel whole, and happy, and to not neglect those things just because of their jobs/school/whatever society said was more important. We continue to get slapped in the face with the ways in which inequality is a planned feature of our society, and so we taught our kids to recognize it from the beginning, to name it when they see it, to actively work against it. Book: Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Peña (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 1 edition, 2015)

Unit Summary

My notion about a perfect family while growing up always meant a family who looked like mine. Because that’s what I saw around me. As I ventured out more into the world , I saw many different sets of family and strangely enough they never seemed odd even when they were different from my family. You know why ? Where would we be if not for all the love that we have received from our family? When it comes right down to it, our family is still our source of happiness, through good times and bad. Family and love are two words that are inseparable from one another. Without love, there’s no family, and with no family, there’s no love. These two coexist peacefully and create a wonderful synergy.