Salutations friends,

We are constantly on the lookout for strong representation in kid lit. We both firmly believe (read the research!), and know from teaching our students the power of providing young humans (and all humans!) with as holistic an experience of representation of humanity as possible. It’s good for everyone! We often talk about windows and mirrors and we love the ways our students grow as they sort themselves out within the beautiful web of the diverse human experience.

We have an ongoing collection of books we love (you can read about some we love for different occasions all over this blog) but one has become appallingly apparent to us in our representation quest: SINGLE MAMAS. Shoutout to SINGLE MAMAS EVERYWHERE.

We have been hunting and are beyond disappointed by what we’ve found. Some of the best mamas we know are badass single mamas and not only do their babies deserve to see their families represented, but all kiddos need to be able to SEE and have the context to this beautiful family format. So- this might be a “Part I” of multiple posts as we hunt for the best single mama rep we can find. It’s looking dire, but I am going to work on it. We also might need to write some ourselves but that’s another post/ endeavor...

***One thing that has been noted is that there are VERY FEW that explicitly discuss a mama and baby family unit / mama and siblings unit so we have also included books that simply have a mom without other guardian figures mentioned, as well. We know this isn’t ideal! We know that it then requires the adult to make it explicit, but we wanted to provide more options where you can do that. Favorites will be bolded so you know which ones we especially loved. Also! If we accidentally skipped over another guardian figure in one of these please let us know! I think we did it, but it is possible. ***