What Can Children Learn About Social Justice from Picture Books About Migration?
Many young children encounter refugees and migrants for the first time in the picture books read to them by their parents. But what can they learn from these stories? Amidst growing hostility towards immigrants in both the UK and the US in the Brexit and Trump era, we set to address this question and shed light on the role that these books play as socialization agents in young children’s lives. We selected 40 popular books published in these two countries during 2015-2019 and systematically analyzed their content, following a codebook developed specifically for this study.
We found that the stories are characterized by three dominant narratives. The first centers on the immigrant’s resolve to overcome a range of hardships and difficulties involved in the journey to their new home and the adjustments such a move requires. The second narrative focuses specifically on the migrants’ or refugees’ quest for social acceptance in their new cultural context while concurrently harboring memories of their home country. This tension is expressed through specific cultural markers, such as a Persian carpet in a story of an immigrant from Iraq to Europe, embedding words in Creole in a story of a migrant from Haiti, or employing images of Barbie and Nintendo to signify the US as the host country. The third narrative depicts a happy ending of the journey, better life in the host country, often characterized by a celebration of the protagonist’s realization of the American Dream.
“Half of the books we examined focused on contexts of forced migration, where children flee violence, war, oppression, poverty, and/or famine.”
The construction of the host country as a haven is often achieved by depicting the migrant’s life in the country of origin as extremely difficult, miserable, and dangerous. Half of the books we examined focused on contexts of forced migration, where children flee violence, war, oppression, poverty, and/or famine. In this sense – and similar to other media portrayals of migrations (such as news coverage) – these books introduce children to the dire reality of many of their counterparts around the world, by reinforcing the negative experiences of migration. In turn, they downplay voluntary migration, for example, stories of migration motivated by the desire to pursue education or a profession. The implied message in many of these children’s stories is that people migrate to “our country” (the US and the UK) which is safe, welcoming, and prosperous, in order to leave behind places that are unsafe, dangerous, dirty, and poor.
To bypass highly politicized contemporary discourses about immigration and their often divisive tendencies, one strategy that 40% of the books employ is to locate their stories in the past, using history as a prism through which to understand contemporary migration. In this way, migration is presented as a story that is safely secured in the bygone era, as in, for example, stories of immigrants who entered the US through Ellis Island or of famous figures such as Irving Berlin, who immigrated from Tsarist Russia to hospitable New York.
Interestingly, the depiction of antagonists was largely absent in the stories; the world is presented as a safe place full of well-intentioned people, similar to TV content for young audiences. The protagonists, half of whom are children, are mostly migrants themselves and are represented by and large as human characters. They are frequently characterized as active and positive, exhibiting creativity, talent, innovativeness, bravery, resilience, kindness, and optimism. Their gender identity follows the typical imbalance in children’s media more generally – namely, the majority of characters are male, and are mostly depicted as active. It was striking that even the stories that did focus on a female protagonist completely ignored the particular gendered hardships and injustice faced by millions of girls in their countries from which they flee.
Finally, we also noted that the trend of diversifying the representation of children in contemporary media and culture manifests itself in picture books as well: over a third of the characters have brown skin, which can signify a range of races and ethnicities, including African, Latinx, Middle-Eastern, and/or South Asian, a quarter have white skin, and the rest are non-human or had more than one skin colour. In addition, some of the child characters are depicted in dual-parent families while others are presented in single-parent families. At the same time, heterosexuality remains the norm: there is no reference to non-heterosexual families or characters.
So what lessons can children learn from picture books focusing on immigration?
They may learn that migration stories are success stories, where children move from unfortunate circumstances in their home countries, which are predominantly in the global South, to much better lives in the host countries in the global North – most frequently the US. They are generally greeted with generosity and hospitality and find their host country to be a safe place of comfort, acceptance, and happiness, which is devoid of antagonists, and in which opportunities are bountiful and individual efforts are rewarded.
“[These picture books] miss an opportunity to broaden children’s knowledge and appreciation of the plurality of cultures, experiences, and places and the urgent need to respect and protect them.”
This is a familiar construction that celebrates ‘bootstrap neoliberalism,’ whereby individual determination, perseverance, resilience and optimism bear fruit in the ‘land of opportunities.’ Yet it misses the chance to engage young children with issues of equity, discrimination, and injustice in their own ‘host societies.’ It also contributes to the binary and stereotypical depiction of the global North as a safe haven, and the global South as a monolithic space of misery and suffering. The richness and diversity of cultures, traditions, histories and experiences outside of the western world is, in this way, largely erased. Therefore, we concluded that “paradoxically, while children’s picture books concerning migration are aimed at highlighting, appreciating, and celebrating difference and are part of the growing trend of children’s ‘diversity’ books that promote justice and fairness, they seem concurrently to erase difference and injustice. They thus miss an opportunity to broaden children’s knowledge and appreciation of the plurality of cultures, experiences, and places and the urgent need to respect and protect them.”
Shani Orgad
Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dafna Lemish
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers