While parents of public school children may feel besieged by alternative lifestyles, one public school teacher doesn’t think the literature available to them is diverse enough. “It takes a lot of work to find books that include same-gender parents, step-parents, foster or adoptive children, or other nontraditional families as background in an adventure tale, a friendship parable, or a holiday romp; nontraditional families are either the topic of the story or, more likely, not included at all,” Willow McCormick writes in the summer issue of Rethinking Schools magazine. “When two-parent, heterosexual families are presented as the norm in story after story, near [year] in and year out, an insidious message is conveyed: Families that don’t conform to this structure are not normal.”
“And, of course, the message is reinforced in the majority of movies and television shows geared toward children.” McCormick is a second and third-grade teacher in West Linn, Oregon. One wonders which television shows she is referring to.
![heather two mommies book](https://www.academia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/heather-two-mommies-book-234x300.jpg)
For that matter, not only has the book Heather Has Two Mommies been in circulation since 1989, but it has been joined by a host of others, in English and Spanish, such as My New Daddy and My New Mommy.