Heather Has Two Textbooks

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.

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.

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