Love Makes a Family

The book “Love Makes a Family” is one of the more simplistic children’s books written by the author, clearly intended for parents to read to their very young children. The message of the story, that a family is defined only by love, is conveyed in less than 15 pages of maybe a sentence each. The whole book takes about 30 seconds to read at a normal pace and no more than 5 minutes to read to children, even when stopping on every page to show the illustrations. The simplicity of the audience provides for an even more overly-simplistic book that, while undoubtedly well-intentioned, ultimately fails to engage any audience or achieve any meaningful impact.

First of all, the author of the book appears to be a cis, straight, and white Australian woman. While the book deals with a variety of different types of family (single-parent, homosexual, heterosexual, etc.) and does not focus exclusively on LGBTQ+ experiences, there is only a need for this book because of the prejudiced faced by queer or single parents. Beer appears to fit neither of those categories. As a result, her writing about this topic becomes less personal or deep and more sanitized for an audience who, like her, has probably never faced the hate that serves as a catalyst for the book.

In fact, she doesn’t even touch on the fact that different types of families are not seen by society as equal, which perhaps makes sense when the audience she is writing to is taken into consideration but still feels disappointing given the importance of the subject matter. There is no advocacy for change because a problem is not pointed out. Of course the message of the book can be important as a way to ingrain in children’s minds from an early age that there is no one “right” type of family, but it seems inappropriate to completely ignore the fact that that’s not how society sees it. The target audience of this book, children not even in Elementary School yet, might not have even been exposed to these societal prejudices. It is important to teach children that “love” is not the only measure people around them will use to judge relationships before they start hearing their classmates make snarky gibes at kids with single parents or use “gay” as an insult. This book does not do that; instead, it paints a utopian version of the world where everyone is treated the same and the only quality a family must have to be accepted is love. It is impossible to address problems of social justice with so much sanitization of real, lived struggle to the point where there doesn’t even seem to be a problem.

Overall, the book is also simply not interesting to children. There is no semblance of a plot (except for the description of activities moving in chronological order throughout the day) and the book is monotonous. Reading this book, children would be glad it is so short. To be completely frank, even the incredibly short time it takes to read the book might not be enough to keep young children engaged throughout it. It cannot be said that the book would be hard for children to read, though. It is clearly written for young children and contains no words that are not already in their vocabulary. At least the children would be able to understand what’s happening – if only something were actually happening.

This book is not all bad, however. The diversity shown in the illustrations is definitely a positive point, even if it is the bare minimum considering the subject of the book. There are families of multiple races, including some with interracial parents, and not all characters are clearly attributed to a binary gender. One could point out the lack of disabled characters, and that is definitely a relevant critique, but the illustrations are still overall quite good in providing representation for different types of people. Another positive aspect of the novel is the complete lack of gendered terms. There is no mention of “mother” or “father” or any other word that could leave out groups of people. Gay and lesbian couples, straight couples, and single-parent families are all given the same weight in the story. Marginalized groups are not put to the side or given less intricate illustrations.; every type of person pictured in the book is treated the same. The book also tries its best to show lifestyles or cultures that are not dominant where it was published, such as a Muslim couple with the woman wearing a hijab or even an interracial couple (which, although numbers are going up, only make up around 8% of married couples in the US).

“Love Makes a Family” is a book without a story that attempts to teach children about the importance of tolerance and acceptance, but falls short of achieving any change. The story is overly sanitized to an audience that is too young to truly take away anything from it. The only way to make the story more impactful would be to actually recognize that there is an issue in how people view different parent-child relationships, but Sophie Beer does not do that. The point of the book is not clear to a child who does not know prejudice yet, so the story only serves to reinforce a notion that parents should already have been teaching their children from the moment they knew how to speak. The few positive aspects of representation for many marginalized groups and the equal inclusion of those groups in the illustration do not set the book apart, although they are surely appreciated. At the end of the day, this is a story that tries to tackle a deep problem by barely scratching the surface. If this was the way it had to be done in order for young children to understand it, then maybe it should not have been written for that audience.