ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which disability and disabled parents are discursively constructed within children's picture books that feature a disabled parent. Picture books on disability are prime sources through which children learn about the broader sociocultural elements of disability as language utilized in books is often value-laden and imbued with sociocultural meaning. As such, through their linguistic and discursive constructions, books both resist and reproduce dominant sociocultural values, which influences the ways children understand disability in relation to themselves, their counterparts, and the broader social world. Although there is an extensive amount of children's literature that focuses upon children with disabilities, children's literature featuring disabled parents is overwhelmingly scant. With the limited amount of literary sources on disabled parents available for children, they are consequently exposed to very few, yet very specific, discursive framings of disabled parents through which to learn about and identify with. Thus, underscoring the ways that disability is discursively constructed within these texts is critical. In particular, this chapter considers the ways the language of these texts both explicitly and implicitly constitute notions of inspiration and resilience; normalcy and difference; individualization; narrative erasure; and social and medical models of disability.
