Coloring Books for All Our Kids

As a scholar in childhood, one of the things I struggle with is how after spending so much time with young children and their families, much of the research writing I produce is for a different audience– usually research journals. And let’s face it, most six year olds are not interested in reading my most recent piece in Journal of Things I Learned About Children Presented In Extremely Small Typeface, no matter how low its acceptance rate or how immaculate my research methodology.

So I have been experimenting a bit with that, as one saw in Washing Knives. And I like to work on my child-writing chops a bit when the opportunity arises, so imagine my glee at being asked to synthesize what we know about the needs of children and families’ foster and adoptive experiences into a coloring book! This book is from the nice people at All Our Kids, a non profit organization that supports foster and adoptive families, and the were helpful not only in providing me with data on family experiences, but also helping me understand what normalization of experience could mean for these stakeholders. The result is a very nice illustrated text that seeks to do just that in a developmentally appropriate and research-based way.

And by purchasing the book, you can help All Our Kids with their important work.