“It’s not until we know the stories of each other that we embrace our humanity. When I know the stories of my people and my culture, that’s when I become human myself.”

— Ezra Hyland

In 1990 Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop published the groundbreaking essay, Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors, illuminating the ways that reading helps us to see ourselves, and others, more clearly. She wrote, “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books,” (Bishop, R. S., 1990).

For children, reading books that reflect their cultural identities, personal experiences, family dynamics and more helps them to make sense of their world, and reflect on who they are as a growing person. Reading about those who differ from them increases their capacity for empathy and compassion (Kucirkova N., 2019).

Groundwood Books, an independent children's publisher based in Toronto, contracted therapist Tania DaSilva to curate a collection of picture books just for this purpose. Groundwood Books’ curated “Feeling and Healing” collection of picture books for children explores everything from emotions to grief and loss, inclusion to identity formation, and more. DaSilva, Child, Youth, and Family Therapist and Clinical Director of Behaviour Matters in Canada, thoughtfully put together the collection of books with........

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