Mckibben, S. (2020, February). Readers Guide/ The Heart of Reading Instruction. Educational Leadership: Rooting in Reading, 77(5). Retrieved February 10, 2020.

When I was in elementary school in the 1980s, I remember reading series like The Berenstain Bears. One of my favorite titles was Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room, which inspired an early journey into Marie Kondo-style organization. Like nearly all children’s series at the time, the main characters were part of a conventional nuclear family—Brother and Sister Bear and Mama and Papa Bear. It wasn’t until much later, when my wife and I became parents to twin boys, that I understood something was missing. Families like ours simply didn’t exist in the pages of most books.