What Typically Developing Children’s Parents Say When They Read Books About Disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine (a) how parents and their kindergarten-age children talk about disabilities when they read books that include characters with disabilities and (b) the relationship between the frequency of mother/child comments about disabilities and children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities, as measured by the Acceptance Scale for Kindergarten–Revised (ASK-R). Thirteen mothers and their children audiotaped their conversations when they read books that included characters with disabilities. Seventy conversations were analyzed and 12 themes were identified. The themes that appeared most frequently in the mother–child conversations about disabilities included differences in abilities and similarities between the child and the book characters with disabilities. Although the relationship between the number of words spoken by the parent–child dyads and children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities was not statistically significant, group differences between the number of words spoken and the content of the disability-related conversations were observed.