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Grief In Children With Disabilities And How It Is Portrayed In Children's Picture Books, Erjola Gjini

Theses and Dissertations

Even though today's children's literature provides a wide range of topics, including books on death and grief, and much has been done to represent children with disabilities accurately and positively, there is still room for improvement. This descriptive study sought to understand how individuals with disabilities were represented in 177 grief-themed children's books from 1965-2023. From the results, only seven books included representations of individuals with disabilities. Additionally, the literary devices such as euphemisms or metaphors utilized in the books to describe how death was represented may inadvertently perpetuate inaccessibility to resources about grief (Berns, 2004). Thus, when choosing books …