SuitabookWe Belong Together
Todd Parr
- Reading
- Share the book slowly, pausing to name the welcoming message and ask what feels fair or incomplete. Add your family’s own language about mutual love, identity and belonging.
- Themes
- Adoption and belonging: The book presents adoption as people choosing to come together, sharing a home and heart, and making a family that belongs together. Family belonging and diverse ways of making a family are warmly affirmed through direct, reassuring language.
- Need, provision and reciprocity: The recurring formulation gives the child a need, such as a home, and the family something to provide, such as space or love. The welcome is affectionate, but the one-directional structure can be read as portraying the child as needing rescue and the family as saviour-like.
- Diversity in families: The illustrations are described as showing single parents, couples of different kinds, people of different colours and animals, alongside children. Visual diversity and acceptance are presented positively as part of the book’s welcoming family message.
- Worth knowing
- Notice whether the child is positioned mainly as someone receiving a home, love or other provision. Some readers may find this implies rescue or indebtedness rather than recognising love and need on both sides.