Why is that man in a wheelchair? Why won’t that girl talk and play like other kids?
Sometimes children’s simplest questions are the hardest ones to answer. But author and longtime street youth worker Tim Huff invites them, no matter how sensitive the topic.
Huff’s 2007 picture book, The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge, brought homelessness out of the shadows by helping adults respond to the things children ask when they walk past a panhandler or see a person sleeping on the street.
Now his new book, It’s Hard Not to Stare: Helping Children Understand Disabilities, opens the conversation about people who use a wheelchair, are hearing impaired or have autism or other challenges.
Using simple stanzas and bright illustrations, Huff approaches the topic from a child’s perspective. He acknowledges their curiosity, provides answers and sends the message that having a disability “as you will see/it’s just about people like you and like me.”
Huff’s goal: to demystify the unfamiliar, build empathy and prevent the kind of judgment and meanness he has witnessed during his decades working with the disabled and as an outreach worker on the street with youth.
“If we teach children to be compassionate when they’re young, it spills over to everything and affects their character,” says Huff, co-founder of Street Level, a national advocacy network on homelessness and poverty issues.
Huff’s manuscript so impressed Ontario Lieutenant-Governor David Onley — who uses a wheelchair as the result of childhood polio — that he wrote the foreword, describing the book as “a remarkable contribution to the dialogue that is taking us closer and closer to being a fully accessible society.”
Onley noted that while many barriers have been removed for those with disabilities, the biggest challenges are negative attitudes and judgment from other people. But Huff’s words and illustrations will guide children “from staring to caring,” he wrote.
To special education teacher Jan Fukumoto, the book presents an opportunity to address children’s questions before those barriers set in. And that’s critical at a time when disabilities such as autism are increasingly prevalent and more kids have classmates and friends with special needs, she says.
That’s why Fukumoto jumped at the opportunity to write the book’s discussion guide, offering parents and teachers a tool that provides factual information and talking points. Both she and Huff consulted people with disabilities, their families and educators through every stage of the project.
“Kids challenge us about our own core values when they ask tough questions, and they can make us uncomfortable,” says Fukumoto, central co-ordinator of autism services with the Toronto District School Board.
Fukumoto has observed the benefits of frank conversation in classrooms. Recently, after a Grade 3 class in Toronto listened to a student with autism explain some of his repetitive behaviours, peers responded by talking about their own ways of coping with anxiety.
“You can see a shift. Kids automatically respond and they end up concluding they have more similarities (with one another) than differences.”
At a time when bullying is rampant, Huff says it makes more sense to build on the positive by instilling compassion and dealing with kids’ questions or uncertainty about the unfamiliar, rather than simply outlawing behaviours through numerous anti-bullying programs.
“Shouldn’t we be aiming much higher for the next generation than just hoping they will tolerate one another?”
It’s a message that seems to be resonating with the teachers and school boards lined up to hear Huff speak. Last month, 600 Catholic elementary teachers in York Region responded to his presentation on social justice with a standing ovation.
That same week, he took his message to 75 school principals in Orillia and led two assemblies on homelessness for 800 students.
In the last few years Huff has taken The Cardboard Shack, along with his own portable shack, to classrooms and auditoriums in schools across the GTA, from wealthy suburban private schools to high-needs classes in Scarborough where some of the students live in shelters.
It’s Hard Not to Stare is the second book in what has become the Compassion Series, published by Castle Quay Books Canada. Huff’s third book, The Honour Drum: Sharing First Nations’ Truths with Children, is planned for 2015. He has also written two adult books based on his experiences working with the homeless and street youth.
“Kids in school need to be educated about these issues,” says Castle Quay’s Larry Willard, who had steered away from publishing children’s books until he met Huff in 2006.
The Cardboard Shack sold 3,000 copies in 18 months without any marketing and Willard was soon hearing from grateful parents. So when Huff pitched the idea of a Compassion Series “I never even blinked.”
“Making kids aware and sensitive to others, when you start young, it plants seeds that continue to grow.”
For more information about It’s Hard Not to Stare and the Compassion Series, visit