Mom Writes Book Series Featuring Disabled Characters

posted on Jun 02 by Admin in the Advocacy, Cerebral Palsy, Disability News, Fun, Wheelchair Accessibility category

Sarah Yates is a mother of a child with cerebral palsy, and like any mother, she wanted her daughter to be able to read stories that included characters like her. This desire is what drove her to create a series of fictional stories featuring characters with disabilities.

“When my daughter was born, I would read to her and all the heroines in the stories ran and jumped and shouted and she couldn’t. And I thought she’s got to have a literary role model, so I wrote her stories and told her stories where she could be the heroine,” Yates explained.

Originally, the doctors said she had quadriplegia and couldn’t move her arms or legs, but that turned out to not be the case. “She has wild arms. As things went on we realized she could use this foot, so we taught her to use her foot. She draws with her foot. She uses her computer with her foot.”

“I started the first one when she was very little,” Yates said of her first book inspired by her daughter. “When she started going to school and the kids would say, ‘Why can’t you be still?’ because she would have a hand that would go ‘Whoop’ and hit somebody, so I wrote a book called ‘Can’t You Be Still’ because she can’t.”

Yates promotes her books by traveling around the country doing puppet shows. “My puppet show came from the children’s book, because when my daughter couldn’t use her hands, she would have bears and how could she hold a bear? So I sewed elastic on the back and put it on her hand or on her knee so she could move it and tell her own stories to herself,” says Yates.

Yates’ daughter is now 22-years-old and a student at a University in Canada.

Source: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/disability_issues&id=8118490