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The lawyer and children\u2019s book author celebrates female representation in ‘Maya\u2019s Big Question,’ just in time for Women’s History Month.<\/p>\n
Just in time for Women\u2019s History Month, Meena Harris\u2019 latest book for young readers, Maya\u2019s Big Question<\/em>, is encouraging kids to think critically about women\u2019s rightful place in history. In what she says could be considered an unofficial sequel to her first book, Kamala and Maya\u2019s Big Idea<\/em>, Harris\u2019 protagonist goes on a class trip to Washington, D.C., and realizes that all of the monuments she visited solely honor men.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first wrote this book, I was really thinking about the heated debates that we are having around public monuments and these questions of who are our heroes, who deserves to be immortalized, what do monuments say about our values?\u201d explains the author, lawyer, and founder of Phenomenal Media.\u00a0<\/p>\n Combining those questions with her signature themes of girl power, women\u2019s equity, and female representation led Harris to her protagonist\u2019s big questions: \u201cWhere are all the women? Why is there no female representation in our monuments?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By centering her fifth book around this specific quandary, the mom of two wants young readers to know that there\u2019s power in asking questions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bigger goal\u2014and the way I hope that the book is used as a real tool\u2014is getting kids to question the status quo,\u201d says Harris. \u201cIf because of your specific experience or your specific observation, you notice something that you have a unique question around, that is incredibly powerful. Ask all kinds of questions and understand that there’s incredible power in doing that, especially if no one else is asking that same question.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \n “The bigger goal\u2014and the way I hope that the book is used as a real tool\u2014is getting kids to question the status quo.”<\/p>\n \n Harris feels like her path to becoming an author was quite unexpected. \u201cI wrote my first book as a side creative project while I still had a corporate job and no plans of leaving that job,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt was very much paying tribute to my grandmother and the values of community organizing, teamwork, and bettering your community that I wanted to pass onto my own children.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, five books later, Harris sees Maya\u2019s Big Question<\/em> as a way for her to get back to the style she launched with Kamala and Maya\u2019s Big Idea<\/em>, while simultaneously evolving her work.<\/p>\n “I took the learnings from the first book and thought about, \u2018OK, how do I add nuance to this or keep building?\u2019\u201d says Harris. \u201cPart of that was getting so much great feedback from educators and teachers and around how they were really using my book as a tool. It’s nice to know it\u2019s having the impact that I intended.\u201d<\/p>\n With Kamala and Maya\u2019s Big Idea<\/em>, Harris aimed to pay tribute to her grandmother, Shyamala Gopalan, who was a pioneering scientist, researcher in the field of breast cancer, and mom to former Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n Now, her childhood and family continues to fuel her writing titles that celebrate female empowerment, leadership, and heroes.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything I do is inspired by the family I was raised by, and the family I’m now raising,\u201d says Harris.<\/p>\n She explains, \u201cThe family I was raised by was unique\u2014just being surrounded by incredible women\u2014and I only kind of came to realize the power of that when I became a mom. For me, my worldview was that women were the main characters\u2026the people who were in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n In turn, it’s important for Harris to not only raise her daughters Amara, 9, and Leela, 8, the same way but to make that perspective and those values accessible to others through her books.<\/p>\n At the same time, Harris was inspired to address a lack of representation and diversity in children\u2019s books\u2014something she noticed was seriously missing when she first became a new mom nearly a decade ago.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve made incredible progress since then, but back when I started off, there were more books that had animals as main characters than Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, all people of color,\u201d she notes. \u201cAnd of those books that had human characters, in the majority of them, white boys were the main characters. And I knew that I wanted to write books that had little Black girls as main characters.\u201d<\/p>\n Harris set out to center characters like Maya for both girls and boys.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just about having daughters,\u201d she points out. \u201cIt’s also incredibly important for boys to see that representation matters, having that mirror matters, but so does having windows into other people’s experiences in terms of child development around empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n Though Harris says she\u2019s just trying her best like everyone else, the author encourages who want their kids to develop theircritical thinking skills to speak honestly with them, talk to them about current events, and encourage them to ask questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Taking this approach makes Harris think of how her family never had a kids\u2019 table for Thanksgiving. She sees that choice as a metaphor for holding space for kids\u2019 to share their ideas. And when kids ask questions, as they\u2019re apt to do because they\u2019re curious and observant, can validate them by taking them seriously and engaging with them, explains Harris.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s not about treating kids like adults, but it\u2019s more about respect for them and respect for the questions that they may have,\u201d notes Harris.<\/p>\n For example, Harris has been engaging with her eldest daughter on climate change, allowing her to head up their conversations. \u201cI have a perspective on that and care a lot about it, but I’m letting her lead and recognizing that she\u2019s going to have a unique experience in her generation, and the way that she has come into engaging that issue is different than how I did,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n By empowering her girls to tap into their innate curiosity, Harris is also encouraging them to trust themselves. \u201cIf somebody’s saying, \u2018The sky is green,\u2019 and you’re like, \u2018No,\u2019 understand that there’s power in pushing back on that.\u201d<\/p>\n Read the original article on <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The lawyer and children\u2019s book author celebrates female representation in ‘Maya\u2019s Big Question,’ just in time for Women’s History Month. Just in time for Women\u2019s History Month, Meena […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkmania.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Meena Harris<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
How \u2018Maya\u2019s Big Question\u2019 Took Her Writing to the Next Level<\/h2>\n
Getting Inspiration From Her Upbringing and Daughters<\/h2>\n
Encouraging Kids to Ask Big Questions<\/h2>\n