Family Diversity in 50 Years of Storybook Images of Family Life

Storybooks are cultural artifacts and part of children's normative socialization. Content analysis of the 100‐book sample of picture storybooks about daily family life published between 1943 and 1993 revealed no significant differences among time periods in frequency of appearance of different family types nor of different ethnicities. The dominant family images portrayed across 50 years and in each time period were the traditional nuclear and the Caucasian family. The diversity in families of real children should be reflected in fictional picture storybooks about family life.