Interview with Ian and Sarah Hoffman, Authors of “Jacob's School Play: Starring He, She, and They”

Jacob’s School Play describes the nuances of gender identity in such simple terms. What would you say to people who think that children are too young to understand gender diversity, or that it is too difficult to talk to children about gender diversity?

Kids begin to understand gender when they’re 2 or 3 years old. So it’s natural and appropriate to start discussions about gender at that age. Like everything kids learn—language, math, social skills—gender is a discussion that should get repeated as kids grow older, more sophisticated, and more nuanced.

Kids are very accepting of new ideas. When it comes to gender diversity, we’ve noticed that kids are very comfortable with ideas about gender and pronouns. It’s usually the adults who are struggling.

The message of all our books is that there are all sorts of ways to be a kid. So be yourself, be open to new ideas, and don’t hurt anybody else. We think that’s an appropriate lesson for kids of any age.

Jacob has been on quite a journey since the debut of Jacob’s New Dress! What can readers - both children and adults - learn from Jacob’s journey?

There is a lot of leeway in our world for girls to express themselves all along the gender spectrum, from sparkly dresses and tiaras to jeans and baseball caps. Our hope is for a world where all kids are just as free to be who they are, and to express themselves however they’d like. So we hope, when kids read our books, that they will come to see a boy like Jacob as just another way of being a kid. And we hope that when kids like Jacob read our books, they will see that they are not alone.

More broadly, we hope our books will help teach kids that it's ok to be different in any way. That message is aimed both at the kids who are different and the kids who aren't different. We've learned through our own experience that kids are pretty tolerant of difference if they're taught to be tolerant. Education makes a huge difference in terms what kids will or won't accept. We’ve seen it in our children’s schools: when kids were educated about gender diversity, they accepted our son Sam. When they were not, they rejected him. Education is powerful, and it works.

What have you both learned from Jacob’s journey and the process of creating it?

We started out writing about a little boy who likes to wear dresses, because we were raising a little boy who liked to wear dresses. We had wanted to read a book to him about a kid like him, but that book didn’t exist. That’s how we came to write Jacob’s New Dress, to support kids like our son.

Raising a gender non-conforming child has been a messy, broad, and open-ended process. Along the way we kept realizing there were other books we wanted our son to have that didn’t exist yet. So we wrote Jacob’s Room To Choose and Jacob’s School Play: Starring He, She, and They. We never set out to write a series. We just wanted to address some of the messy, broad, and open-ended situations we encountered in real life.

Along the way we learned that you can explain most topics to a curious preschooler, if you can distill them down to their essence.

What advice do you have for teachers who want to create a safe space for LGBTQ+ children and engage all children in conversation about gender identity, but may not know how to begin, or may feel afraid of not doing it perfectly?

That’s a great question—we’ve seen a teacher do exactly what you’re describing! When Sam started kindergarten, he wore dresses and had long, blonde hair. He was the only boy in his entire school who dressed that way. Sam was lucky to have a teacher, Ms. Reeves, who believed in preventing bullying before it began. Ms. Reeves wanted to teach lessons on gender in her classroom that would help the other kids accept Sam.

Ms. Reeves had no formal lesson plan, but she dove in anyway. She started with simple questions like "Is pink a boy or a girl color?" and "Are there boy colors and girl colors?” The kids moved from the standard pink-is-for-girls/blue-is-for-boys responses to figuring out there are no "boy colors" or "girl colors."

In other lessons she would ask questions about sports or toys. They kids came to realize that colors, sports, and toys don’t necessarily divide by gender.

Then she moved on to appearance. Ms. Reeves had long black hair streaked with magenta. One day she pulled out a photo of a short-haired child. “Is this a boy or a girl?” she asked them. The kids were all certain it was a boy.

“That’s me,” she told them. “When I was in first grade. Girls sometimes have short hair. Just like boys sometimes have long hair.” Kids in Sam’s class understood what Ms. Reeves was teaching, and they were fine with Sam.

What none of us realized was that Ms. Reeves was accidentally running a science experiment. Because the kindergarten class next door—taught by a different teacher —didn’t receive these same lessons. That class wasn’t nearly as accepting of Sam. They teased and questioned Sam a lot. What we learned is that education is powerful, and it works.

Ideally, schools should invest in education about kindness and diversity for all of their students. This kind of education doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. It just has to be woven into the fabric of the day.

What do you enjoy about writing children’s books together?

We are very, very lucky to work together. We have the same core values, but very different skills. Sarah thinks fast and big-picture. Ian thinks slowly and resonates with the details. Our complimentary skills bring a lot of depth to our work life (and the rest of our life, too).

We love to create together. For us, there’s no real difference between our writing, our parenting, and the rest of life. Usually, one of us has an idea. We talk it over to see if it’s a good idea. If it is, then someone starts the project. With writing, one of us will generate a first draft, then turn it over to the other for editing/comments/revision. Then it goes back and forth between us until it’s ready. Nowadays we have two very insightful teenagers in our house, and we seek out their opinions. They’re now a delightful part of our family business.