Joselin, Laurence <br/><br/>
Images of the Mentally Disabled Child’s Family in Children’s Literature 

 -  2010.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> Analysis of children’s literature can be used to give an account of social representations of the family in which a deficient hero develops. Focusing on thematic analysis of a corpus made up of a hundred albums or short illustrated novels published between 1995 and 2006, various family figures emerge. As a general rule, the stories depict social representations that vary according to the protagonist’s deficiency. The handicap does not appear as a social question, but as an intra-familial issue that disrupts the stability of the family, that will allow a change in view, in the affective tonality or behaviour of the members of the family to be operated, so as to live better alongside an equal in a situation of disability. The narrative weft gives a relatively normalised image of the family and purposely optimistic impact of the presence of a deficient child in a family.