Abstract

Children, as a result of age, social status, and developmental stage, depend upon caregivers and medical professionals to interpret health discourse. However, children have largely gone unexamined in research on visual health communication. Because children are a vulnerable audience, rhetoricians should more closely attend to texts addressing them. This article analyzes 147 children’s picture books about COVID-19. These texts draw on the rhetorical concept of identification to encourage readers to take up particular health behaviors. These texts illuminate three specific risks of using identification to instantiate health behaviors in children: failing to acknowledge material limitations on children’s agency, glossing over the risks of infection, and distorting scientific discourse. Ultimately, while the majority of the texts in our corpus articulate the need for a community-centered approach, only a handful acknowledge directly that children’s agency and power are limited. These texts, therefore, also highlight a larger issue beyond the coronavirus: the difficulty of relying on an individual health imperative in communicating public health—an inherently communal enterprise.