Black History Month runs through October in the UK. Much of what fills it, rightly, is history that is hard to hear — struggle, injustice, and the people who refused to accept either. Children need that history, and they will grow into it. But a four-year-old is not ready to start there. For the youngest children, the more useful question this month is a simpler one: do they know they belong somewhere, and that people who look like them are at the centre of stories rather than the edges? Start with a place, not a lesson Small children do not learn heritage from facts. They learn it from things they can picture: a grandmother's kitchen, a word only your family uses, a real place they could stand in one day. If your family is from Ghana, there are plenty to choose from. One we love is Kakum National Park in the Central Region — a protected rainforest with a walkway of rope bridges strung through the treetops, high above the forest floor. It is one of Ghana's best-known places to visit, and to a child it sounds like something out of a story, which is half the point. Kakum is also not far from Cape Coast, whose castle holds a history your child will learn when they are older. Kakum is the gentler door into the same part of the world: somewhere joyful first, so that the harder story, when it comes, lands on ground that already feels like theirs. Belonging comes before history. A child who feels at home somewhere is ready to learn what happened there. The hero, not the sidekick The other thing small children notice, long before they can put it into words, is who gets to be the main character. A child who only ever sees people who look like them as the friend, the helper or someone in the background learns something from that, quietly. Being the hero of a story is different from being included in one, and young children feel the difference. Small ways to mark the month Ask a grandparent for one story from their own childhood, and tell it again at bedtime. Cook one dish together and say where it comes from. Find home on a map, and the town your family is from inside it. Read books where a Black child is the one who is brave, curious or funny — not only the one who is wronged. What our book is, and what it isn't We should be honest about scope. The Bridge in the Sky is one story, set in one real place in Ghana. It is not a history of the continent, and it will not stand in for the conversations that come later. What it does is put your child at the centre of a story set somewhere real: their name on the cover, their face on the bridge, a child who is frightened and crosses anyway. For a Ghanaian family it is a corner of home. For anyone else, it is a window into one part of West Africa — with their own child standing in it.