Kayla: A Modern-Day Princess — The Little Black Girl Who Dreamed of Broadway

Long before Kayla Pecchioni became a Broadway star, she was a little girl with a very big dream. She loved musical theatre. She loved performing. She loved the magic of stepping onto a stage and becoming part of a story. And long before she could have known where that love would take her, she believed there might be a place for her there.

That little girl became the inspiration for Kayla: A Modern-Day Princess, a five-book children’s series published by Make A Way Media. Book One has become our most popular-selling book, and all these years later, there is something especially meaningful about introducing readers to the little Black girl at the center of the story and being able to say: She grew up.

And she kept dreaming.

A Modern-Day Princess With a Different Kind of Dream

When we think about princess stories, we often think about castles, beautiful gowns, magical kingdoms, and happily-ever-afters. Kayla: A Modern-Day Princess was created around a different idea of what it could mean to be a princess.

Our Kayla has dreams of her own.

She is a little brown girl who loves musical theatre. She has a hardworking mother. She has people she admires, things she wants to accomplish, and a future she is beginning to imagine for herself. Her story encourages children to understand that they do not have to wait for someone else to tell them who they are or who they are allowed to become. That message is important for every child, but representation in children’s books gives it another dimension.

When Black children and other children of color see themselves represented in books as dreamers, leaders, adventurers, princesses, problem-solvers, artists, and heroes, they receive an important message about where they belong. When children read multicultural stories about people whose lives and experiences are different from their own, they are given opportunities to develop curiosity, understanding, and empathy.

Diverse books do more than change what is on a bookshelf. They can change what a child imagines when they think about who gets to occupy the center of a story.

The Real Kayla Couldn’t See the Future

There is another reason this series has become even more meaningful to me over time.

The real Kayla Pecchioni grew up to become a Broadway performer.

Today, we can look backward and connect the dots. We can see the little girl who dreamed of performing and the woman who would eventually step onto Broadway stages. We can point to the roles, productions, auditions, training, disappointments, opportunities, and successes and make the story look almost inevitable.

It wasn’t.

Kayla was growing up at a time when there was far less evidence that Broadway would have room for a young Black woman like her in the kinds of roles she dreamed about playing. She had no way of knowing what would change. She couldn’t know that one day she would have the opportunity to play Sugar in Some Like It Hot. She couldn’t see herself in the future playing Daisy in The Great Gatsby. She couldn’t know that Katherine in Newsies might someday be part of her story.

The Broadway she was dreaming about as a child is not exactly the Broadway she eventually entered. Opportunities expanded. Conversations about representation changed. Doors that had historically been closed began opening wider.

But little Kayla couldn’t know any of that.

She had to dream without the evidence.

Sometimes You Have to Move Like Your Dream Is Possible

I think there is something enormously important for us, and for our children, in that. We often want proof before we move. We want to know the opportunity will be there before we prepare for it. We want reassurance that the dream will work before we risk disappointment. We want someone to tell us there will be a place for us before we spend years developing the skills we will need when the door finally opens.

Life rarely gives us that kind of guarantee. We often have to move like our dreams are possible.

We aren’t going to pretend that obstacles don’t exist. And we aren’t going to promise our children that wanting something badly enough guarantees they will receive it. But what we are going to do is not allow today’s limitations to determine the full size of tomorrow’s possibilities.

Kayla trained.

She learned.

She auditioned.

She heard no. A lot.

She kept developing her craft.

She kept showing up.

And she continued preparing for opportunities she could not yet see.

Then, when some of those doors appeared, she was ready to walk through them.

Talk to Your Children About Their Dreams

It is never too early to ask children what they dream about. No, we don’t expect a six-year-old to choose a career and we don’t expect every childhood interest to become an accomplishment. Childhood dreaming has to be much more free than that.

Ask because dreaming exercises imagination.

Ask because it helps children learn to hear their own voices.

Ask because somewhere along the road to adulthood, many of us lose some of our ability to believe in our own magic.

And all of us have some magic. Children begin life with an extraordinary capacity to imagine. They can picture themselves doing almost anything. Then the world begins offering opinions:

• That’s too hard.
• People like us don’t do that.
• Be real.
• You’re not good enough for that.
• There are too many people trying to do that.
• What if you fail?
• You should do something safer.

Sometimes those voices come from people who genuinely love us. Fear can sound remarkably similar to protection. Over time, other people’s voices can become so loud inside our heads that we begin hearing them more clearly than our own. One of the greatest gifts we can give children is not a promise that every dream will come true. It is helping them develop enough confidence, self-awareness, resilience, and trust in themselves that fear does not automatically get the final vote.

This Is Why the Kayla Workbook Exists

The Kayla: A Modern-Day Princess series is accompanied by an activity workbook designed to take these conversations beyond the story. The workbook was written from a licensed therapist’s perspective and designed with the expertise of a real-life teacher. It gives children opportunities to think, create, reflect, and talk about who they are and who they might become.

Children need more than adults telling them, “You can be anything!” They need opportunities to explore what they enjoy. They need language for their feelings and to recognize their strengths. They need help learning how to cope when something is difficult, how to keep trying when they don’t immediately succeed, and how to separate their own hopes from other people’s expectations.

Books can open those conversations in a way that feels natural. A child may not sit down at the dinner table and announce, “I’d like to discuss my developing self-concept and the external messages influencing my perceived possibilities.” But ask a child what Kayla wants, why she wants it, what might make it difficult, and what they would do if they were Kayla?

Now we’re talking.

And then we can ask, “What about you?”

Why Black Princesses and Diverse Books Matter

Representation has always been central to the work we do at Make A Way Media. A Black princess does not have to be a lesson in diversity. Sometimes she can simply be a princess. A little Black girl can be imaginative, funny, determined, nervous, ambitious, loving, imperfect, adventurous, and full of dreams. She can occupy the center of the story without her race being the problem the story needs to solve.

Children deserve books that reflect themselves, and they also deserve books that introduce them to a much larger world. A Black child deserves the experience of opening a book and feeling recognized. A white child benefits from growing up with books in which Black children are naturally centered as heroes, princesses, friends, dreamers, and ordinary kids living full lives.

Multicultural children’s books help normalize a truth children should learn early: there is no single kind of person who gets to have the adventure, receive the opportunity, dream the big dream, or become the hero. This is how diverse stories can help build empathy while also expanding possibility.

We Don’t Know What Doors Are Being Built Right Now

Perhaps this is the part of Kayla’s story I think about most. Somewhere, right now, a child is dreaming about something that doesn’t quite exist yet. The industry they will eventually enter is changing. Technology will create a career none of us has heard of. Maybe a barrier that looks immovable today will fall. Somebody, somewhere, is building the program, company, stage, school, organization, or opportunity that child will walk into fifteen years from now. Maybe that child will grow up and build the door themselves.

We don’t know.

Neither did Kayla.

That is precisely why we cannot teach children to measure their dreams only against the world as it exists today. We can teach them to pay attention to reality while still leaving room for possibility. We can teach them that goals require work. We can help them develop a growth mindset so that difficulty becomes something to learn from rather than automatic evidence that they don’t belong. We can expose them to diverse books and multicultural stories that widen their understanding of who gets to do what. We can introduce them to people whose lives demonstrate that there is rarely only one road forward.

Most of all, we can teach them to recognize the difference between wisdom and fear.

That Is the Conversation Your Child Needs Today

Ask your child:

What do you dream about?

What would you try if you weren’t worried about being the best at it?

What are you curious about?

What makes you feel most like yourself?

Who inspires you?

What would you love to learn how to do?

Then listen.

You do not need to turn their answer into a plan. You don’t need to find lessons, buy equipment, research colleges, or figure out whether their dream is practical before bedtime. Just give the dream some room. Let your child hear an adult they trust respond to possibility with curiosity instead of fear.

The real Kayla could not know that Broadway would change. She could not know which roles would someday become possible for her. She could not know which auditions would lead to a yes. What she could do was keep moving as though there might be a door somewhere ahead with her name on it.

She could work, prepare, learn and be ready. And she could trust herself enough to keep going.

Years after a little girl named Kayla inspired a children’s book about dreaming big, the real Kayla Pecchioni stepped onto Broadway.

That is not a reason to tell children that every dream comes true exactly as they imagine it. It is a reason to be very careful about telling them which dreams can’t.

Give your children diverse books. Let them meet Black princesses, Black Santas, brown heroes like Miles Morales, and children who are different from them, children who remind them of themselves, and characters dreaming dreams they have never considered. And don’t forget to ask them what they see for themselves.

Then help them learn to hear their own voices before the world gets too loud. There is no way to know which doors will be waiting for them. Teach them to keep becoming the person who will be ready to walk through one.

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