Review: Families

Happy Wednesday, everyone! It’s time to join once again with Kid Lit Frenzy to celebrate the best of children’s literature for young people.

Big or small. Similar or different looking. There are all kinds of families. Join a celebration of diverse families having fun, being together, and helping one another.

This photographic celebration of families is a must-have for any children’s collection. Just from looking at the cover, which features a large, happy mixed family, you know that this is going to be a welcoming, inclusive and joyful look of families in all their shapes, sizes and colours.

Co-author Sheila M. Kelly is a clinical psychologist, and writes that “recently, research psychologists have found that children who developed a strong family narrative from speaking with their parents about family history and hearing family stories, both good and bad, exhibited greater self-esteem and a feeling of control over their lives.”

The sparse text is designed to provide caregivers with a starting point for positive conversations and discussions about their own families and families they see or know – what they look like, who’s in them, what they like to do together.

One of the things I appreciate most about Families is its straight-forward, no-nonsense approach to families that might seem “different”. The text introduces nontraditional family forms in simple, nonjudgmental ways – in one spread, for example, children are shown first at their father’s house, and then at their mother’s, suggesting (but not explicitly mentioning) that the parents are divorced or separated. In other pages, children are shown with their two mothers or two fathers, or with their grandparents, who might be raising them. Everything is depicted as perfectly and absolutely normal – which it absolutely is!

Along with the cultural and ethnic diversity, we see a family with a wheelchair user, which is something we absolutely need to see more of in children’s books. Just because someone’s mom or dad does things differently because of a disability doesn’t make them any less of a mom or dad!

Simply put, this is a lovely, colourful, vibrant celebration of families in all their many wonderful shapes, sizes and forms. Children should always feel comfortable talking about their families, and should never be made to feel that their family is “weird” or “strange” simply because it looks different from the ones they see in picture books or on TV. All families are important, and Families reaffirms this message to wonderful effect.