Saturday, November 27, 2010

Book Review : When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls


Title : When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls
Author : Erin A. Munroe
Publisher : Health Communications Inc.
ISBN : 978-0-7573-1532-9

Book Review written for BookPleasures
'When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls' attempts to be a useful aid for the parents, especially the mothers of little girls, as daughters knowingly or unknowingly tend to emulate their mothers in their actions, responses, biases, beliefs and mannerisms. Bringing up daughters can be an intimidating task for a mother when one mini-herself is looking for guidance and approval of the right way to live and behave. Author Erin A. Munroe sheds light on the topics that girls face today and through these incite the parents to first understand themselves and their emotions so that they are appropriately equipped to steer the daughters to handle the pressures of growing up.

It is imperative for the parents to keep the communication channels open at all times with the daughters and to exercise 'listen more and judge less' policy to achieve that. There are some very useful tips in the book under various topics for the parents to take help from - making them comfortable with the physical changes happening, getting to know her friends personally, educating her about sex, pregnancy and STDs, supporting her in case she has some kind of learning disability or mental illness, and discussing the topic of drugs and alcohol.
At the end of each chapter, there is a neat list of 'Action Recap', 'Top five talking points' and 'Useful resources for more information'.

But more than anything else, what a parent should take from such books is to work on developing a loving and caring bond with the daughters and if there is one, I think no such help is required and if it is not there, these books do not help either. The responsibility of making the relationship such entirely rests on parents.
The book is not the kind to be read from cover to cover. The readers should pick the chapter that deals with particular concern of theirs to get right more information on. The chapters are quite mutually exclusive, each focusing on a different issue, there is no particular sequence of the chapters.

First thought after reading this book was why this could not be a generic book dealing with the issues of both sons and daughters. The only specific chapters were where physical changes are discussed. The same can be addressed for boys too under different sections of course. Other than this topic, the rest of the chapters are pretty much generic and parents/caregiver of a boy also have the similar kind of concerns.
Did not find anything new which has already not been written about in many other parenting books that are available on the shelves. So yet another book on parenting.

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