Reviewer Vibha Sharma: Vibha is from Bangalore, India. She is a software engineer and a management graduate by profession but is now a stay-at-home mother of two children. The passion to read and write brought her to the blogging world. Vibha has two blogs - one devoted to book reviews - Literary Sojourn and Literary Siesta (Short Stories For Children), where she posts short moral stories for young children.
Author : Erin A. Munroe
Publisher :
Health Communications Inc.
ISBN : 978-0-7573-1532-9
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 not been written already in many other
parenting books that are available in the
market.