The Backyard Diplomat

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, in a small backyard, nine-year-old Thomas Jackson works up the nerve to ask his mother a hard question. He has just come home from a friend's house, where he heard a grown woman tear into her child's father. It bothered him. Why, he wants to know, does his own mother never do that?

Eloise Jackson keeps sewing. Then she tells him the truth. His father is a good man. They grew apart. And she will not speak ill of him.

The Backyard Diplomat is one honest conversation between a mother and her son about the words adults choose when children are listening. It gives young readers something rarer than a lesson: a grown-up modeling restraint, dignity, and the discipline of deciding what not to say.

Warmly illustrated by Shelby Peake, this is a book for any child who has overheard something they were not meant to hear, and for every parent who wants their child to know the door is always open.

Maurice T. Williams is a Baltimore native and the founder of Butterscotch Memoirs Publishing. He holds a B.S. in Administration of Justice from Texas Southern University and is a veteran of the United States Army.