What Should I Tell the Kids?: 2A Parent's Guide to Real Problems in the Real World

A child psychologist and columnist for Child magazine offers advice on how to communicate to children between ages four and eleven information about sex, death, divorce, drugs, AIDS, and similar subjects. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

Children, especially those ages 4 to 11, ask hard questions, and parents often have a tough time knowing when to tell the truth and when to protect them from it. Here Siegler, director of the Institute for Child, Adolescent and Family Studies in Manhattan and a columnist for Child magazine, draws on her own experience as both mother and therapist to help parents be honest with their children in a gentle, nurturing way. Filled with real-life examples of good and bad parent-child interactions, the book is divided into chapters focusing on such subjects as sex, illness and death, anger and envy, divorce, single parenting, mental illness (including suicide and depression), alcohol and drugs, AIDS, homosexuality, and man-made and natural disasters. Never preachy or patronizing, this guide should make it easier to answer kids' questions.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Every day, parents struggle to give responsible answers to questions about sex, drugs, bigotry, and myriad other issues that children wonder and worry about at increasingly earlier ages. Here to help is this timely and practical handbook by noted child psychologist and Child magazine columnist Siegler. Stressing the importance of honest and clear communication, Siegler reviews a variety of topics, including separation, divorce, remarriage, and illness and death. He offers hundreds of sample dialogs between parents and children to illustrate ways in which conversations can be structured to inform and reassure kids ages three to 12. While the degree of frankness in many of the dialogs may not suit everyone, Siegler's approach, when tempered with parents' own sense of their child's needs, encourages new ways of understanding and communicating. Recommended for parenting collections.
- Linda Cullum, Lake Superior State Univ. Lib., Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. Social Science
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.