What Is a Family?

by Etan Boritzer, Jeff Vernon (Illustrator)

What is a Family? is the 12th title in Etan Boritzer's popular series on character education and difficult topics. The author uses his well-known style to ask young readers serious questions that sharpen their critical thinking skills and lead to real understanding of complex issues. What is a Family? tackles difficult questions regarding the fast-changing face of contemporary families. Values of an ideal family and the problems that occur in real families are all open for discussion.

ebook

First published September 21, 2012

Reviews

[Riki Kellogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would consider this book's genre a work of realistic fiction because we could choose to take any of these families and set them in a real-life situation. For instance, I know we have children in my practicum right now that are staying at shelters and others that are in foster care, yet another lives with her grandmother. The nature of this book as it relates back to the children would be something they can relate to in their day to day lives. The Book what is Family does a great job of trying to hit all the bases of how a family can be formed and what a family consists of. They even talk about dysfunctional families animal families and families throughout past history in a way that questions more than tells children about what happens in some families that may be different which opens the story up for reflection. The only thing that really caught my attention was toward the end of the book when they were talking about mental illness in a family. The woman was bipolar not the man and that just struck me as biased considering how the rest of the book had progressed so far. Still overall a great read especially to kids of elementary school age. A teacher could even use this work as a way to introduce new material about different family types and have the children investigate how many families they can count from the book.