Who's In My Family?: All About Our Families

An acceesbile, cheerful, and fun look at all kinds of families. Harris is the author of some of the best books ever written (and illustrated by Ed Emberly) for children on human body development and sexuality, which are consistently challenged and censored by adults who fear children learning facts

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about themselves. This book, which acknowledges that there are families with two daddies and two mommies, will undoubtedly be the target of those same ignoramuses.

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Grades PS-1:
This upbeat book talks about the fact that, while families may be different in terms of make-up, members, cultural traditions, physical appearance, etc, families share certain characteristics. Regardless of how many kids a family has, or whether kids live with their mom and dad, or

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their mom part of the time or their dad part of the time, or two dads, or two moms, or relatives or foster-parents or any of the other myriad combinations, families care about each other and help each other. Even when they have sad times or mad times, members of a family love each other. Colorful digital illustrations capture the cheerful tone as siblings Nellie and Gus reinforce the messages of the book through their speech bubble conversations. A good read-aloud choice for helping children celebrate their own families and increase their awareness of the diversity of families in their community.

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Colorful illustration's with a detailed story line that shows how many different families live.
Source: DuPont Library
Age: 4 - 6

This is worth a look if you need something to help kids adjust to/communicate about the newness of (or new awareness of) being in a mixed race family, or having friends who have differently structured families than their own.

It's organized in a double-dimensional way: There is the narrative

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component connecting each page, and this section explains that there are many different types of families, and families exist everywhere. There is also a semi-consistent dialogue between two siblings as they plan their family outing to a zoo, discuss their own family, notice the different shades of skin amongst their family members, compare the range of eye color in their family, etc. (The father is white with fair hair, the mother is black with black braided hair. The kids are tan with curly hair.)

There are very full, detailed illustrations throughout, and both the pictures and the narration explain topics like hair type, hair color, skin color, anger and happiness, same sex couples, etc.

Some kids may really enjoy the double story; social workers, counselors, and certain families may really gain from this book.

I didn't really care much for it-- I think the message is excellent, but I think there was entirely too much happening in the narration, the sibling dialogue, the illustrations--and all 3 combined make for a very long, somewhat disorderly feel. I feel like the author wanted to present a really important topic, but he tried to hit on too many components thereof. It also felt really forced-- though certain ideas were posed straightforwardly, they would appear suddenly from the midst of scattered and chaotic additional ideas. The effect is that a powerful message that was meant to be poised accessibly became so artificially 'normalized' that it felt jarring.

Don't discount it based on my opinion, though-- it's bound to be very useful for some kids.

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This book follows a family on their trip to the zoo. There they meet many different friends, these friends all have a different type of family unit. This book introduces children to the differing family structures. This book conveys that, that is normal and ok. The end of the book the many

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different families gather and all have a dinner party emphasizing the connection of differing people.

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If you need a book to teach about diversity, this is not a bad choice. But, there was a lot of information here for a child to take in and not all families are reflected, despite the title. But perhaps that would be impossible. I asked myself how my grandson would respond to this book. First, I do

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not think he'd find it all that interesting. No rhyming text, no real humor, no adventure, nothing particularly clever. Second, he wouldn't see his family reflected here, so he might find the concepts of family that are depicted confusing rather than enlightening. Though written with 3-5 year old children in mind, I question whether they would truly understand the message. It's a lot to take in. It's more didactic than entertaining.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, please note I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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This book would be good for a shared reading with kindergarten or first grade students. The book discusses the many different types of families there are-including animal families. The book also talks about activities families like to do together, how families care for one another, and how people

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in families may look alike or they may not. The text also brings up the concept of twins, which is interesting to look for in a text. A great text feature about the book is that it has regularly narrated text, but it also has speech bubbles that appear above different characters. The speech bubbles show characters talking in first person point of view, while the narration is done in third person point of view. This book would be great for introducing the concept of different points of views and which words to look out for when differentiating the two.

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