All About Families

The word ‘family’ can mean different things to different children. What is a family? Who’s in your family? How can families change? This book sets out to answer these questions, and many more, in a friendly, matter-of-fact way.  

Lots of different types of families are depicted visuallyand in the text, including foster families, kinship care families, single parents, same-sex parents, and so on. Various terms are explained, like ‘blended family’ (along with a glossary at the back), and a family tree helps shows quite how cousins, grandparents and aunts and uncles are all related.  

This lovely, inclusive book also shows the many different kinds of home that families can live in, and the various ways family members help and look after each other. Almost every aspect of everyday life in a family is covered, from food to language to celebrations to outings. At the end there is a series of illustrations, like comic strips, acknowledging that within families not everyone feels the same way about everything.  

This would be very useful in showing children that everyone’s family is different, but special in its own way.