are now fighting are helping them sculpt themselves into the separate, interesting adults they will one day become. Arguments are excruciating, but they also mark an important rite of passage.
SEE ALSO: anger • bargaining, endless • bath, not wanting to have a • bed, not wanting to go to • best friend, falling out with your • blamed, being • parents who are splitting up, having • sulking
astray, being led
Many a grown-up frets that the cherubic, innocent child in their care might be led astray by the depraved and delinquent one in someone else’s. If you introduce a child early on to the possibility that they may one day have a friend who takes off in an ill-advised direction – and they’ll need the presence of mind not to follow – you’ll be able to fret much less. A great story for the job is Sam and the Firefly, an early reader in which an owl named Sam, looking for a playmate, meets a zesty little firefly named Gus. Sam is impressed when the firefly shows him the shapes he can draw with his light, and soon the pair of them are scrawling their names across the sea-green Eastman sky. But then Gus gets the idea of writing ‘Turn left’ and ‘Turn right’ above the traffic lights for a laugh. Sam knows that Gus has over-stepped the line and tells the young firefly so – holding his ground even when Gus calls him a spoilsport (see: loser, being a bad). Sam is the perfect role model for how to stand firm against your wayward friends – without, in fact, having to lose them as friends.
The older children are, the harder it sometimes is to resist the influence of others. Gabriella in The Invisible Girl is a shy eleven-year-old – so shy, in fact, that she feels invisible – and when her neglectful father packs her off to Manchester to be with her mother, omitting to tell her mother that she’s coming, it gives Gabriella the perfect excuse to disappear. She’d rather try to survive on the streets of a city she doesn’t know than face her sharp-tongued mother.
In Manchester she finds herself more alone than ever before. Just when she’s reconciling herself to having to sleep in the cathedral doorway, she meets Henny, a girl who knows a thing or two about homelessness herself – a little too much, in fact. Soon, the older girl has Gabriella shinnying up drainpipes and breaking in to people’s flats; and for a while, Gabriella seems doomed to a life of crime. She’s saved by her faith in her older brother, Beckett, who she hasn’t seen in years, and by an innate belief that she’s a good girl at heart. This is a story to help young readers maintain the courage of their own convictions rather than be swayed by the first attractive, worldly personality to come along.
| CURE FOR GROWN-UPS | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer MARK TWAIN |
One such attractive personality being Tom Sawyer, and you’d do well to acquaint yourself with his type. Though on the surface this charismatic vagabond looks like one of the bad influences described above, Tom is in fact a good egg. And although he and his true love, Becky Thatcher, do end up spending several days in a cave and almost starving to death, their adventure is well intentioned – and inadvertently leads to the discovery of a bona fide fortune. Learn to recognise the mischievous prankster who always lands on his or her feet from the doomed disaster who will take your child down with them (and see The Novel Cure: rails, going off the). If the child in your care is being led astray by a Tom Sawyer type, stand back and let them enjoy the ride.
SEE ALSO: friends your parents don’t approve of, having • naughtiness • peer pressure • told, never doing what you’re
attention, seeking
SEE: praise, seeking
autism
Just as there are a variety of behaviours associated with autism, there are a variety of ways to respond to it. Encourage an empathetic, non-judgemental response in the children you know with a story, or two, which gives a flavour of what it might be like to experience the world via an autistic brain. Then read the stories yourself.
THE TEN BEST BOOKS FOR UNDERSTANDING AUTISM
SEE ALSO: different, feeling • routine, unable to cope with a change in the
awkward
SEE: shyness • tall, being
1 When tackling serious ailments, always read a book through to the end yourself before sharing it with a child. The picture books recommended here are written to capture what it can be like to experience violence in the home and unless the content bears some resemblance to the child’s own experience, it may disturb more than reassure.
2 This moving story about a teenage girl who becomes hooked on drugs after unwittingly taking LSD at a party – originally claimed to be taken from an actual diary but since acknowledged by its author,
