Using+Contemporary+Realistic+Fiction+to+Understand+the+Family

How might one use contemporary realistic fiction to understand family relationships?
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Added by Marcia Bernard

Contemporary realistic fiction offers many opportunities for children to explore and understand a diverse range of family relationships. Through examination of characters and plots they may be able to better empathize with others as well as gain new insight into their own familial relationships. For children in non-traditional family units this may be particularly useful. Foster children, single parent families, same-sex parents, families led by grandparents, orphans, and adoptive families: there is an entire rainbow of ways the contemporary family may be colored. “Such literature may help children realize that many family units other than the traditional one are common and legitimate in society today. Children may also see that problems often can be solved if family members work together” (Norton 474).

Parental divorce is a topic that more than 50% of students will face in their childhoods. Paula Danziger’s //Amber Brown// is a spunky, smart fourth-grader who faces a range of problems common to kids her age, including her parents’ divorce. Amber Brown is angry, she is vulnerable and she is trying to make sense of this new life—in a realistic and often humorous way that children will understand. Children with same sex parents are often faced with questions from their classmates and may feel different. //Molly’s Family// by Nancy Garden brings the issue to the youngest members of our schools in her story about a kindergartner who draws a picture of her two-mom family to which her classmate says she can’t have two mommies. The teacher is able to show the many types of families in the class and the love of family, no matter how it is constructed, remains the theme of the book. Even for children in stable traditional family units, there is bound to be occasional turmoil, stress and rivalry. Sibling relationships are paramount in many realistic fiction novels. In Cynthia Lord’s //Rules//, Catherine is frustrated by having to life with a brother who is autistic. The book doesn’t sugar-coat her emotions and leads to a true examination of her feelings. In reading about the way Judy Moody treats brother Stink, or The //London Eye Mystery’s// Kat behaves toward brother Ted who has Asperger’s Syndrome, children can see themselves, realize they are not alone in the issues they face and find solutions and strategies to use in their own lives.

Sources Danziger, Paula. //Amber Brown Sees Red.// New York: Putnam’s, 1997. Dowd, Siobhan. //The London Eye Mystery//. New York: Yearling Books, 2009. Garden, Nancy. //Molly’s Garden.// New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004. Lord, Cynthia. //Rules//. New York: Scholastic Press, 2006. Morgan, Mia. “Contemporary Realistic Fiction” LBS 803, Fall 2009. Norton, Donna E. //Through the Eyes of a Child.// 5th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1995.