BUYING ADVISORY: EL (K-3) - NO
AUDIENCE APPEAL: LOW
All Ways Family is about the reproductive systems, as well as the different families found in today’s society. All Ways Family teaches about the traditional family first, with a mother and father, who get pregnant, and how they got pregnant. Then a little girl asks her mother how she could have been born, since her mother has never had a male partner. The mother takes her daughter to a fertility clinic to show her daughter the invitro process, discusses donor sperm and/or ova, and then talks about why a family would want to use different variations of these services (health problems, single-parent choice, lesbian/gay couples, etc). Then a young boy talks about being adopted from another country. The kids then discuss in the class all the different ways families can become families, then they celebrate their different families.
All Ways Family can be used as a teaching tool within the home. I would not allow this book in a library, as it is quite controversial in how different families look, as well as the fact that it has (cartoon) pictures of naked parents. All Ways Family goes in to detail how babies are made, in all forms. I think that it does an excellent job of keeping the discussion very factual, using correct terminologies, yet in a form that young children can still understand. All Ways Family would be great for parents wanting to cherry-pick how they approach this sensitive topic, and they can skip the pages they do not agree with or wish to discuss at that time. However, if a child came home with this book from school, I am pretty certain that every parent would either absolutely love it, or be extremely infuriated that access to such a book was granted without their approval by the school.
Reviewer: AR/SL
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