Book Review: Kids Books on Surrogacy, What is a Family, Foster/Adoption Story

Title: Sophia's Broken Crayons: A Story of Surrogacy from a Young Child's Perspective by Crystal Falk
Publisher: Amazon's digital Services
Format: E-book
Genre: Surrogacy, Children

Synopsis: Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs bark? When will I be tall? Where do babies come from? Kids ask a lot of questions. Some of them are easier to answer than others. Explaining why someone would choose to become a surrogate or why a family would choose a surrogate to help grow their family are even harder questions to answer. Sophia’s Broken Crayons can help you answer those questions.

 (50)Review:  A simplistic story to explain surrogacy to a young child.  The book is geared toward ages 2-6 and would be great to help children of surrogates understand why the baby isn’t staying with them and also to help the child that is born through surrogacy understand the process.  It doesn’t get into great detail it just talks about how one family shared their tummy to help another family just like the young girls friends share their crayons when hers are broken. 
This book was published in conjunction with Surrogacy Together and while a great book the back of the book is filled with full names of names of surrogates, intended parents and donors, which I felt was a breach of confidentiality and was unnecessary for a story geared toward children. If they had just left the forward and the little blurb in the back about their organization I think it would have been much better. However the story itself is very good and could be used for anyone involved in a surrogacy situation.

Title: Children Books: What is a family?: (Preschool Values book) - Picture Book for Early & Beginner Readers fiction (Balu Baldauf series 9) by Ruthz SB
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Format: e-book
Genre: Diversity, Children

Synopsis:What is a family? For BeBe, it is a father, mother, boy, girl, cat or dog living in a house with a garden. When BeBe's teacher asks her students to tell about their families, BeBe learns that each child comes from a different kind of family.

In this book, BeBe's friend World shows that children live in close or faraway, with a mom and dad, grandparents, two same-gender parents, or stepparents. Also mentions adoption, divorce, addition and loss of a member.

(51)Review: This is a sweet book about BeBe who is trying to define family.  His friend poses different questions to him to get him to think harder about the question until BeBe realizes that defining family isn’t always so easy and there are many different types of families.  This book shows many different aspects of what being a family means.  In the end BeBe realizes that family means different things to different people and none of that is wrong. 
The author has a beautiful note at the end of the book where she writes “A family is a collective consciousness - our first step towards understanding the supreme soul consciousness. Families make communities, communities make nations, nations make humanity…”, “…family is always our fundamental milestone.”
This is a great book to start talking about different types of families and looking at all the different types of families you may know.

Title: Sprout: an adoption story by Megan Meredith
Publisher: a Herald's Megaphone Publishing Co
Format: ebook
Genre: Foster care, Adoption, children, abuse

Synopsis: Sprout lives in Wild Wood where he is trampled and scorched. Who will care for Sprout? Will someone save Sprout? Will Sprout find a place to safe and belong?

(52)Review:This is a beautifully illustrated story about a seedling that isn’t given the chance to grow, it is not taken care of and harmed until one day a stranger comes and takes it away, nurtures it and helps it to grow. For children who are removed from dangerous or harmful environments and placed in new homes this is a story of hope, of love and what can happen when you give a child the love support and care that he or she needs to grow. Without talking about what happened to a child in the past this story is not an in your face book, but a subtle story about what love and encouragement can help create.  Hopefully a child will see his or her own story in this one and while maybe not fully understanding that it relates to them at first it may spark hope inside them. I can see this as a book you would want to read again and again. 

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