Not all arguments occur because someone’s in a bad mood, but it certainly makes an argument more likely. In the brilliant little The Quarreling Book, we see how bad moods can be passed, like fire, from one person to the next. It all kicks off when Mr Brown forgets to kiss Mrs Brown before he leaves for work. Mrs Brown then snaps at son Jonathan when he comes down for breakfast, who in turn snaps at sister Sally, who snaps at her best friend . . . and so on until, inevitably, it’s somebody’s dog that gets it in the teeth. The good-natured dog, of course, just thinks it’s all a big game, which starts a counter-domino-effect of good moods going in the opposite direction. Arnold Lobel’s black-and-white illustrations capture the changing moods with the tiniest of lines – a mouth turned down on one side, a hurt eye widening. Read this one to the whole fractious family; then go and buy yourselves a dog.
If your child seems determined to pick fights, at least make sure they do it with a sense of humour. The extended family in Helen Cresswell’s wonderful Ordinary Jack and the other Bagthorpe Saga books are great role models for inveterate quarrellers, with mealtimes usually beginning with everyone talking at once and ending with the slamming of doors. The elderly matriarch, Grandma, is the ringleader, liking nothing better than throwing a pointed jibe, and she’s disappointed when it fails to stick. Mr Bagthorpe and his brother-in-law, Uncle Parker, have so many ‘first-class rows’ that Jack suspects they enjoy them, too – and he’s noticed that many of their interchanges turn up ‘pretty well word for word’ in his father’s TV scripts. Luckily, Grandpa’s tendency to make sudden, irrelevant statements – finishing a train of thought he started in his head – tends to throw an argument off course before it can get too savage. And if that doesn’t work, five-year-old cousin Daisy’s newfound habit of playing with matches underneath the table does (see: pyromania).
Dare we cast the aspersion that teenagers are frequently the cause of arguments in the home (see: adolescence; hormones, raging)? To help both teens and their haggard grown-ups get through these rocky years, bring in the hilarious The Book of the Banshee. Written by one Will Flowers from the ‘Front line’ of family life, it opens with the announcement that his sister Estelle has ‘curdled’ – i.e. become a teenager – and that suddenly it’s like sharing a home with an apprentice witch. The arguments begin at 7am, with diatribes about why school is pointless, and take up so much of everyone’s time and energy that Will ends up having to leave the house without his lunch money – and with only a hastily put-together piccalilli or salad-cream sandwich instead. The day ends with more arguments, these ones about why she can’t wear what she’s wearing and why she can’t stay out till 1am.
Meanwhile, Will finds a strange sort of comfort in a First World War memoir called The Longest Summer by a man named Saffery. In it he finds remarkable parallels between his own home life and Saffery’s experiences on the Front lines of northern France. When Will’s father comes upstairs to have words with Estelle, it’s just like the brave lads going over the top. And when Will’s little sister Muffy tucks her head into Will’s dressing gown in fear of Estelle, it’s as if she fears being hit by shells flying overhead. Before long, the military atmosphere has ratcheted up to such a point that Will decides he must take a proactive stand. He gains valuable ground and self-respect in the process; but he also learns that the battles Estelle – and in fact he, too – 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.