Tough Questions: Talking Straight With Your Kids About the Real World - Softcover

Sheila Kitzinger campaigns for women to have the information they need to make choices about childbirth. She is a strong believer in the benefits of home birth for women who are not at especially high risk. Sheila is also concerned to give a voice to pregnant women and new mothers in prison and has worked to free them from chains during birth, to keep mothers and babies together unless a woman can be shown to be a danger to her baby, and to provide woman-to-woman help to prisoners during birth.

Sheila Kitzinger lectures to midwives in many different countries. She is honorary professor at Thames Valley University and teaches the MA in midwifery in the Wolfson School of Health Sciences there. She also teaches workshops on the social anthropology of birth and breastfeeding and on unhappiness after childbirth for birth educators and postnatal counsellors, too.

Sheila Kitzinger combines birth activism with research, writing, lecturing and appearing on radio and TV. Her research includes work on women’s experiences of antenatal care, birth plans, induction of labour, epidurals, episiotomy, hospital care in childbirth, children’s experiences of being present at birth, post traumatic stress following childbirth and the many different messages that touch can give during childbirth.

Sheila ( The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth ) and Celia (The Social Construction of Lesbianism ) Kitzinger are an English mother-daughter partnership who come to their task with clearly defined progressive goals: "One vital element in . . . preparation for life in the modern world must be education for social and political change"; and readers who disagree with that position will find the book at least partly tendentious. Few will find fault, however, with the authors' calm common sense and realistic idealism as they ponder what to tell children about death (which has, they note wryly, "replaced sex as the great taboo subject") and how to deal with moral questions, prejudice, aggression and violence and the thorny aspects of friendship and other relationships. The stress is always on respecting the child as an individual and on bringing out his or her thoughts or feelings rather than imposing adult views. There is a refreshing multiculturalism at work--examples are repeatedly drawn from non- Western societies--and brief case histories and personal experiences are sensitively pk integrated. The English origins of the book are plain without being obtrusive or restrictive, and any parent who finds the political approach appealing will find this a valuable, nurturing study.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.