Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

The way to a girl's heart

The Bean remains in the smash-and-grab phase of her infancy, an uncompromising stage in which she displays no inhibitions whatsoever about seizing other people's belongings, but hangs onto her own with grim determination. Since I'd like her to grow up with at least a few friends, we're working on those social skills, and so while browsing in the signing tent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday (oh, okay, I admit it, hanging around  to sneak glances at Richard Dawkins who was there signing copies of his latest book The God Delusion), I found this lovely book by Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, called Sharing a Shell.

I've bought Sharing a Shell in the hope it will help teach Beanie about sharing and friendship, since the book is a gentle parable (of sorts) about how we relate to other people, but now I'm wondering if we can learn that sort of thing from a book, whether in fact these are life lessons we have to figure out for ourselves. But I'm such a believer in books' abilities to have transformational effects on our lives I couldn't resist purchasing a copy.

Watching our sixteen-month-old children playing last week in a walled garden at an Edinburgh art gallery, and laughing kindly at my attempts to rein in Beanie's exuberant behaviour, a friend commented to me that children really learn mostly by example, while telling them what to do achieves little. When I look back at my own childhood, that's certainly true, and I think (though others may disagree) that children are acutely sensitive to parental hypocrisy (saying one thing, doing another). Oh dear, in that case I'd better behave myself then and set a good example to my daughter of sharing and friendship.

Still, I don't think Sharing a Shell will prove a bad purchase, if only because, as the cover rightly publicises, it has "Glitter on every page". Now only rarely, very rarely, can that be a bad thing, and Beanie absolutely loves it. Indeed she was so enthralled with her new acquisition yesterday afternoon that she spent about ten uninterrupted minutes fingering the glitter with rapt attention, pausing only to scream at me in indignation when the book fell out of her buggy. 

Posted 20 August 2007 11:18

Daughter Etiquette Friends Books Edinburgh Festival Out and about

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