Let’s Behave Ourselves – Talking to My Son

Orly Castel-Bloom`s book takes the form of a dialogue between mother and son, an innovation in the field of literature for the very young. Its target audience is very young children who are just beginning to learn about the world around them and to experiment with various problems; but it also has an implicit audience – adults, mainly mothers, who read to their child at bedtime. For them, this charming, simple book may also be a source of wisdom. For here, the division of roles betweenmother and child, teacher and pupil is blurred, and the child insists on his right to make his own truth heard, because it is not inferior to the truth of the adult. Who knows more? – this is the question being re-examined here.

Thus the dialogues shed light on two independent worlds as well as on the relationship between mother and son. The latter is made up of ordinary and routine details familiar to every child and every mother: what`s for dinner, why is it wrong to throw your shoe at Mother, let`s count to 10, what did you learn at kindergarten today, etc. Each of these topics becomes the subject of a conversation which is actually a little story, full of imagination and humor.