Customer Reviews

Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? A Parent's Guide to Raising Multiracial Children

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a parent of multiracial children, I was delighted to find this book, which not only answered the questions I had, but gave me a wealth of information, strategies and tips that gives me confidence about the future of our family. While the statistics and psychological data are compelling, the most interesting facet of the book for me was the interviews with over 60 multiracial families. i would highly recommend this book to anyone concerned with the issues faced by multiracial children and their families and parents.

Thank goodness this isn't another academic tome dealing with racial tensions and ethnicity in the U.S. Finally, we have a book geared for parents that is intelligent, informed and useful. The scripts alone--Ms. Nakazawa's suggestions for what to say to children in response to (or in anticipation of) challenging situations--are worth the price of the book. I know of at least one school that is giving away free copies of this book to all the parents of multiracial and transracially adoptive children in their school. I hope, for the sake of our children, that more schools will get the word out about this book.

As the mother of 4 beautiful biracial children, I was delighted to find this intelligent, realistic book. My children are often asked "What are you?" and attempts are made to label them as Arabic, Latin, Greek,Black, Italian, etc, etc. This makes it difficult for them when they are at ages where all of us were trying to "find ourselves". My daughter has also had a difficult time, often meeting women who instantly dislike her based on her appearance alone. This book was refreshing and helped me to realize others go thru the same. I was amazed at the amount of research and fact finding this author included. The everyday anecdotes was also most truthful, speaking from personal experience. great find for anyone who knows, loves, interacts with those of more than 1 race!!

As a Multiracial teen this book helped me navigate the strange waters I found myself drowning in. It doesn't read like a unrealistic "turn that frown upside down" Dr. Seuss book; instead the subject is approached in a straight forward manner. This book contains IMO the most valid sense of what makes the difference between a healthy self identify and self hate/defensive racism (when you come to loathe/distance yourself from a group to protect yourself from further harm)in mixed race kids. All my friends now starting multi hued families that come to me for advice, receive this book as a gift. As I wish some kind soul would've done for my parents.

I strongly recommend this book to parents of multiracial children *especially if your child will garner a lot of (confusing/unwanted) attention based on their physical differences from their peers/ or physical comparison to their parents* You can't distract them with toys/games to keep them from processing incidents or procrastinate addressing the issue, forever. Children are more observant then we give them credit for and the questions that go unanswered speak volumes.

It's also a cathartic read for us mixed adults that had to figure it out on our own. It shed a lot of light on how I processed and internalized confusing/awkward events as a child and convinced me to let go of some of the child-like logic/hang ups still effecting me.

The only way to deal with some complications are to face them in the light of day for what they are. We do the best we have with the tools we have at the moment. Sometimes the quick fixes we use to cope, can become a larger problems in the future if we don't evolve our thinking and problem solving skills. This book prompted the catalyst that took me from tragic little mixed girl to the grounded multi ethnic woman I am today. Give the book a try, it'll be money and time well spent.

Being a member of a multi-ethnic family myself, I purchased this book to help teach some people in my life what it is like to grow up in such a family.
This book has been an excellent resource because it touches on the many topics involved including terminology, answering the "What are you? question, dating, etc...
The author of the book did alot of research including interviewing members of many different multi-racial and bi-racial families.
This book focuses on empowering members of multi-racial and bi-racial families to be proud of who they are and gives advice about how to handle in a positive light some of the negative situations they may encounter. The book particularly focuses on helping to raise multi-racial and bi-racial children who are happy, well adjusted, and have high self-esteem.
I highly recommend this book.

I've read all of the books that have been suggested by adoption professionals & adoptive families about how to support an interracially adopted child & I have never seen this book listed. I was given
"Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? A Parent's Guide To Raising Multiracial Children" by a friend who has multiracial birth children. The cover didn't lead me to think it would be a great source of information for us. Our youngest child is adopted from China. I've read a few other books on the topic of multiracial families & gleaned some useful information but most of the read was disjointed in application to our family. The book sat on my bedside table for awhile but one day I picked it up & couldn't put it down. I was marking pages, taking notes & was proufoundly grateful that this book exsisted. It is truly a great wealth of information about the experiences that children born and adopted interracially/multiracially experience with solid advice on how to support your child/ren throughout their childhood & into adulthood. This book should be a must read for parents of interracial/multiracial children--no matter if you choose to build your family through adoption, birth or both. I wish that the title or front cover would indicate that this book applies to both multiracial children & interracially ADOPTED children so that the adoption community would discover it on a greater scale and make it a must read. Until then I will do my part spreading the word about this amazing book. It is my favorite gift to give families that can benefit from its read.

I experienced extreme self-hate and lack of awareness as a multi-racial child in the 80's. I never really knew my father and I didn't "look black" so I got a lot of the "what are you" questions. I never knew how to reply because "multi-racial" was never heard of back then. I would just say "half and half". I intend on sharing this book with my children who are of multiple races in hopes they will be brought up with higher self-esteem than my own. We have come a long way.

Great book! I was pleased to find it because there seem to be so few books that discuss Asian/Caucasian multiracial issues as thoroughly as this one does. Most other books seem to concentrate on African American/Caucasian issues -- a worthy issue I'm sure, but not my life.

I loved her organization: she concentrated on specific times in the children's lives and how they perceive race at each time. My smart, beautiful, Japanese/Caucasan daughter is only three, but I get the "is she yours?" question way too frequently.

I'm sure I will be consulting this book for some time.

This is a good, fairly basic book on children dealing with issues of racial difference. Topics such as how and when children start understanding racial differences, how peers begin to react to racial differences in school and some basic strategies for parents are covered well. My one criticism is that the book is marketted for adoptive parents and yet its main focus is on the children of interracial couples. The author says - off-hand - at one point that the differences between these two situations are minor and beyond the scope of the book. That was a bit of a shock. I think the differences are probably vast. Parents of transracially adopted children don't have the basic resource of an adult partner from the child's background. That's an enormous enough of a difference that I really think the issues should be treated in separate books. My other reason for personal dissatisfaction is not the fault of the author. I am in the situation of adopting a minority child in a country where racism is still very overt and raw. I found the book's focus on Asian-Caucasian mixes unhelpful because, although there is some racism in American society, it is not nearly so intense, particularly when it comes to people of Asian background. If you are looking for a hard-ball book on dealing with intense racism, this probably isn't it. This is about dealing with run-of-the-mill basically well-intentioned ignorance, not open hostility.
-A.F.

Great read for parents of multicultural children. Biological and adopted families can learn a great deal about coping with being multicultural and grasping for an identity.