cover image For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping Your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy, and Proud

For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping Your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy, and Proud

Suzanne M. Johnson, Elizabeth O'Connor. Guilford Publications, $16.95 (248pp) ISBN 978-1-57230-663-9

Authors Suzanne M. Johnson and Elizabeth O'Connor are experts on the challenges facing lesbian families: both developmental psychologists, they are coparenting two daughters. Their book For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping Your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy and Proud offers help on explaining lesbianism to children and explores what lesbian parents can do to help children explain their family situation to their peers. Johnson and O'Connor also explore the complexity of dealing with the attitudes of the outside world, including relatives, schools, and doctors or mental health specialists. There aren't many books addressing the needs of the ongoing lesbian baby boom, and the enthusiastic blurb from Lesl a Newman, author of the acclaimed Heather Has Two Mommies, should help focus well-deserved attention to this one. ( May 13)