My Feelings and Me: Feelings: Experiencing Feelings

This volume, part of a series designed to teach interpersonal skills to preschoolers, has all the earmarks of an effort to put ideology into practice but lacks even a thin veneer of storybook subtlety; it is dogmatic and tin-eared. Named on the title page are four authors and four researchers/editors, all but one listing academic credentials. This committee has produced a relentlessly cheerful package aimed at teaching children to recognize emotions (""a rainbow of feelings''), resulting behavior and the rewards of expressing feelings. The situations are so generic as to elude any attempt at identification with the feelings they mean to portray. The language, ostensibly creating poetry by using meter and rhyme, reads poorly, as in the lines, ``My mom and dad felt as happy as could be/ That they had an itty-bitty babyME!'', where a reader is tempted to pronounce the dash. Punctuating the series of situations is a recurrent formula (``I felt mad. See my mad face!''), illustrated by Pollyanna-like drawings in which only the degree of curve of the mouth seems to indicate emotion. (2-5)