small fry

Amusing bored small fry

What to do with bored small fry on a rainy afternoon, or keeping an active measles victim amused are just two questions which have bedevilled parents for quite a time.

It’s not so bad with two children; they can usually have a good argu ment, but one child with “nothing to do” can send a parent reaching for the picture rail.

Susan Dickinson, in her aptly named book Mothers’ Help, couples her mother’s experience with her writer’s imagination to bring help to the harassed. Covering many dif ferent twists on such gems as dress ing up, story time, making music, etc, the editor adds such hackle-raising tit-bits as co-operative cooking and caterpillar boxes.

The editor and her 11 writers have come up with a collection of things to do for children up to five which don’t simply say “tell them to do this . . but actually show how the child can be organised to keep him or her happy for hours.

I have tried several items on my own three-year-old son and the sight of him mixing pastry for jam tarts has to be seen to be believed , . .

Real Time is not a catalogue in the style of the Whole Earth Cata logue or similar publications dealing, as the title implies, more with ideas than available goods. Divided into five sections, Communications, Human Systems, Mind, Science and Technology and Trends, Real Time is well written and edited and features excellent illustrations. However, the publishers should know better than to try to “Perfect” bind the good quality offset paper, as one is con stantly reinserting pages which have come adrift due to this writing pad effect.

Excellent reading, a book one can pick up and put down at one’s leisure and always find something of interest.

John Collins.

(MOTHER’S HELP, edited by Susan Dickenson; Fontana Books; $A1.50.) (REAL TIME, edited by John Brockman and Ed Rosenfeld; Picador, Pan Books Ltd London; $A5.95.)