Kay’s Anatomy: A Complete (and Completely Disgusting) Guide to the Human Body

"What I love about Kay’s Anatomy is that it uses a lot of humour. It breaks the body down into its component parts, and explains the practical uses of what that piece of anatomy is meant to do. But it ties in funny stories, jokes and history – things that the Romans did, things that happened at different points in history – around the body. If you manage to inject any sort of humour and storytelling, then people can usually remember things better and it demystifies the subject. I have to talk to children about lots of personal things about their body. I have to get them to try to trust me so they will tell me what’s happening so that I can then try and understand what might be going wrong for them. Kay’s Anatomy gives children confidence. These books enable me to have a common language with the children I care for and it stops them feeling frightened to talk about pee and poo and the heart and your eyes and lungs. The images in it are really good as well, because they’re all almost comic, and the graphics are great. Any book that breaks down the fear factor for a hospital appointment is fantastic. I can understand why we have a tendency to want to protect our children. The leading cause of death in children younger than two years old is usually congenital problems. Between two and five, you get the introduction of injuries and cancers, especially brain tumours, and more infections. Between five and nine, you have the same thing: significant accidents, brain tumours and cancers, and still some infections. But then after the age of nine, the stark reality is that the most common cause of death in children is suicide. Between the age of nine and 13, most children go through puberty. So even though you can’t see it on the outside of their bodies, their hormones are increasing to more of an adult pubertal pattern. And those hormones affect not just your physical organs, in terms of growth; they also affect your brain. We need to talk about all these things with our children so that they’re far better prepared, so they can understand that if they’re suddenly in a rage with their mum it might be something that mum has done but it can often be to do with their emotional lability during puberty. Between nine and 13 is also when we get more of a conscious understanding of time. That’s often when grandparents or people that we love are really ill. It’s important that children understand about disease processes because they become consciously aware that one day granddad was there and the next minute he wasn’t, and why do I feel the way I feel? Well, grief is the loss of love and an expression of sadness at that loss. So, I do think it’s important that we discuss these things. As parents it can feel incredibly uncomfortable bringing up emotional wellbeing or sexual health in pre-teenage and teenage children, but it’s our duty to prepare children for the world around them. Often the best time to talk to a teenager about their health is when you’re walking along beside them, or in the car, at an idle time when there’s no agenda. If there’s been a death in the family or a relative that’s been ill, it’s really important to discuss grief, to be open about your own emotions related to grief or sadness, because children are very perceptive, they’re very good at understanding if the adult in their life is unhappy or unwell. Adam Kay’s book demystifies the body but what I also really like about it is that it discusses some of the emotional aspects that starts impacting on children at this age, when they are too young to fully understand what the impact is, but they know that something’s not right. They themselves will have been used to waking up every morning feeling really happy and they won’t suddenly understand why sometimes they’re in a mood or just really fed up. It’s important that children understand that emotion is normal. Human beings have a terrible habit of binary thinking: black or white, happy or sad, cool or uncool. Culturally, over the last decade or so, it’s always about maximal positivity, but it’s ok to talk about both negative and positive. Books like this one give children the words to understand. Yes, Kay’s Anatomy is wonderful at breaking down the barriers of awkwardness and enabling engagement. You know, the longest journey you will ever do is with your own body. The sooner children get into the habit of using sunscreen the better, and the sooner that they understand their feelings the better, because the person you will spend the most time with is yourself. I haven’t but my friend’s daughter’s listened to it. She loved it; she thought was wonderful."