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For the bookshelf: Patrick’s Home Run

Patrick’s Home Run

By Elizabeth McCarthy

Tate Publishing, 2010

 

War has many victims. But one group of people affected by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t fend for themselves, and Elizabeth McCarthy is determined to do something about it. “When a parent is deployed, children don’t fully understand the concept of war and what’s going on overseas, but they do pick up on the news and in their classrooms that it’s a dangerous place and soldiers are being killed. One of their unspoken fears is that their parents are not coming back,” says McCarthy, who graduated from DU’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology in 1995. So, she wrote a book to help kids articulate their anxieties. Patrick’s Home Run tells the story of a boy whose mother is going away and teaches kids a trick to help manage their emotions. “It involves the non-deployed parent taking the child out for a special day of fun and relaxing activities, and then sharing with the child this special technique. By the end of the day, the child is primed to be open with the parent,” says McCarthy, now an expert on deployment stress for the Department of Defense. McCarthy is donating all of her profits from Patrick’s Home Run to the USO.

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