Baby Books

Here are my favorite books for new parents. Or any parents!

1. Miss Manner's Guide to Rearing Perfect Children, by Judith Martin

Amazingly, there are some child-rearing questions that actually have right answers! This book will tell you what they are! You will go forth confident that you know what is right and what to do. And you will love her writing. Love!

Miss Manners is the best.

2. Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek et al.

This book saved me from being a flash-card mom.

It made me into a play-oriented mom and suggested what kinds of play are most worthwhile by explaining how children really learn. In short, children learn by doing and experiencing. It doesn't matter if a preschooler can look at a picture of a sphere and say "sphere," for example. It is important that a child discovers that a ball will roll down her driveway when she drops it. And that she can hypothesize that an orange will also roll down the driveway, which thing she can then test.

This book also presents all kinds of developmental milestones that do not appear anywhere else. For example, when a child can add one more to a series he has already counted by just saying the next number instead of re-counted the entire set.

It also informed many of my opinions on education.

3. Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Mark Weissbluth

One of the best things about being a first-time mom is that you can schedule your life around naptime without having to balance other children's needs. But when is naptime? How do you know?

The thing I liked about this book is that it explained what kind of sleep I could expect developmentally from my baby. It made suggestions for the kind of sleep cycle typical in any given age so I knew what to look for and when to expect changes.

The best thing I learned in this book is that the more a baby sleeps, the better a baby sleeps.

I have never had a truly fussy baby, but he has another book on that topic. I have not read it.

4. Why Gender Matters, by Leonard Sax

There are a number of gender-differences books out there, and the funny thing is that they all insult each other. This one was very sensible, and it made me aware of behaviors and physiological traits that are typically different between boys and girls. It does not make broad "Boys always . . . " or "All girls . . . "claims. And it doesn't suggest you steer you girl in X direction just because she's a girl.

But it does explore differences between boys and girls in a way that has helped me parent two boys. If nothing else, it identified ways in which my boys were likely to be different from me and to experience the world differently. I could then watch for those differences instead of freak out about them. 

For example, did you know that boys have different ratios of rods and cones in their eyes than girls? It causes them to respond to colors differently. (Again, we are speaking broadly here, not of specific children.) This helped me not freak out when Victor was three and a half and could not identify a single color. Not one! Zeke, on the other hand, knew all of his colors (down to pink and tan and gray) by the time he was 18 months.