Your One Year Old: The Fun-Loving, Fussy 12-to-24-Month Old Book

I started reading this book when Louisa was in the midst of a particularly demanding period that involved lots of frustrated grunting at us and the occasional tantrum. At first it provided great insight and perspective on what can be expected from a one year old developmentally, and how to deal with them. I particularly liked the explanation of how children go through alternating periods of emotional equilibrium and disequilibrium, largely attributable to developmental changes they are dealing with. Then towards the end, this book got pretty weird. It places heavy emphasis on the validity of Constitutional Psychology, a way of classifying personalities based on the belief that we behave as we do largely because of the way our bodies are built. The author suggests that you can predict how your child is going to behave in life based on whether their bodies are "round and soft", "hard and square", or "linear, fragile, and delicate". Really?

I attribute the weird aspects of this book to the fact that it was written in the early 80s. A section called "Stories from Real Life" was particularly revealing of the era in which it was written. The author publishes letters she's gotten from parents and her responses to them. I was really looking forward to that part of the book, hoping for humorous stories I could relate to as a parent. Not much humor, but rather a ridiculous amount of parental references to smacking their children, largely from desperate sounding young mothers. And the responses were often judgmental and snarky.

This book is valuable for the timeless insights it provides, and somewhat entertaining in an anthropological sort of way for the 80s era pop psychology and parental angst.