Can You Help Me?: A Guide for Parents Book

I *loved* this book, and I feel very thankful to be able to interview the author, Sam Apple, for my Maternity Ward blog next week! I'll share our conversation on Tuesday, February 7, at

"American Parent" features a mix of thoughtful memoir and well-researched journalism. In addition, it offers a lot of laugh-out-loud moments. Sam Apple is a very talented, engaging and witty writer.

Some of my favorite quotes:

"I don't think I could already have been in love, but I've since thought that we really only listen, in the deepest sense of listening, to the people we are in love with" (p. xi).

"Revenue from the sale of baby products has almost tripled since the mid-1990s, and the average American child now receives seventy new toys a year" (p. 3).

"But many of the strollers looked nothing like the strollers of my imagination … They had shiny metal frames and wheels so tall and thick that immigrants who spot them for the first time probably assume that American parents engage in competitive off-road baby racing" (p. 7).

"There are lots of things for a new father to panic about, and I was on top of all of them" (p. 19).

"In 1962, the publication of a book of names was still novel enough to warrant a brief article in The New York Times. Now more than twenty baby name books are published in a typical year" (p. 24).

"I still can't explain it, but perhaps more than any other parenting trend, our longing for unique names seems to speak to a larger shift in the American parental psyche. A few generations ago, American parents aspired for their children to fit in. Now we aspire for them to stand out" (p. 29).

"And when I thought I had AIDS'a surprisingly regular occurrence for someone in a monogamous relationship who had already tested negative'Jennifer would return the favor and tell me to get a grip" (p. 36).

"If Dick-Read and many of the other natural birth pioneers often got their science wrong, just as often they got the larger human story exactly right" (p. 101).