Reviews for Your Growing Child

The average rating for Your Growing Child based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-10 00:00:00 Miguel Firpi Given the choice of meeting Penelope Leach or another Brit, like JK Rowling, I'd choose Penelope. Great common sense advice for parents.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-28 00:00:00 Donald Fisher I really like this book. It emphasizes a very practical/flexible approach to parenting. The book also includes a lot of really interesting information on mental and emotional development of toddlers that I really appreciated. There are lots of supposedly-real anecdotes about supposedly-real parents dealing with toddler phobias and lost loveys and other issues, that are presented in a format that feels like those conversations that mothers get into with one another all of the time (e.g. My baby refuses to let me feed him with a spoon anymore. What do I do?). This makes the book feel reassuring and helpful, though it doesn't necessarily have clear-cut answers for everything. Most answers have some version of telling you that you should pick your battles carefully and allow yourself to be adaptable, which seems to me to be a more realistic way of parenting then always having mental lists of rules and schedules that are being strictly adhered to (Some of the books seem to want you to be the business-like CEO of you family, and leave out the possibility of staying in your pajamas till noon so that you can blow raspberries on your baby's belly and build block towers to knock down). One minor gripe-- lots of typos (at least in my edition). As a total snob, I sometimes had trouble giving the book a chance because I was distracted by the errors. (It was compiled by the "editors" of parenting magazine-- why weren't they doing their job?)