“There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more” goes The ... ing
The New Contented Little Baby Book (Vermilion, 2002) when my son was a ...
Bookworm
Alex Bollen discusses baby books
Katherine Slee reviews...
The Philosophical Baby: what children’s minds tell us about truth, love and the meaning of life by Alison Gopnik (Bodley Head) £14.99
“There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more” goes The Smiths song, and I’ve always thought Morrissey had a point. And so, since becoming a parent, I have read more childrearing books than is probably good for me. What follows are some entirely subjective comments on a few of them.
Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more and experience more than we could ever have imagined. This is not another parenting manual and does not pretend to give tips and ideas on how to raise your children. Rather, it looks at babies and children from a different perspective, examining their behaviour and how they learn. Each chapter explains different parts of the child psyche, using examples of scientific experiments to back-up or disprove theories from Plato to Freud. Gopnik covers everything from how babies have an inherent understanding of statistics and probability, which are used to learn language at a basic level, to the most intriguing and worrying aspect of parenthood – how much of a child’s future is based on genetics and how much on environment?
Before giving birth, I had decided I wasn’t a Gina Ford type. This was mainly because I had watched one of my school friends sob throughout my hen weekend because her baby wouldn’t sleep at the times Gina said he should. I tried reading The New Contented Little Baby Book (Vermilion, 2002) when my son was a couple of weeks old and I was sleep deprived and befuddled. I could barely get to the bottom of each page, let alone contemplate implementing Gina’s detailed regime. And I couldn’t help feeling that underpinning her approach is a sense that babies are cunning, impish creatures on the lookout for any opportunity to bring mayhem into their parents’ lives. Having said that, I did find myself sneaking a look at the book on a couple of occasions for a bit of guidance, for instance when my son was going from three to two daytime naps. He was a ‘textbook’ baby, settling into a rhythm of feeding every three hours in the day (even though I was feeding on demand) and sleeping at regular times. My daughter, on the other hand, has much more unpredictable patterns of feeding and sleeping. If I had tried to get her into a Gina routine, I’m sure this would have led to misery all round. In conclusion, I think Gina probably works best for parents who like meticulous routines and have a baby who naturally obliges. In the early days with my son, I found Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer (Vermilion, 2001) gentler and more attainable. Hogg describes her approach as a “sensible and practical middle ground” between strict regimes and having no structure at all. She advocates learning to understand a baby’s cues while getting him into a regular routine of eating, activity and then sleeping. It’s mostly common sense, but as a clueless first time parent it helped me get to grips with some of the basics. However by far the most useful – and inspirational – book I read when my son was tiny was Naomi Stadlen’s What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing (Piatkus, 2004). I read this when I was at a very low ebb, struggling to cope with a colicky baby and breastfeeding problems. On top of that, I had just finished reading Sue Gerhardt’s book Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes A Baby’s Brain (Routledge, 2004). This is a fascinating look at how children’s brains develop but its emphasis on the importance of parental love somehow left me feeling like an inadequate mother. I would only advise reading this when you are feeling robust (and not when you are contemplating sending your child to nursery either).
Parenthood
Parenthood
Instructions not included
Going back to Stadlen’s book, this draws upon her many years of work with new mothers, including running regular discussion groups. It covers a range of emotional and practical issues such as the shock of adjusting to life with a new baby, difficulties in getting anything done with a newborn, what babies need and relations with your partner. Throughout the book, different mothers describe how they have grappled with all these issues. Having felt despondent about how I was doing as a mother, reading about the experiences of other mothers made me realise that I was doing just fine. The book helped me become more confident in my ability to be a good mother to my son. Finally, I was beside myself with excitement when I discovered that a history of baby manuals exists. I read Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford (Frances Lincoln, 2007) during long winter evenings breastfeeding my newborn daughter. It’s a fascinating read, charting the changes in fashions in childrearing advice from the eighteenth century to the present day – and how the pendulum has swung back and forth between strict regimes and unstructured baby-led approaches. I’ll leave Hardyment to have the final word on baby books: “None of the manual writers are omniscient authorities, and none of them have met your baby...Manuals need to be kept in their place: tools, not tyrants, a helpful indication of the varied options that face us, not holy writ.”
The chapter on love is both insightful and guilt-inducing from a parent’s perspective. The argument is that the most basic form of love is based on care-giving; babies learn to love those who care for them and take this understanding into all future relationships. This made me appreciate even further how my emotions and actions are affecting those of my son both now and in years to come. I particularly enjoyed how she emphasised the importance of role play and imagination in learning about both physical and psychological causation. Gopnik argues that children understand the difference between ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ and that play should be encouraged, for wasn’t everything in the modern world once only an idea? Understanding your child is something that every parent aspires to. The first few years can be both magical and frustrating as a child learns to communicate with its parents and the larger world. Gopnik’s book gives an alternative insight into the development of babies into children and then adults and how their way of looking at the world is both unique and beautiful.
Super Daisy and the Peril of Planet Pea by Kes Gray and Nick Sharratt (Red Fox) £6.99 In this book from the Daisy series, Daisy has to stop Planet Pea from colliding with Planet Earth, or else there will be peas with everything! As a newcomer to the Daisy series, it wasn’t clear whether Daisy was always a superhero in each book – it felt a little disjointed as there was no introduction to Daisy or her friends. That being said, the story was simple to follow and the illustrations were bold and vibrant, with flaps that older children could explore. My three year old reviewer liked the story, but her mum wasn’t convinced it would be a book that she would read more than once or twice.
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (Virago Press) £7.99 This debut novel is for a large part the description of Ginny and her sister, Vivien, and of the psychological relationship between them. After an absence of 50 years, Vivien decides to return to the parental mansion, which Ginny has never left. Ginny is a reclusive lepidopterist who has spent the large part of her life avoiding interaction with people. The story is told through her eyes; memories of her childhood interwoven with specificities of moth science and the detailed record of her routines, ticks and habits. Whilst this appealed to my inner geek, the moth minutiae could be seen as laborious. I was left a little frustrated at the end of the book, because whilst much is alluded to, not all of the family secrets are fully explained, seemingly at odds with the precise narrative. That being said, it is easy to see why the book was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Prize. Two sisters, one house and a past plagued by lies and uncertainty. Never trust a narrator, never underestimate the true power of love between family members, but be prepared to be shocked by what motivates their actions.
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