What to Expect The First Year [antikvár]

A Word From the Doctor A new baby is fiin and exciting, but anxiety provoking, too. At the outset, the responsibilities of new parenthood loom awesomely large. But that natural insecurity and concern are manageable with reassuring advice, down-to-earth information, and an occasional good night's sleep. What to Expect First Year guarantees two out of three, and as such is a welcome extension of my role as counsellor to parents with a new baby. I'm impressed with the authors' medical accuracy, and with the sensible way it's translated into useful mother-to-mother advice. Anticipatory guidance - on feeding, colic, crawling, safety, and day-to-day crisis control - is the heart of paediatrics. During pregnancy, you probably found the reasur-ance and easily accessed answers you needed in What to Expect When You're Expecting. This book picks up w4iere that one left ofiF, telling you what you need to know -wiien you need to know it: as baby grows, one month at a time. Paediatrics has changed dramatically since I began practising and teaching it at Albert Einstein Medical Center 25 years ago. Not just in hi-tech diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. The new mothers and fathers I see today are more advanced, too - more challenging, better informed, more searching and sophisticated in their questions. For them, this lively, comprehensive and well-organized book is just what the paediatrician ordered. I was pleased ^^^en the American Academy of Pediatrics asked me as an AAP national media spokesman to review the manuscript. One of its three authors is a grandmother, and today's paediatrician, too, assumes that role. Sohdng a rare diagnostic dilemma may be the paediatric challenge we enjoy most. But in practice, the day-to-day essence of our work is surrogate grandpar-enting. With the old extended family vimially dismantled, grandmothers are jogging, sculpting, golfing, travelling and starting new careers. For the anticipatory guidance grandma once dispensed, parents now turn to their paediatricians. That kind of guidance is so indispensable that in 1988, on a trip to China to evaluate paediatric practices, I was astonished at its absence. When I commented to my host paediatricians, 'I notice you don't give any advice on child development or mothers' everyday problems,' they looked at me oddly. 'That's true,' said the senior physician, 'We're too busy.' It wasn't until I was invited to his home for lunch and two sets of grandparents descended from their rooms to join us for tea that I understood. 'There's our answer,' I exclaimed to my wife. 'Chinese parents don't need paediatricians for advice on feeding and toilet training. They've got live-in grandmothers.' The advice in What to Expect the First Year, I'm happy to say, is a lot more up-to-date, informative, and authoritative than grandma 's. I've never seen a popular paediatrics book as strong on diet and nutrition. The recommendations of AAP committees on nutrition and early childhood - with the new concerns about cholesterol, obesity and fitness - receive excellent support on these pages. The information on 'What Your Baby Should Be Doing This Month' should be wonderfully helpful. And the guidance on the three major parent-child combat zones (sleeping, feeding and stool-gazing) deserves the thorough, well-balanced treatment it receives - more attention than many busy paediatricians can manage to give. In short, I'm deUghted that so thorough and useful a book - one which I suspect will be to parents of the 80s and 90s vAm Spöck was to those of the 50s and 60s - has been published at last How glad? I plan to hand a