Books on Raising Children

There seem to be as many philo­sophies about how to bring up chil­dren suc­cess­fully as there are par­ents, which fact you tend not to dis­cov­er until you are a par­ent your­self. And then you have to hope that your philo­sophy is reas­on­ably con­gru­ent with that of the oth­er par­ent and/or care­givers in your child’s life. We’ve been lucky in this regard; there are always issues that need to be dis­cussed but Tim and I gen­er­ally have sim­il­ar views on child-rear­ing issues. Most of this we had to fig­ure out as we went along (for­tu­nately there are few things you do that are really crit­ic­al and can­’t be fixed later). I found a couple of books to be really use­ful in fig­ur­ing things out, so here’s a quick run-down on which and why.

There are a large num­ber of books on the sub­ject of rais­ing chil­dren, each with their own philo­sophy and assump­tions, so it’s inter­est­ing try­ing to fig­ure out the dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives they were writ­ten from. And the books all have to be writ­ten to allow for the old adage of “they’re all dif­fer­ent” (when you have two, you find out just how true that is). I’ve found with this second baby I’ve ten­ded not to read the books as avidly as I did with the first, prov­ing I guess the oth­er adage about first-time par­ents being tense and want­ing to do everything per­fectly, while more exper­i­enced par­ents relax more and settle for hav­ing things be done well enough. When you have two chil­dren, well enough really is good enough and that leaves you a little time to try to keep your own san­ity as well.

I found three books worth read­ing and hav­ing. First, Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child, which is divided into sec­tions accord­ing to the age of the child up until the age of five. The book’s philo­sophy is to be “be kind to and gentle with your baby”; there is lots of mater­i­al on the child’s point of view and how to inter­pret reac­tions and actions. As an added bonus, the pho­tos are great and our son loved look­ing at them when he was a toddler. 

Dr. Spock­’s Baby and Child Care is the clas­sic I turn to when I’m not sure about wheth­er the baby needs to go to the doc­tor for some­thing that looks minor but might not be, or for an issue affect­ing our sev­en-year-old who’s “out­grown” the oth­er book. The tone seems to me to be more mat­ter-of-fact although there’s also a lot of psy­cho­logy in the book; the dif­fer­ence is tone is prob­ably because of the issues deal­ing with older chil­dren and the emphas­is on bal­ance with­in the family.

And for boys from tod­dler age up, I recom­mend Steve Bid­dulph’s Rais­ing Boys. This is a quick read that has ideas on how to cope with the bio­lo­gic­al dif­fer­ences between boys and girls that affect how many boys behave once they’re past the tod­dler stage. I’ve recom­men­ded this to sev­er­al people and lots have told me they’ve found it use­ful with their sons. I’m going to get anoth­er one of his books out of the lib­rary to read to see wheth­er it has use­ful stuff to say about rais­ing a daughter.

There are lots of oth­er books I’ve read but would­n’t neces­sar­ily recom­mend for any­thing oth­er than get­ting out of the lib­rary, since I read them once and not again. Libby Purves’ How Not to Be a Per­fect Moth­er fits into this cat­egory; fun to read once but not a must-have for the par­ent­ing lib­rary. Edward Chris­toph­ersen’s Little People: Guidelines for Com­mon Sense Child Rear­ing was mostly good, though I dis­agreed with some parts of the book. I read it once, figured out the import­ant bits of the “catch them being good” mes­sage (which is use­ful) and haven’t read it again since. YMMV on any or all of these books of course (what was that about they’re all dif­fer­ent? So are the parents…)