Common-sense and practical advice on raising young children by an expert in the field.
The Supernanny delivers a guidebook to aid parents with rambunctious toddlers.
With more than two decades of experience as a London nanny, Frost (Jo Frost’s Confident Baby Care, 2008, etc.) has seen just about every kind of behavioral issue a young child can produce and has developed certain strategies that effectively nip bad behavior in the bud. She offers parents of preschoolers and older children five basic guidelines to follow to ensure a child grows "into a happy, healthy, productive adult with good morals, healthy boundaries, and the ability to function well in the world." By meeting the physical, nutritional and sleep needs of a child, as well as providing an environment that encourages brain development and setting clear rules for family behavior, parents can eliminate most, if not all, potential problems. Using a method called SOS, Frost recommends a parent Step back from the situation at hand, Observe what is happening, and then Step in and administer the appropriate resolution. Using clear-cut examples that are common issues with young children, the author provides parents with ready-made solutions that have proven effective, eliminating the need to second-guess a decision. She covers sleeping problems (getting a child to sleep in his own bed or what to do when he cries in the night), food and eating issues (refusing to eat certain foods, establishing good table manners, going out in public with toddlers), the need for safety and interacting with other children. She also suggests activities to stimulate gross and fine motor skills and recommends basic good behavior rules that are the accepted norms for human interaction. A full chapter devoted to handling temper tantrums is an added bonus for parents in crisis mode.
Common-sense and practical advice on raising young children by an expert in the field.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-54238-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
A radical reassessment of the current policy of keeping families intact, even when doing so means risking the continuing abuse of children in a family, must be changed. Sociologist Gelles (Univ. of Rhode Island; Intimate Violence, 1988) is a longtime student of family violence and was an advocate of the federally mandated policy for social welfare agencies to make all ``reasonable efforts'' to preserve troubled families, even where there was a history of child abuse and unrepentant parents. He has changed his mind, as have many other child and family advocates in the wake of a recent spate of deaths of children in families having a record of abuse. Framed around the case of pseudonymous David Edwards, a 15-month-old suffocated by his mother, Gelles's analysis accuses the system of failing in part because of the vagueness of the mandate ``reasonable efforts.'' Because both federal and private funds were tied to family reunification and because the goal is laudable, efforts to reunite children with birth parents were not always compatible with what should have been the overriding objective—safety for the children. Gelles blames the confusion of aims, overreporting of suspected abuse, poorly trained and overburdened workers, and an inadequate understanding of risk factors. In a dramatic reconsideration of the tools needed to protect children at risk, he recommends eliminating mandatory reporting (by doctors, schools, and social workers), focusing only on the most serious cases, taking the responsibility for investigations away from social services, and, of course, improving the training of caseworkers. He even mentions the ``O'' word—orphanages (or ``group homes'')—as a viable alternative in some cases. An essay pushed to book length, but a meaty and provocative appeal to put the safety of children ahead of established social policy. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-05395-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
Gilligan (Center for the Study of Violence/Harvard Medical School) zeroes in on the pitch-black emptiness within America's murderers before inexplicably letting his target move out of focus. To stem the contagion of violence, Gilligan believes, America needs to understand both its root causes and the social pathogens that spread it. He points to civilization's patriarchal structure, which entails a code of honor that imposes a crippling burden of shame. When the author confines himself to the murderers he met in the ``underworld,'' or maximum-security prisons (he served as head of mental-health services for the Massachusetts prison system), Gilligan's theories gain strength. For instance, he notes that, despite more shelters for battered women, the proportion of domestic-violence deaths has doubled, because their murderers ``are precisely the men who experience a life-death dependency on their wives and an overwhelming shame because of it.'' He castigates the death penalty not just as cruel but as ineffective, since it feeds a killer's desire for punishment. Moreover, one of his prescriptions—eliminating the illiteracy that fosters many criminals' sense of shame—is practical. However, the effects of Gilligan's subtle studies of killers are lost when he applies his lessons on a broader scale to an America that he says imposes ``structural violence'' on the disadvantaged. Gilligan's call to reform America's socioeconomic structure is less a prescription than a fantasy, and he downplays the fact that most of the lower class never becomes part of the criminal class. This critique has more than a share of the politically correct, as when the author notes that no other nation or culture ``has inflicted more collective violence on its victims than white (or European) Americans have inflicted on both native Americans and African- Americans over the past five centuries.'' A deeply compassionate survey of America's contemporary Desolation Row—but more than one reader will be wishing for a little more tough love. (First serial to Atlantic Monthly)
Pub Date: April 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-13979-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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