Sensible techniques to combat bedwetting, to be used in conjunction with a trip to the pediatrician.
A friendly guide to helping kids achieve dry nights and happier mornings.
With more than 40 years’ experience as a physician, Robson (Stop Washing the Sheets, 2011) has worked with many children and parents to help them overcome the frustration of waking up with drenched sheets. This how-to can be read in an afternoon, and is divided into 10 succinct chapters, beginning with an explanation of why children wet the bed. The average age when parents seek his advice, writes Robson, is when a child is about 7 or 8, an age when bladder capacity is often lower than the norm. He says that this can often be improved with time and behavioral changes. Parents may be surprised to read, for example, that they should encourage kids to drink fluids in the evening; according to the author, good hydration promotes good bowel health, which is the first step toward improving bladder capacity and preventing bedwetting. A morning “poop time” is crucial, writes Robson: “You need to finesse the cooperation of your child to sit on the toilet for ten minutes (use a timer) after breakfast.” He also recommends “alarm therapy” for retraining the brain to recognize the signal to get up and urinate. Although some readers may balk at the idea of clipping an alarm to their child’s underwear at night, the author’s gentle tone makes the therapy seem less clinical; for instance, he playfully encourages parents to help kids learn to “Beat the Buzzer.” In lieu of excessive medical jargon, Robson’s down-to-earth language (including words such as “pee” and “poop”) makes for breezy reading. Parents will also relate to his analogies; for example, he likens the feeling of a child’s full bowel and cramped bladder to a mother’s constant urge to urinate during pregnancy. This slim edition is also an insightful eye-opener, as it refutes several myths, including the idea that bedwetting is a psychological problem. The book concludes with a brief appendix featuring a few easy-to-interpret tables, including one detailing the fiber content of common foods.
Sensible techniques to combat bedwetting, to be used in conjunction with a trip to the pediatrician.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-8245-8
Page Count: 120
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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