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DEAR DR. SALK: Answers to Your Questions About Your Family by Lee Salk

DEAR DR. SALK: Answers to Your Questions About Your Family

By

Pub Date: March 28th, 1979
Publisher: Harper & Row

In the past ten years, Salk has written coherently and persuasively about parenting, most recently about parenting during and after divorce. Here, however, his focus is more diffuse, which substantially lessens his effectiveness. A TV correspondent and magazine columnist, he seems to have taken the questions sent to him and answered them in random order. The answers, as always, are sound and well-presented, but the question-and-answer format is unfortunate. Although common problems do get coverage--nightmares and daydreamers, allowances and sibling warfare, toddler aggressiveness and teenage rebellion--the almost random sequence is shortsighted: even arranging the questions according to general themes would be preferable. True, many of the teenage problems are grouped together, but others are scattered throughout, and too many are similar. Moreover, the successions are often strange: Explaining Reproduction and Sex follows Breast Feeding and Weaning, Bedtime Hours follows Talking to Strangers, The Intellectually Curious Toddler follows Vacations away from Your Child. Salk does know the scene, from the child who saves his bathroom humor for company to the teenager who hides his marijuana stash in the garden, but expecting parents to struggle with an index is asking too much, especially when Salk himself knows better.