TAKING CARE OF YOUR CHILD: A Parents' Guide to Medical Care

Following the format of Take Care of Yourself (1976), a concise guide to the pains, scrapes, and red spots of childhood. After a general characterization of physical and social development and recommended home health policies (including car seats), the complaints of childhood are introduced in highly accessible terms. Decision charts help parents look for constellations of symptoms in determining the course of treatment--whether to wait it out, apply home remedies, or call the doctor. Problems considered range from everyday cuts and bruises through the more familiar diseases to those behaviors that hover somewhere between medicine and psychology (school resistance, tantrums, lethargy), and fine distinctions are stipulated. For example, bedwetting is recognized as a physical problem with social significance; therefore, muscle control drugs and behavior modification devices are discouraged as ""narrow approaches to a complex phenomenon."" In addition, parental responses are anticipated and defused (""Lice and bedbugs are found in the best of families"") and a generous supply of reassurance and good sense pervades the text: time ""is the most important medicine. . . the only known cure for the common cold, as well as most of the other problems of everyday life."" A clean bill of health for this fundamental reference.