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Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 5th Edition: Birth to Age 5 (Shelov, Caring for your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5) Review
With so much information on children's health to be found on the Internet, and many other books giving advice on child-rearing, is this reference book worth buying? The answer is yes! Consider the following four upsides of this "Complete and Authoritative Guide... New and Revised Fifth Edition" (per the front cover):1. IT'S TRUSTWORTHY. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which according to its Web site represents 60,000 pediatricians, publishes it. Over 100 pediatricians (and 4 dentists) contributed to the book. The information is sound and up-to-date as of 2009. The opinions expressed are "mainstream" (not "fringe"), which is reassuring since child-rearing is stressful.
2. IT'S WIDE-RANGING (and some may go farther in describing it as "complete" or "comprehensive"). Although no book can be all things to all people, it contains important information on many common health and behavior problems, and it gives advice on when problems might be so serious that you should bring the child to a doctor.
3. IT'S RELATIVELY EASY TO READ AND USE. The authors write clearly and concisely. Although some jargon is present (e.g., "flat angiomata"), that is held to a minimum. The organization into Part 1 (pages 1-506, covering normal development and needs chronologically from birth to age 5*) and Part 2 (pages 507-848, covering specific health issues from "Abdominal/Gastrointestinal Tract" to "Emergencies" to "Your Child's Sleep") is logical. You'll find the index quite useful for locating info (but see "B" below). Numerous drawings and text boxes complement the body of the text.
4. IT'S IMPROVED FROM THE FOURTH (2004) EDITION, with 145 more pages. Some of the less useful parts of the old edition have been scrapped**, and this edition has a lot of revised or new material***. The text is more pleasant to read than before because there is more space between the lines, and the illustrations are better coordinated with the text.
OK, now for five (minor) downsides, which I'll phrase in the form of a wish list.
A. I WISH THAT THE BOOK HAD ITS OWN WEB SITE for updates, corrections, etc., along the lines of the sites for Baby Bargains, 8th Edition: Secrets to Saving 20% to 50% on Baby Furniture, Gear, Clothes, Toys, Maternity Wear and Much, Much More! or AAP's own Red Book: 2009 Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases (Red Book Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases).
B. I WISH THAT IT COULD BE SEARCHED ELECTRONICALLY (even though the index is generally very useful). Example 1: Let's say I was interested in complementary and alternative medicine, folk remedies, and the like. There's no index entry relevant to these - you have to manually find the box on "natural" therapies on page 619. Example 2: If you want info on mercury in fish, the index doesn't have "mercury" or "fish" as main entries; you have to go to "food," then "fish warning." An electronic index would prevent problems like these. [NOTE ADDED AFTER WRITING THIS REVIEW: Maybe I missed it the first time around, but Amazon's "Click to Look Inside" allows you to search individual words in the book. Thanks, Amazon!]
C. I WISH THAT THE AAP HAD KEPT ITS PUBLIC POLICY OPINIONS OUT OF THE BOOK. We learn that the AAP supports "legislation that would prohibit smoking in public places" (page 9), "gun-control legislation" (page 470), "legislative efforts to improve the quality of children's [television] programming" (page 579), etc. The AAP's Web site, not a book on parenting, is the right place for political statements such as those.
D. I WISH THAT SOME OF THE STATEMENTS HAD BEEN LESS BLACK-OR-WHITE. Example: Page 786 claims that heart murmurs "become a concern" when "they occur very early at birth" because they "are not functional or innocent" (with "not" italicized). But studies such as "Prevalence And Clinical Significance Of Cardiac Murmurs In Neonates" and "Can Cardiologists Distinguish Innocent From Pathologic Murmurs In Neonates?" find that perhaps only half of heart murmurs in newborns are actually problematic. So a better wording would have been "...MAY NOT BE functional or innocent."
E. I WISH THAT IT HAD PHOTOGRAPHS. For example, photos would be worth a thousand words for the skin rashes, birthmarks, and such mentioned on pages 127-128 and 813-836.
Purchase this very nice book from Amazon.com!
* In Part 1, the topics within each chapter from "5. Your Baby's First Days" to "13. Your Four- to Five-Year-Old" may include "Growth and Development" (e.g., movement, language, cognitive, social, emotional); "Basic Care" like feeding and sleeping; "Behavior"; "Health Watch" or "Visit to the Pediatrician"; "Immunization Update"; and "Safety Check."
** Among the material deleted from the old edition are some drawings (e.g., how to use a cloth diaper, hormones in the milk let-down process, crib gym and mobile), some data graphics (e.g., table of sugar content of juices, pie chart of causes of developmental disabilities), and some text (e.g., on vegetables with nitrates, "smaller extended families," "working mothers," and "stay-at-home fathers").
*** Some selected specific improvements: (i) Information on weaning from breast to bottle has been moved from the chapter on 4-7 months to the chapter on 8-12 months. (ii) "The Second Year" chapter in the old edition has been retitled to the less confusing "Your One-Year Old." (iii) The "Age Three to Five Years" chapter has been split into separate chapters for 3-year-olds and for 4- to 5-year-olds. (iv) Part 2 has been reorganized more-or-less alphabetically with new chapters 17 on allergies and 34 on sleep. (v) There is new or substantially revised text on psychological resilience (pages xxxiii-xxxvi), Tdap and other vaccines (7 & 793-800), toxoplasmosis (8), tests during pregnancy (10-13), delivery (13-6 and 36-8), probiotics (118 & 523), vitamin D (169), autism spectrum disorders (336-7 & 622-7), school transportation safety (450-1), E. coli (524-5), sickle cell (635-7), BPA (702), well water (703), and MRSA (825). (vi) The new Appendices on pages 850-866 collect together schedules, growth charts, and so forth that were scattered throughout the old edition.
Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 5th Edition: Birth to Age 5 (Shelov, Caring for your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5) Overview
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