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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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32% Off Discounts: Lowest Price What to Expect the First Year Review

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What to Expect the First Year Review

I absolutely hated What to Expect When You're Expecting. Hated it. So when a friend gave me this book as a gift when I was pregnant, I kind of put it to the side, never expecting to use it.
Well, I surprised myself. I actually refer to this book a lot in caring for my now almost-6-month-old son.
What I like about the book is that the questions that it addresses are very much like real-life questions people ask about their babies. Some of the questions are word-for-word questions my husband and I have asked each other. That makes the information very accessible and I think, reassuring. You get a sense that "Oh good, my five-month-old is not the only one in the world who seems to be coughing just to get my attention."
There's a really comprehensive amount of information about nearly every parenting topic you can think of. In particular, the section about infant illness is invaluable. Great charts of symptoms and treatments for those symptoms, explanations about how to do home treatments, etc. My son has gotten a couple of colds, one of which brought on a croupy cough, and the book's advice about steam treatments and a quick trip outside helping were right-on, and exactly what my mom and grandma had told me worked to help croup. Without the book's specific description of what croup and stridor sound like, and how to treat it, I probably would have ended up in the emergency room with my son.
That being said, here are the things I don't like about this book.
- The information is supposedly unbiased, but the author comes down firmly on the pro or con side of an issue and there's not a lot of doubt about what the author feels you "should" or "should not" do. The author is against pacifiers, against co-sleeping, is much too cautionary about babywearing, and advocates CIO as a way to get a baby to sleep - there's a whole section about how to do CIO in the six-month chapter. The book is also very, VERY pro-breastfeeding. I breastfeed, so it didn't "bother" me, per se, but if a mom has to or chooses to formula feed, the constant references to breastfeeding and questions about breastfeeding that are found over and over and OVER in the book's pages would probably be a big turnoff. There's some lip service paid to "well, formula feeding is an OK choice" but there's a VERY clear and VERY strong message that you should breastfeed until your child is a year old, period. I know a lot of women who tried valiantly to breastfeed and just could not, and I have had my own challenges with it. I am all for breastfeeding advocacy and I consider myself an advocate for breastfeeding, but the tone and the repeated admonishments to breastfeed for a year were over-the-top even for me.
- The aforementioned section about CIO was pretty terrible. There were no discussions about ways to avoid CIO other than extended family bedsharing (which the author was lukewarm about recommending, at best), and there is a middle ground between the two. There was also no discussion about the fact that CIO doesn't work for all children - some kids are crying escalators, they don't calm down after crying for an extended period but instead get more upset, and trying CIO with a baby like that is going to be traumatizing for all involved. There's a pretty terrifying section that talks about how to deal with the noise of CIO, by notifying your neighbors, trying to muffle sound, etc. I just have to say, if your baby is crying that loud, that piercingly, and that long when you try CIO, you should consider the possibility that CIO is not working and is actually scaring or harming your child. CIO is a great tool for some kids, but not for all kids, and the book treats CIO like it is the cure-all for sleep problems. You get a sense, reading that section, that there really is no alternative to CIO other than having your baby sleep with you until they're 10, and there are other options (the No Cry Sleep Solution has some great suggestions about the sleep issue). There's also no discussion of the idea that nightwaking, especially for breastfed babies, is a developmentally normal and appropriate thing and will get better with time even without resorting to sleep training measures.
- The developmental milestones are treated as gospel truth and there is some alarmist information about "if your kid doesn't do X by Y month there could be a BIG PROBLEM." There's no discussion about what developmental milestones really mean in terms of development or the idea that babies can have developmental strengths in one area and weaknesses in another. My baby has always been WAY ahead in his gross motor development and lagging in his fine motor, which is a totally normal thing. But there's really no allowance for that, or explanation for why that would happen, in this book.
Overall I think this book is good and I don't think it's nearly as guilt- or panic-inducing as the Expecting book, or the Sears Baby Book (which is a whole other review). I think it's a worthwhile addition to the library of any new parent, if you can take some of the information in it with a grain of salt.

What to Expect the First Year Overview

Everything new parents need to know about the care (and feeding) of an infant, from the authors of What to Expect® When You're Expecting. Covers monthly growth and development, feeding for every age and stage, sleep strategies that really work. Filled with the most practical tips (how to give a bath, decode your baby's crying, what to buy for baby, and when to return to work) and the most up-to-date medical advice (the latest on vaccines, vitamins, illnesses, SIDS, safety, and more). Reassuring Answers to Hundreds of Questions, including:
What's the best kind of car seat for my newborn?
How do I know if my baby's getting enough to eat?
How can I tell if my baby is really sick? When should I call the doctor?
Should I sign my baby up for classes?
Should I be worried that my baby isn't crawling yet?
How do I cope with my colicky baby?
The only book on infant care to address the physical as well as the emotional needs of the entire family.

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