The Yale Child Study Center Guide to Understanding Your Child: Healthy Development from Birth to Adolescence

This book will be very helpful in planning a course on child development with interested parents. Though I have a background in work with chilren, my knowledge base is mostly theoretical and I needed something that would help me address the everyday issues that parents of young children face and I am hoping that many of them will be willing to get the book as a reference for themselves.

This book is good if you want a book that doesn't tell you how to parent, but rather helps you understand your baby/child. With the information in this book, you can make your own educated decisions on how to parent. It's very straightforward and it's easy to use it as a reference if you have a specific question. If you're tired of books that tell you how you should be parenting but are interested rather in your child's development, this could be for you. It makes you think and is not a manual. For example, in the sleep section, it doesn't tell you what to do, but rather the implications of different methods of helping your kid sleep and why your kid might be having trouble or falling into certain patterns (like maybe it's just part of development). This book really respects the parent-child relationship.

The collaboration of Linda C. Mayes (Arnold Gesell Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center) and Donald J. Cohen (Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center), The Yale Child Study Center Guide To Understanding Your Child: Healthy Development From Birth To Adolescence is a superbly practical and "reader friendly" guide for parents which compiles the findings and discoveries of the Yale Child Study Center (an organization first founded in 1911) in order to assisting men and women in finding their own parenting style, achieve balance between family and work duties, and acquire ways to strengthen the ties the bind their family relationships and deal with difficult issues arising from new siblings, to school bullies, to divorce and death. The Yale Child Study Center Guide To Understanding Your Child is confidently recommended as being a wide-ranging, eminently readable reference packed with solid information for parents and caretakers of children everywhere.