Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Happiest Toddler... Quick Review

Some books that were on my list have to go back to the library yesterday, so I am going through them today. I already wrote a bit about this first one, but here's my final word.

The Happiest Toddler on the Block
by Dr. Harvey Karp

No! NO NO NO! Dr. Karp, I hear that you are trying to write an accessible book about children for overworked parents, but I am not a toddler myself! Too many exclamation points and twee little pictures! Too many fallacies (homo erectus does not equal neanderthal)! Too obvious that you are writing mainly, if not only, to mothers, and those mothers are probably pretty well-off!

I read the first half and skimmed the second before I took it back to the library. In my case, the only possibly helpful bits were about sleep training, which basically spoke to some advice I got from my son's NICU team, and the bit about making praise specific (compliment the action, not the child). Granted, there may be other gems in the text, but I could not get beyond the writing style and simplistic design.

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