Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics

Description

Your baby isn't trying to make bedtime impossible. Your toddler didn't suddenly decide vegetables are the enemy.

There may be a reason for all of it.

Parenthood comes with an astonishing amount of advice—how your child should sleep, when they should eat, which behaviors to encourage, and which ones to correct.
The trouble is, the advice often conflicts. And when you've tried the “right” approach and your child still isn't cooperating, it's easy to wonder what you're doing wrong.

Bringing Up Baby isn't another parenting system to master.

It's a way to understand why so much of what children do, actually makes sense—even when it doesn't feel that way in the moment.

Pediatrician and anthropologist Paul W. Turke, MD, PhD, looks at everyday parenting questions through the lens of evolutionary biology, exploring why children develop and behave as they do—and how our evolutionary history can put today's parenting challenges into context.

“Practical advice…evolutionary explanations, with dozens of vivid examples and engaging reminiscences enlivened by good humor.” —Randolph Nesse, MD

Among the questions you'll explore:

• Why might a baby who refuses to be put down be behaving exactly as a human baby should?
• How did medical advice about introducing common food allergens change so dramatically—and what can that history teach us?
• Could pain, fever, and swelling sometimes be doing something useful rather than simply giving us symptoms to eliminate?
• Why can children handle some foods better than their grandparents?
• What could teenage angst, the extraordinary helplessness of human babies, and our unusually long lifespans possibly have to do with one another?

With doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology, a deep background in evolutionary biology, and decades spent caring for children, Turke brings an unusual perspective to these questions.

But this isn't a medical textbook or an argument that “natural” is always better.

“A fascinating, beautifully written book…for everyone interested in human nature, evolution, medicine, or childhood.” —Bernard Crespi, PhD

The goal isn't to win at parenting. It's to understand more of what you're seeing.

That won't make every sleepless night, rejected meal, illness, or difficult stage easy. But when the chaos makes a little more sense, you can spend less time wondering what you're doing wrong—and realize that a lot of what feels messy, frustrating, or uniquely difficult is simply part of raising a developing human being.