Great Expectations: Baby's First Year

Expectant mothers snapped up Great Expectations: Your All-in-One Resource for Pregnancy & Childbirth (135,000 copies sold), and reviewers praised it for its warm, reassuring voice of expertise. This is the logical follow-up, an innovative baby book that will guide and reassure new moms and dads through every nuance of the first 12 months of life with baby. Of course, it maintains all the design elements that are the signature of the Great Expectations series and have proven so appealing: innovative graphics; clear-cut, contemporary styling; and sensitive drawings of babies as they develop month-by-month. The text, too, continues that same friendly, supportive, parent-to-parent tone of the earlier book—but now with dads playing an integral role. Inside, there’s a plethora of information on the nuts and bolts of feeding, diaper changing, and immunizations, as well as cutting-edge research on baby intelligence and development, nutrition and medical care, and insights into the dynamics of the parenting process. Checklists, bulleted sidebars, and quick-reference tables speed up the process of finding needed information. Unique tables in the extensive medical reference section will present the gamut of symptoms, so parents will have help distinguishing between common baby ailments and more serious emergencies that may require immediate attention. Includes a foreword by Dr. Michael Crocetti, Assistant Professor and Director of Clinical Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and also an extended resource guide and parent’s dictionary.

The mother-daughter team who coauthored two other Great Expectations books open this outsized parenting manual with a chronology of what to expect—day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month—during baby's first year. They follow with a how-to section (feeding, diapering and other baby care issues), a shopping guide (analyzing features of strollers, cribs and car seats), a review of parental issues (mostly mom's physical and mental needs) and an A–Z of baby medical problems. This layout breeds a lot of overlap; some issues—car seats, breast-feeding, crib hazards—are covered repeatedly. While the authors mention that 35% of children in America are born to single mothers, the target audience is the traditional nuclear family, preferably one with ample financial and social resources. They're very modern in their trust-your-instincts advice, stressing that parents are wise enough to choose their own parenting style—comforting crying babies vs. ignoring them, etc. Likewise, they don't fret about boosting baby's I.Q. with fancy toys. Philosophical issues aside, the eye-catching charts and diagrams are bound to catch the eyes of bookstore browsers. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.