Danny ChaiWe read a ton of baby / child rearing books. Probably a dozen by now, and she’s not even half a year old yet. Because, you know, knowledge is power. Learning is half the battle. Yo Joe.
The problem with all these baby books is that they give conflicting advice, so you have no idea who’s right. Some of them are almost violent in their disagreement. Like you should read how Babywise talks about La Leche League – it uses language normally reserved for the likes of Slobodan Milosovic and Pol Pot. It’s almost comical.
Speaking of Babywise, I’d say our favorite books until now had been The Happiest Baby On The Block (which I heartily recommend) and Babywise. I say until now because I recently came across some disturbing stuff about Babywise and its author. Apparently, he’s a big quack. Babycenter has an editorial against it, and there are sites (like this one) devoted to debunking the ideas in Babywise.
What scared me most was, even Christian organizations have joined in speaking against Babywise. The author is apparently a Christian and, while it’s not obvious in its books, he calls it a Christian method of child-rearing. Apparently the teaching is bad enough that he was excommunicated from his church, publicly reprimanded by John MacArthur, deemed cultic by the Christian Research Institute, and criticized by Focus on the Family, Christianity Today, and a host of other Christian groups.
Egad. We’d been using this sytem, and the people/groups against it are a veritable who’s who of people I respect spiritually. How are we supposed to know what resources are good and not? I dunno, but it’s frightening. So yeah, I would have recommended the book except for it being dangerous to kids’ health and possibly heretical.