Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 5th Edition: Birth to Age 5 (Shelov, Caring for your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5),   ISBN:9780553386301

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This is a wonderful resource for new and experienced parents. Easy to use. Helps prevent unnecessary calls to the pediatrician! It was given to me and now I am giving one to soon to be new parents.

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this was the best baby shower gift i received. it was given to me by a friend of mine who is himself a pediatrician, and it came with other books from the AAP. my husband and i have referenced it MANY times as new parents. this book put our minds at ease more than once, as well as kept us out of doctors' offices and ERs for needless visits. though it shouldn't be used to replace a doctor's advice based on a live assessment of a child, it often gave us a reality check in terms of what was serious and what wasn't. since we realized that new parents have a tendency to be hyper-concerned at times, this was just what the doctor ordered.

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This is an excellent reference book for any parent with a young child. It is especially helpful in giving useful information when a parent is worried about the health or development of their child. I use it all the time and give it as a gift to my expecting friends.

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We asked our nurse practitioner about some advice from The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (Revised and Updated Edition) and she warned us that Dr. Sears was out of date, we should buy this book instead. So we did. But I have to say it is disappointing (particularly coming off a well written book like the Sears book). I check this book for "modern updates", but honestly, every time I go to look something up in here, my wife says "It probably won't be in there, try Dr. Sears." Part of the problem is that this book has a poor index. Interested in how sleep position affects SIDS? It's not in the index -- not as sleep position or position sleep, back sleeping or even Back to Sleep (the AAP's campaign to get kids on their back). If you happen to look up SIDS, it is in the text -- just not the index. If you can read and digest a nearly 900 page book, you will have the information. But I hope you are not in a hurry.

The organization and chapter scopes are also inconsistent. For example, there is good material on reflexes in the section on Growth and Development in the chapter called "The First Month". Although this chapter is supposed to be on the first month, this section talks about some things that last for several months or even years and often without clear indication which time frame is being discussed (note: there are similar chapters for time frames up to five years). Taken literally, the book says that babies in their first month need "a balanced experience of freedom and limits." The first month? That is probably not what the author meant to say since a few sentences into the next paragraph the time frame three years is mentioned but where were the editors? Whoever let that go should be spanked. But it also brings up the questions: who is the author? who are the editors? There are several dozen contributors listed and seventeen people listed in a review or editorial capacity. But there are no attributions to who wrote what. This suggests that the book is written by committee and frankly it reads like it. Were it only a matter of prosaic style, that would be one thing. But there are many places (like the example above) where the meaning becomes ambiguous that should have been caught by a good editor. Maybe the problem is that it was edited by committee rather than being written by committee: the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere. Regardless of how it got there, while it is "up to date" the extensive sections on development cannot hold a candle to the scholarship or practical wisdom of Babyhood either.

As others have commented this books tends to recommend consulting a pediatrician on almost everything including some things that seem pretty safe to comment on. For example, if you are wondering if formula that contains probiotics is safe for your child -- you should consult your pediatrician. OK, maybe there is more to it than meets the eye, in which case say something like "due to a lack of regulation in the probiotic industry, you should consult your pediatrician before choosing a specific formula." But our pediatrician (recommended by a professor of pediatric neurology as the most thorough pediatrician in Buffalo) gave us a basic probiotic formula as part of a starter kit at a prenatal visit without comment. So I have a sense that the style sheet says to end every discussion with "consult your pediatrician".

Some of the material is very good, but the writing is spotty. We do trust the factual advice -- and look up anything we can find in here to double check older sources for late breaking science, but it is hard to get enthusiastic about it. So three stars seems about right.

Customer Rating: 

This's the book recommended by my pediatrician and I use it as a handbook for any questions on nursing.