Penelope Leach - Your Baby and Child

To Gerry, who is missing from the picture and sorely missed by everyone in it

A second generation of children inspired this new version of Your Baby and Child. I would like to thank all the representatives who appear in it (especially Cassie, Rory and their friends), as well as the later arrivals who dont appear but have nevertheless made themselves felt. I would also like to thank their parents who, luckily for me, like books as well as children and are exceedingly good at both. Im grateful too to the many children and adults who let us take pictures we eventually had to leave out for reasons of weight! Every photograph in the book is of real people rather than models, and for her sensitive narrative photography I shall always be indebted to Jenny Matthews.

It is thanks to the original design teamin particular Sally Smallwood and Hilary Kragthat the words and pictures work together as well as they do, but it is thanks to the current teamespecially Nicola Rodway and Carolyn Hewitsonthat the new blends so comfortably with the old.

As to the text: without two brilliant and dedicated editorsfirst Caroline Greene, and now Claire Tennant-Scullits sheer size and complexity might have overwhelmed us all. I thank them both.

Penelope Leach

C ONTENTS

Your Baby and Child is written from babies and childrens points of view as far as we can understand them, because however the society in which they are brought up changes, and however the demands made on parents may shift and alter, those viewpoints remain relatively stable, vitally important and often neglected.

This book looks at children and their experiences from shortly before birth until the beginning of their compulsory schooling. It looks at the successive tasks of development with which they are involved, the kinds of thought of which they are capable and the extremes of emotion that carry them along. Babies and young children live minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day, and it is those small units of time that most concern the people who care for them. But everything a child does during those detailed days reflects what he or she is, has been and will become. The more you, and any other adults who regularly care for your childlets say a daughtercan understand and recognize her present position on the developmental map that directs her toward being a person, the more interesting she will seem. The more interesting people find her, the more easily she will get the attention of all the adults who are important to her, and the more willing attention she gets, the more satisfied and satisfying responses she will give.

So taking a babys point of view does not mean neglecting the viewpoint of parents or other caring adults, because they are inextricably intertwined. The happier you can make your baby, the more you will enjoy being with her, and the more you enjoy her, the happier she will be. And when she is unhappyas of course she sometimes will beyou will usually find yourselves unhappy as well. Your baby affects you just as much as you affect your baby. In fact, if you have spent years learning to maintain a businesslike distance between your professional and personal lives, you may be astonished to discover how difficult it is to maintain any distance at all between adult lives and baby matters. It is because you and your baby affect each other, for better or worse, that although this is a book, it does not suggest that you do things by the book but rather that you do them, always, by the baby.

Raising a child by the bookby any set of rules, predetermined ideas or outside instructionscan work well if the rules you choose to follow fit the baby you happen to have. newborn clean. Bathed each day according to the rules, some babies will enjoy themselves, adding pleasure for themselves and a glow of accomplishment for parents to the desired state of cleanliness. But some will loudly proclaim their intense fear of the whole business of nakedness and water. However correctly you bathe such a baby and however clean she becomes, her panic-stricken yells will make your hands tremble and your stomach churn. You are doing what the book says but not what your baby needs. If you listen to your baby, the central figure in what you are trying to doand your only reason, after all, for reading the bookyou will defer the bath and use a washcloth. Then both of you can stay happy.