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A review by hilaritas
Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy by Nicholas Day
4.0
I enjoyed this book, but I was initially going to rate it much lower. The problem is that, near the beginning of the book, the author makes some claims about various churches' positions on breastfeeding that, as far as I can tell, are totally unsourced and very likely wrong. At the very least, he seems tone-deaf to religious issues. It gave me pause and made me doubt everything else he said.
Then, the middle section of the book picked up speed and was a great, informative and funny account of various infant behaviors and studies of infant behaviors. But then near the very end, he tries to address religious issues again, and his clumsy attempts fall flat. It took me out of the narrative and made me stop and think, "has this guy been blowing smoke the whole time?" If those two passages were excised, it would be a great read. With them included, it shows the author's limits of knowledge. I went ahead and gave him the benefit of the doubt and based my rating on the parts where he actually seemed to know a little bit about what he's talking about.
The basic thesis is that cultural understandings of infant behavior and child-rearing change over time and are far more plastic than we realize, while being tied to basic biological drives. It's written in a lightly arch tone and includes various interludes where the author describes his own experiences with his young child. Mostly, it's a chatty account of various experiments in infant cognition and locomotion. It's not a child-rearing manual but serves as a great counterpoint to so many books that tell you what you MUST do. Recommended.
Then, the middle section of the book picked up speed and was a great, informative and funny account of various infant behaviors and studies of infant behaviors. But then near the very end, he tries to address religious issues again, and his clumsy attempts fall flat. It took me out of the narrative and made me stop and think, "has this guy been blowing smoke the whole time?" If those two passages were excised, it would be a great read. With them included, it shows the author's limits of knowledge. I went ahead and gave him the benefit of the doubt and based my rating on the parts where he actually seemed to know a little bit about what he's talking about.
The basic thesis is that cultural understandings of infant behavior and child-rearing change over time and are far more plastic than we realize, while being tied to basic biological drives. It's written in a lightly arch tone and includes various interludes where the author describes his own experiences with his young child. Mostly, it's a chatty account of various experiments in infant cognition and locomotion. It's not a child-rearing manual but serves as a great counterpoint to so many books that tell you what you MUST do. Recommended.