Best Baby Bottles

The main message of this book is that parents should not try to control and stress over their children’s feeding practices. Babies (and toddlers) are pretty well regulated and know what and how much to eat. The parent’s job is simply to provide a variety of healthy and nutritious foods and ensure a pleasant mealtime atmosphere. The rest is up to the child.

I wholeheartedly agree with this premise–parents should not try to hoax babies into eating or to restrict a chubby toddler’s diet. I think that most of the other nutritional advice in the book is valid as well–that we should not attempt to mold out children’s bodies into a media-dictated “perfect” form, that eating meat and drinking whole milk is essential, and that the occasional piece of candy is not the end of the world.

The reason I felt compelled to write this review is that to a lot of attachment parents this is superfluous information. They already know they should work with, rather than control their children. The division of responsibilities comes naturally to them. And, even though the book offers a very gentle, very child-let approach to feeding, it is far less understanding in other aspects of child rearing. For example, it highly recommends the Ferber technique of sleep training–reading through these pages might be painful for gentler parents.

In short–the book offers valid information on feeding, but this information is superfluous to people who already practice an instinctive and gentle parenting.
Rating: 3 / 5

It alarmed me that this book puts the weaning information in the 6 to 12 months section. Doesn’t the author know that the AAP recommends breastfeeding for at least a year, and that the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for two years,with no recommended weaning age? I wonder if the author simply ignored that information and included her own opinions about how long a child should nurse instead of actual facts.
Rating: 2 / 5