Parenting Books for the Clueless New Parents
Michalis "BIG Mike" Kotzakolios
Kotzakoliou, SSA

Being a new parent can be both exciting and scary. The prospect of caring for an extension of you has no equal. Unfortunately, babies don't come born with a user's manual. Outside of perpetuating often misguided parenting advice from your parents, the next closest thing to a manual is parenting books.

One of the most popular parenting books is The Baby Book: Everything You Need To Know About Your Baby From Birth To Age Two written by William and Martha Sears, et al. The book is almost 800 pages long and is a comprehensive resource for new parents. William Sears is a pediatrician and his wife Martha is a registered nurse. Together with their two doctor sons, they write about everything involved with caring for babies. They advocate attachment parenting, which is a high-touch style of parenting to balance the high-tech life of the new millennium. While some might object to the constant coddling and spoiling of their child, the Sears family contends that spoiling is what happens when someone or something is left untouched.

Another of the popular parenting books is Parenting With Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility by Foster W. Cline and Jim Fay. Cline is a psychiatrist while Fay is an educator. They characterize different parenting styles, such as the helicopter which hovers around the children, and the drill sergeants who order their children around. These two styles are not conducive to children's ability to develop good decision-making capabilities. Bad decisions begin to arise as early as the adolescent years. The key is utilizing the authors' Love and Logic principles, which advocate allowing children to solve their own problems, which in turn enables them to cope with the real world.

One of the parenting books that takes a different approach is Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice by James Lileks. It takes a humorous look at parenting in the 1950's. The author takes old magazine articles, photos, government pamphlets, and other paraphernalia and proffers his own humorous spin. Sometimes the best way to learn about good parenting is to learn what constitutes bad parenting.