Mothers at Home Matter

by Susan Maushart 

Penguin £5.99

When I was pregnant with my first child during the summer of 1999, I was working in an independent bookshop in Bristol. Part of my job was to unpack special orders, and let customers know the books had arrived. This meant that  as well as seeing tens, maybe hundreds, of copies of Captain Correlli’s Mandolin fly off the shelves that year, I caught sight of some less well-known titles which I might otherwise not have had the chance to see.

One of the orders...

by Sue Gerhardt

Simon & Schuster £12.99

Ambitious and wide ranging, the Selfish Society reveals the vital importance of understanding our early emotional lives, arguing that by focusing on the attention we give to our young children we can create a better society. Open any newspaper and what do you find? Violence and crime, child abuse and neglect, expenses scandals, addiction, fraud and corruption, environmental meltdown. Is Britain indeed broken? How did modern society get to this point? Who is to blame? How can we change? We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material wellbeing with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child rearing and the new economies ignored people’s emotional needs. We...

by Jane MacRae

This book is a manual for wholesome child rearing, which aims to feed the minds and hearts of our children with high quality, unprocessed stimulation.  Its author encourages an organic approach to parenthood, giving a wide range of activities which grow out of the natural interest children have in the world around them.  It is laid out in four parts, including activities for younger children such as looking round the home and garden for ‘animal homes’ to more complex tasks for groups of older children, such as putting on plays and learning sections by heart.  There are many interesting activities which will open the eyes and senses, not only of the children, but the parents too.

But fundamentally, it is based on the FTM premise that, ‘simply by being at home with your toddler, you are...

by Steve Biddulph and Shaaron Biddulph

Thorsons £12.99

Drawing on his experience as a family psychologist and a father, and with common sense, Steve Biddulph, with the assistance of his wife, has put together a very grounded source of advice and encouragement for all parents.

This book is really two books rolled into one, with a little repetition. However, it comes out with some refreshingly frank messages. The Golden Rule which emerges from the first section of the book is that there is an order of priority which should go on in every family, and not necessarily the one we've got used to. First and foremost needs to come YOURSELF, then your partnership, or marriage, and thirdly, your children. He doesn't mean put your desires first, but your basic human needs, likewise, in...

by Susan Pinker

Atlantic Books  £12.99

This book matters, not least because its author, a well-known Canadian child psychologist, has moved from a hard-line feminist position in which she believed the sexes were interchangeable, to recognition that there are profound differences between them. Members of FTM and readers of its newsletter will regard such a statement as obvious.  Nonetheless, for several decades our voice has been stifled by a strident and powerful left-wing and feminist lobby. Thus it is good to have the belated support of influential women like this author.

She opens her book with Professor Henry Higgins’ lament in My Fair Lady: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”, then spends the rest of it demonstrating that it...

by Penelope Leach

Dorling Kindersley £13.99

Research, fashions and different experts have, each in their time, transformed the way in which successive generations have raised their children. In this respect, the above expert and the above book are no different.

Would I buy this book as a present for a mother who is expecting her first baby?  Yes.  I would.  Moreover, I would recommend it to Dad and the grandparents too and would hope that all would read the book well before the baby is due to be born.   What struck me immediately was the number of beautiful photographs.  There are so many and they take up about the third of the space.  Dumbing down? No, let’s call it mood music.  Who could possibly worry about the unknown at the sight of such endearing...

by Dr Aric Sigman

Vermillion £8.99

As a parent, this book is definitely an unwelcome, yet an incredibly enlightening and important read. Unfortunately for me, the familiar feeling of relief when my toddler sat in front of the television and gave me ten minutes of peace has been turned very firmly on its head.

Remotely Controlled is a real polemic, and Dr Sigman has a good old rant about the numerous harmful effects of television throughout the book, of which there are far too many to mention in this review. There is no doubt that the book is well researched and excellently argued, although the evidence of some chapters did seem quite anecdotal. However, the chapter on how TV is affecting our children is littered with references to legitimate and often very large...

by Sue Palmer

Orion 14.99

Science tells us that, rather than being the superior sex by design, boys are at a disadvantage to girls from conception.  At the beginning of her new book, Sue Palmer describes how some research suggests some research suggests that boys' potential vulnerability starts in the womb and continues from there.

Though girls have their own issues to deal with as they grow up (which Palmer will tackle in her next book), boys are particularly affected by the cocktail of ingredients which make up what she calls a Toxic Childhood.  Junk food, poor sleeping patterns, a screen-based sedentary lifestyle, the wrong sort of childcare and educational experiences, family fragmentation and the effects of consumer culture are...

by Aric Sigman

Piatkus £12.99

Dr Sigman, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, is a hands-on father of four willing to speak out about how he feels our children are being neglected.  They are spoiled in ways which go beyond materialism, he writes, and are given so little in the way of boundaries and authority that they're being robbed of the basic supporting structures they need to thrive.

Tackling difficult issues like children's sense of entitlement, screen-based media, parental guilt and the compensation culture, Sigman examines why our children, some of the wealthiest in the world, suffer high rates of depression, under age pregnancy...

by Jean Liedloff

Penguin Books £8.99

“I don’t know whether the world can be saved by a book but if it could be, this might just be the book”, writes John Holt, author of How Children Learn. The key phrase in this book is “in-arms”, a baby’s birthright is to expect that embrace, that proximity, that continuum.

Perhaps it is not possible to transplant all features of continuum principles from a harmonious indigenous culture in a South American rainforest, but there is so much we can learn from their eternal and successful child-rearing practices that Leidloff describes, that we ignore this wisdom at our peril. “The children were well-behaved, they never fought, were never punished and always obeyed happily and instantly.”

Leidloff doesn’t use the term...