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It Gets Easier! And Other Lies We Tell New Mothers (2008)

by Claudine Wolk(Favorite Author)

3.17 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0979767644 (ISBN13: 9780979767647)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

New Buck Press

review 1: yeah, this is really just okay. i think that most of the people who have given it particularly negative reviews have done so out of ideological differences with the author, claiming that she is dismissive of attachment parenting. i think she definitely has some ideas about parenting that are not relevant to every parent, but anyone who is actually able to cling to a parenting ideology is either not yet a parent or won the parenthood lottery. i had a lot of bright ideas about attachment parenting too. before my baby was born two months premature & wound up refusing to breastfeed. i choose to pump & give her breast milk in bottles, but a) i have no choice but to give her bottles, & people make plenty of assumptions about what is in those bottles, & b) if pumping hadn't worke... mored for me, i'd have no choice but to give my baby formula. my point is that sometimes ideological intentions don't work out, & if yours do (as some of mine have), just count your blessings rather than getting all high & mighty about it.basically the whole book can be boiled down to this: put your baby on a schedule to save your sanity, & make your peace with the fact that you are going to end up being a housewife one way or another. it's really not the worst advice in the world. i mean, the schedule thing is kind of silly. she goes on & on & ON about how everyone told her to "feed on demand" & it didn't work for her because she was feeding her baby like every hour & didn't understand that not every cry was a hunger cry. then she put him on a schedule & everything was awesome. i have a few replies to that:* duh, not every cry is a hunger cry. but you have to get to know your baby before you can really get a handle on that. my baby is almost five months old & i'm still figuring it out. * "feed on demand" doesn't mean "force the baby to eat if it whimpers".* my theory is that, if the baby is hungry & you offer it food, it will eat. if the baby is not hungry & you offer it food, it will reject the food. so it never hurts to offer food. the baby will let you know if it's not interested. this is especially true of very young babies, who are driven entirely by instinct, & even more true of bottle-fed babies, who are less likely to feed simply for comfort.* of course, this is my theory because it's what has been true for my baby. people figure out what works for their baby & they extoll it as the way to parent a baby, even though all babies are different. * it's worth remembering that a newborn baby's stomach is teeny tiny. it simply cannot hold enough food to see it through a four-hour stretch, & this is why a newborn baby should not be scheduled. or why it will be impossible to schedule a newborn baby.anyway. sorry this review sucks, my brain is fried from listening to the coverage of the boston marathon bombing suspect manhunt all day. the bottom line, i guess, is that this book offered a few useful tips that might help a frazzled new parent through those early days (& i mean early, like first few weeks--if your baby is more than like three months old, there probably won't be much of use here). but as with any book on parenting, you really have to read with an open mind rather than a rigid ideology & think about what might actually work for you as a parent & your baby as an individual. no one method or book is going to show you The Way To A Perfect Baby. & i also secretly feel that it does get easier. then again, i have a pretty awesome baby.
review 2: I must admit that this is the first book that I have read on parenting outside of any sociology or psychology texts I read as an undergrad. As someone who is considering motherhood, I found this book to be very insightful and humorous. I feel that I have a better idea of the good and bad that comes along with parenting. Wolk details her personal experiences and refers to parenting classics when making her arguments. There is a valuable resource list of books and websites for further investigation. This is a quick and useful read. I highly recommend it. less

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