While in the hospital for four days, I finished reading Baby Hearts: A Guide to Giving Your Child an Emotional Head Start. When this book arrived, Stefan looked at it and said, “You know I’ll never be reading that, right?” Not because he doesn’t care about how Mack turns out…but because he figures I’ll tell him what’s really important from the book and he’s got enough going on in his head to want to sit through some book about psychology. But I didn’t find it as dry as you might imagine…or as touchie feelie.

The book focuses on the primary developmental years, from birth to three years old. They start with the basic inborn temperaments and compare them to flowers which makes everything quite easy to understand. Then they explore 5 goals for healthy emotional development:

• feeling loved and secure
• expressing emotions differently
• evoking empathy & caring about others
• developing healthy friendships
• having self-esteem and self-confidence

For those that might be coming to the book to address specific issues, the next part of the book works out the 5 challenges to healthy development:

• addressing fear and anxiety
• dealing with shyness and withdrawal
• handling anger & defiance
• avoiding hostility & aggression
• steering clear of shame

Real life situations and examples are used in each chapter and lots of tips are given to achieve each goal and conquer each challenge. And of course certain things are discussed more in depth for the various types of children as needed. There are many lists in each chapter with relevant tips and ways to encourage that your child stays off Prozac and the authors smartly condensed those tips in the appendix with a quick reference chart.

I liked that I could quickly fall back into the flow of the book. If I couldn’t read it for while or spent more time reading another book, I could easily fall back into reading Baby Hearts. This should also make it fairly easily to grasp if you just pick it up for help on a specific area…although there is a lot of general info in the beginning which is useful for any parent who wants to raise an emotionally balanced child.

The same authors of Baby Hearts wrote Baby Minds & Baby Signs. They refer to signing with your child several times as a way for your child to learn to express herself long before talking is a possibility. I think that their signs aren’t based on ASL sings like several others but as long as parents learn and use any signs, it’s better than nothing, IMO. After all, how frustrated would you be if you went somewhere to order food but couldn’t be understood and then were constantly offered a diaper change?

I’m glad I bought Baby Hearts and have marked several sections to revisit as Mackenzie gets a bit older. It not an essential read for every parent but those wanting to delve a bit deeper in child psychology and development (but not too deep), you’ll enjoy it.
Buy a copy of Baby Hearts: A Guide to Giving Your Child an Emotional Head Start at Amazon.com or Amazon.de