First-Time Parent: The honest guide to coping brilliantly and staying sane in your baby’s first year - Softcover

Atkins, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007269447 ISBN 13: 9780007269440

Publisher: Collins, 2009

Synopsis

Forget unrealistic childcare manuals – this is the book you really need to help you cope brilliantly with those first chaotic days and months ahead.

As a health journalist and mother-of-three, Lucy Atkins is familiar with both the medical aspects of childbirth and baby development, and the reality of day-to-day life as an exhausted first-time mum or dad. In her feisty, humorous style, she begins with that first mind-blowing day and addresses the issues unique to the first-time parent who stares at their newborn and thinks “Where are the instructions?”

Anticipating the questions and concerns of all new mothers–Why does my baby cry so much? Will I ever lose all this weight? Am I a bad parent because…?–the book provides practical advice and level-headed reassurance. It addresses the needs of the baby and, very importantly, those of the parent during the first year of their baby’s life.

Contents include:

• Starter’s orders – the equipment and kit you really need, as opposed to what the department store tells you
• Hello – how to cope with the first few hours
• Start – coming home, bonding, how to survive the first few days
• Sleep – for everyone!
• Cry – why your baby cries, what to do, why you'll want to cry, too
• Eat –breastfeeding, supplemental feeding, moving to solids, nutrition
• Grow – baby's physical and mental development
• Play – yes, you two actually can have fun
• Thrive – health considerations for baby and parent
• Live – adapting to your new life, the changing mother-father relationship
• Work – coping with being at home and with going back to work
• Also includes information on single parenting, and on adopted, multiple and special needs babies.

The First-Time Parent is on your side, and reassures that you can cope brilliantly with your new baby and your new life.

About this title

About the Author

Following a degree in English from Oxford University, Lucy Atkins established a career as a successful health journalist. She often contributes articles for the Guardian and is a literary critic for both the TLS and the Sunday Times. Her work has also appeared in the Times, the Telegraph, and Red magazine. Lucy has been a first-time parent, as well as a second- and third-time one. She lives with her family in Oxford.

Edition details

• Publisher: Collins
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007269447
• ISBN 13: 9780007269440
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224