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This small volume contains practically all the knowledge essential to mothers in their everyday handling of the very 'normal' child.
Book I tells of his needs during the first year—clothes, furniture, daily routine; Book II of his care in incipient sickness and in health from one to five years; and Book III touches on some of the problems which arise from the first schooldays to adolescence. One chapter of this is reserved for special reference to the development of the mind.
The keynote of the book is balance. Almost every aspect of the child's life is taken into consideration, and warning is given against excess in any one direction or over-enthusiasm for measures which contain possibilities for harm, such as sun-bathing.
Mrs. King, a mother of seven children, gathers up the fruits of her own experience, enriched by her powers of observation, for the use of less knowledgeable mothers. The atmosphere of certainty which pervades the book may, nevertheless, be the despair, as well as the envy, of those less happy or successful. While she seems aware that difficulties in upbringing exist, she makes the debatable assumption that certain behaviour on the part of the mother will have certain definite results, e.g. (p. 35):
'If you establish the habit of making baby rest immediately after the midday meal, there will never be any question about it.' And (p. 39):
'The habits of regularity and cleanliness you have instilled in baby's first year will, of course, be continued.' She is little concerned with even minor difficulties here or in connection with feeding or sleeping; yet the percentage of children in whom none occur must be small indeed.
It may be asked whether omission of any mention of bed-wetting, thumb-sucking and like habits is due to the view that they are not to be found in well-regulated babies, or that they are a part of normal child life and do not present any problem to sensible mothers, or that they are outside the sphere of the book altogether and are