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In this little book Mrs. Harris has undertaken the enormous task of covering in 61 short sections varying in length from one-half to four pages “those aspects of infant development to school starting age which she considers of special importance”. Her stated subject is the relationship between parents and their rapidly growing child and the questions and feelings which this evokes. These she deals with helpfully and sympathetically in the examples which form the greater proportion of the book.
Some idea of the scope of this book can be gained from the list of contents; there are nine Parts, each sub-divided sometimes into as many as ten short sections. The headings are—Parenthood; The new baby's point of view; Coming up to six months; Weaning; The toddler stage; Encouraging growth; Brothers and sisters; The young child's education; Various problems. In covering such a wide field in so short a space there is of course bound to be a temptation to compress psychoanalytic theories in such a way that I would think they can become almost meaningless or even alarming to uninformed parents. Thus love, hostility, guilt and sadness are covered in half a page which leaves “hostility”, I would think, an unacceptable concept to the ordinary devoted mother because of the associations to such a word. Mrs. Harris begins one section “For the infant, his bodily products are invested with all kinds of omnipotent powers, both terrible and highly idealised”. This difficult sentence introduces a very lucid account of the relation between physical pain and “a nasty feeling” and the ways in which the child relieves himself of both by expelling wind, flatus, faeces and urine, and how this contributes to a feeling of omnipotence which is his defence against helplessness. I would think that the first theoretical statement and other similar statements in this book could well be omitted without loss.
In the last part on “Various problems” Mrs. Harris includes a rather cursory account of Sexuality