Dilys Daws: Your One Year Old; CHRISTOPHER DARE: Your Six Year Old; MARTHA HARRIS: Your Eleven Year Old, Your Twelve to Fourteen Year Old, Your Teenager; ELSIE L. OSBORNE: Your Four Year Old, Your Five Year Old, Your Seven Year Old; EDNA O'SHAUGHNESSY: Your Eight Year Old, Your Nine Year Old, Your Ten Year Old; DINA ROSENBLUTH: Your Baby, Your Two Year Old, Your Three Year Old,  Corgi Books (1969), Cash Sales Department, P.O. Box 11, Falmouth, Cornwall. 3s. ( 15p).

This series of mini books for parents on Your Child, year by year, is brilliant in design and conception and exceptionally successful in execution. Without shadow of doubt these attractive, inexpensive, easily available, easy to read little paperbacks will make an outstanding contribution to the mental health of parents and children in the next decades. As stated in each volume, the series was planned and written by a team of six Child Psychologists and Child Psychotherapists from the internationally famous Tavistock Clinic's Department for Parents and Children. Each of the fourteen books is addressed directly to parents. Each is interesting, informative, illuminating, and reassuringly realistic about the fact of life that “there must always be a lot of uncertainty in bringing up children.” Because every year of life under twelve rates a book in its own right, the importance and the achievements of becoming 3, or 5, or 7, or 9 are highlighted and dramatised. A book-for-each-year also makes it less likely that parents will treat their children “as much alike as possible” for purposes of convenience, peace at any price, or what is often felt to be “fairness”.

In general terms the books have been written to help parents understand and learn to appreciate “what lies behind” the way the baby, the child, the adolescent, the mother or the father is behaving-and-feeling at any particular time of happiness, joy, or triumph—or discouragement, despair, or anxiety. More specifically the authors state their aims in these words: “We hope parents will learn to see things which they would not otherwise observe.” “What we really hope to do is to increase your understanding because we think you, the parents, will find the best solutions yourselves.” “We would also like to feel that we helped you look again at some of the occasions when, for expediency, you did something that you knew in your heart was unfair,”

There is little question that these hopes will be realised. Hundreds of pare