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This little book is good. It is easy to imagine that many will be inclined to find fault with it. They may find it 'not specific enough', not practical enough,—this despite the fact that the book covers the whole range of problems from early difficulties in feeding the baby through all stages of development of the child and the adolescent, through difficulties with and within the family: discord, divorce, sickness, truancy, speech difficulties and delinquency. Perhaps it is this very wide coverage that imparts to the book a certain summariness and a certain diffuseness. One cannot speak with depth and in detail about so many topics in so short a span.
Yet this book has considerable quality. It is written with quiet simplicity and unassuming directness of language. It does not pontificate, it promises nothing; it does not 'lecture' anyone. It just states a number of problems and describes them briefly, avoiding the pomposity of terminological profuseness. In other words, this book seems to be addressed to simple people, and it talks to them simply. Dr. Teicher assigned himself just this task, and he has fulfilled it very well indeed. There are many books on the same subject, many 'manuals' for young, middle-aged, and aging mothers, young mothers-in-law, and others. Among the mass of these books, Teicher's first work will not be lost. It is obviously the work of a psychoanalyst who wrote his piece not to 'drum up' (again and again) child guidance according to freudian principles, but rather to set down a few points to be thought over, quietly worked over, and humanely resolved in some practical but not too utilitarian manner. The average psychoanalyst will not find anything new in this book, but the average mother will find a number of things worth learning.