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27th November 1967.
Dear Mrs. Spence,
Thank you for your second letter. I think that you have found out a part of my book which can easily lead to misunderstanding. Perhaps the trouble comes from the fact that in my book I am not trying to tell people what to do, and of course if you have a baby in your care you are trying to get advice whenever you feel uncertain.
What I am trying to do is to draw attention to the kind of problems that do exist, and I think you may feel that I have avoided giving advice, and I do this because I feel that no two people are alike and no two babies are alike. It is only that there are certain principles that can be enunciated which apply generally.
I would have thought that it was possible to tell when a baby passes over from being angry to feeling hopeless, and I think you will find that you never want to let your child pass over this borderline. On the other hand with most small children there are quite a lot of times when the child is angry and you can see that