Leonard Sax

An excellent book that must be read by everyone that is planning to have children or already have young children under the age of 4-5. I suggest the latter age of 4-5 as it is important that you understand Dr. Sax’s experience and what he has learned about different parenting styles from his pediatric experience and begin following them at those ages or earlier. That is not to say that those with older children would not benefit, however, as your child gets older, if you have not followed Dr. Sax’s advice, it gets tougher and tougher to change your child’s behavior. This book is VERY counter cultural to today’s methods of child raising practiced by so many parents – i.e., “I Have to be my child’s friend”, “I have to allow him/her to experience things their friends are doing before they go off to college or else they will immediately do things I prohibited”, etc.) He has many citations to support his commentary. I believe the reason we have so many so-called “snowflakes” in our college students and recent graduates is precisely because parents did not follow his suggested methods.… (més)

Eye-opening book on sex differences in childhood. I was always taught gender was a social construction, never knowing so much research finds innate, statistically-significant differences between the sexes. (I never knew there was so much research that supports innate differences between the sexes in primates either.) I find the book very helpful since I have one of each! Here are things I learned: Boys need to hear things at a louder volume than girls; they see motion better than they see colors. Boys are girls bully for different reasons and act out the bullying in different manners.; they have different expectations about sex; they use drugs for different reasons.....There's also interesting information on gender atypical children and LGBT children that, again, did not quite fit with what I was taught. Fun book!… (més)