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Murphy's own magazine has published The Parents Answer Book: From Birth Through Age Five (Golden Books). It takes parents from the breast-vs.-bottle-feeding debate to toilet training to sleepovers. The 900-page Parents Answer Book is intended as an encyclopedia of child care, ready to be pulled down from the shelf in a moment of need.
A rival publication, Parenting, has published Parenting Guide to Pregnancy & Childbirth (Ballantine), designed to take you from conception to the early weeks after birth. How should the pregnant mom eat? What about sex? What about exercise? When should you tell the news to your boss? Here are some answers.
In January, Broadway Books will be publishing The Black Parenting Book: Caring for Our Children in the First Five Years by Dr. Anne C. Beal, Linda Villarosa and Allison Abner. Besides offering parents standard child-care advice, the book addresses special concerns in the black community, such as dealing with racism and raising a child with self-esteem, as well as common health problems like lactose intolerance.
And of course, there is the fully revised and expanded Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dr. Steven J. Parker (Pocket). The book takes the parent through adolescence. Child abuse, rock 'n' roll, AIDS: no topic is too difficult for Dr. Spock to address.
MELANCHOLY BABY: IS IT MORE THAN A CRYING JAG?
Just a few decades ago, experts were arguing about whether children were vulnerable to depression. Since then, doctors have found that childhood depression is common, although harder than adult depression to diagnose. With advances in scientific knowledge have come new books about childhood depression. "This has been an under-addressed category," says Elizabeth Rapoport, an executive editor at Times Books. "People didn't appreciate how complex children's inner lives are."
Growing Up Sad: Childhood Depression and Its Treatment by Dr. Leon Cytryn and Dr. Donald McKnew (Norton), sensitively explores childhood depression and helps parents spot problems in the home. "Seldom do we look upon children as small human beings, struggling like the rest of us to make sense of life, to satisfy needs, and to meet challenges as they arise," say the authors. "We tend to assume that children are somehow protected by their innocence."
Each child is the best source of information about the state of his or her own mental health, and the voices of depressed children come through loud and true in this book. The authors, both child psychiatrists, detail the significant advances in treatment and medication over recent decades, offering families new hope. They also present specific strategies for handling depressed children.
SPLITSVILLE, U.S.A.: DIVORCE IS A DOWNER FOR KIDS