The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: Revised Edition by Harvey Karp Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: Revised Edition
Book Review: Not a bad book
Summary: 3 Stars
The book offers a number of tips on how to deal with toddlers, connect with their feelings, and avoid meltdowns. The author gives an interesting insight about how dealing with toddlers is similar to a diplomat's work. However, I didn't like the way the book was blown in size to make it seem worth the money. It could be summarised into 20 pages if all the examples, cartoons and FAQ sections (which I didn't find very helpful at all, really) are taken out. I'd say it's not worth its retail price.Book Review: good, but missing a couple of key topics
Summary: 3 Stars
The FFR rule is really good to know, but don't think you have to wade through so much piffle (who has the time, honestly some of these books are written as if you have all the leisure time in the world). So with a crying baby last thing at night after a long trying day with a 20-month-old, I turn to this book for help and looked at the index for these toddler-related problem areas: potty/toilet training (nope), sleeping issues (nope), and weaning (er, nope). (sigh). But his heart's in the right place and he does have good advice.Book Review: Great general-purpose guide
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great book for those looking for general advice on how to approach problems of the 1-4yo agegroup.
It's easily skim-able. Really, you will do best if you move on once you have the main thrust of each section. This may mean reading some parts word for word, beginning to end, but if you have a handle on things before that, by all means skip right ahead. A lot of people will find they grasp most sections long before the end. The cartoons seemed like sheer padding to me, but perhaps a more visual person would use them instead of the text.
Because its aim is to give you a general *approach* to solving (or preventing) problems, don't expect to find an exhaustive list of specific sections telling you what to do for problem x or y. That said, there *are* quite a few specific topics (brushing teeth is one, for eg), but this is more of a "big picture" book. The idea is that, by the end, you will understand toddler behaviour better and have some tools for putting together constructive patterns of interaction. Personally, I think this is one of the great strengths of the book - it helps give you an approach which you can keep adapting to suit the situation, rather than sitting there til you have a problem, whereupon you thumb through a 793-page index of all problems kids have ever presented throughout history to find a laundry-list of possible solutions which you then have to choose from at whim and work through one by one, until eventually you come across a different problem and have to go thumbing through the 793-page index all over again. Note that my preference here has a lot to do with my own personality.
Definitely the way it's written it's most valuable if you give yourself time to come to grips with the overall idea before you have to start using it, rather than trying to use it to "put out fires". I started reading it after my child's first birthday, but should have started when he was about 8mo. As with any parenting book, don't kill yourself trying to follow it all down to the last miniscule detail, but take what works.