Customer Reviews

The Best Friend's Guide To Maternity Leave: Making The Most Of Your Precious Time At Home

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A cross between the "Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy" and "The Rules," this guide is chock full of useful advice on how to handle your maternity leave from work. The author takes you step-by-step on all the essential steps of your maternity leave, from deciding how much time you will need off to making the transition back to work. You will learn a great deal about what steps you'll need to take before, during and after the birth of your child. Some important topics that are covered include how to negotiate time off, deciding between breast and bottle, making the transition to parenthood, how to find time for yourself, and finding quality childcare. Last, but not least, an entire chapter is dedicated to getting back to work. With the humor and wit of this book, you will feel like your best friend is with you during the entire time - giving you real-life wisdom and perspective that only a best friend could give you. A great gift for your pregnant friends that will be returning to work.

This book is good to read if you have not yet even thought about your maternity leave yet, like in your 2nd trimester of pregnancy. However, if you've already got some idea of what you're doing, or if you're already on leave (like myself), then it really doesn't have a lot of info for you. Really, the parts that I found most helpful in my situation were just emotional anecdotes about how crazy you feel at this time in your life - it's just nice to know someone else feels the way I do. The answer to the question the title seems to ask ("how do I make the most of my maternity leave?") is really given as "Don't expect to get anything accomplished on your leave. Just take care of that baby." Well, I think there are better suggestions out there than that. (If I may be so presumptuous, I'll add my own advice - Get the baby on a tight 3-4 hour feeding schedule. Keep a pen and paper by your chair where you feed the baby. While the baby's feeding, make a list of things you want to get done. That way you at least know when you can do things, and when you have that time, you know what needs to be done. It's working for me!)

The book does offer some facts about leaves of absence and ideas about alternative child care and work arrangements, but this was knowledge I already had, at my stage of the game. The title of the book should have been "The Best Friend's Guide to Maternity Leave: PLANNING FOR Your Precious Time at Home."

(Another note, and this is a pet peeve: the author takes literary license and writes with sentence fragments, which is fine in small doses. However, there are so many examples of this in the book that it makes it very distracting/awkward to read in some places....)

This book is helpful if you read it in the beginning of pregnancy. It does a lot of cheerleading for you to get the most out of your employer for maternity leave but lacks specific instructions or advice. I was looking for ways to get the most out of the maternity leave I was already on and the book did not fit my needs.

I had several major problems with this book, which I found to be a complete waste of time. First, for those women who have a decent amount of fully paid leave (>8 weeks), this book is not relevant. For those without, or with only very limited paid leave, there is one good chapter on cobbling together a maternity leave period from existing workplace and government benefit programs. However, I found that to be the only useful chapter in this book, and again it really is only useful for those who do not have significant paid leave through work. Given the title, I thought this book would be most useful for those WITH maternity leave benefits (not those without them).

Second, at least a third of the book is dedicated to cheerleading and anecdotes that add up to the conclusion: "The first weeks at home with a new baby are chaotic." I doubt very many moms-to-be needed a hundred pages to help them reach that conclusion. Also, it's not really relevant for "making the most of your time at home", which is what I was hoping to learn about.

Third, this book assumes that husbands are either totally useless or absent altogether. While I acknowledge that very few men have paid "paternity leave," as I understand it most salaried workers have 2-4 weeks vacation time. Since most of the men I know maxed out their vacation time to be at home with the new baby, I thought it strange that the book assumes (with the exception of a single sentence) that new moms' partners will not be a resource worth calling upon. Thus, if you have a partner who's planning to take time off when the baby comes home, this book will not be relevant to your experience, at all, whatsoever. Along the same lines, if you have your childcare lined up already (your partner, for instance, or extended family, or whatever), there's an entire chapter of the book that's not applicable to you. Further still, if you will be bottle-feeding, there's another whole chapter that's just not relevant for you. Despite what a previous reviewer stated, the "breast vs. bottle" question is presented in one paragraph for the reader to answer for herself, and then launches into a lot of discussion of nursing issues that aren't relevant for bottle-feeding families.

In sum, if you are a working woman with paid maternity leave who has a supportive partner, very little of this book will be relevant to your experience. The portions that ARE relevant could be condensed down to a magazine article, so there's no point in buying and reading this book.