Customer Reviews

Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health: Birth Through Age Six

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Drs Roberts and Heyman have struck the right balance of solid medical facts and personal experience with their own children in Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health. And balance is just what we need on this topic! I've found other child nutrition books to be heavy-handed, with agendas that are not always about doing what's right for your child and without much scientific backup. This book provides realistic strategies for dealing with an often-difficult and emotional issue - without the guilt! My own experience with my two-year old daughter tells me that they are dispensing very sensible advice. My daughter is a healthy and adventurous eater. It makes life so much easier when mealtime is a pleasure, not a battle. The two points I found to be most helpful: 1) if you don't want them to have it, don't keep it in the house; and 2) whatever a child eats within the first 2 years of life is what they come to know as "safe" or acceptable foods, so variety is key in that time-frame. I hope many, many parents read and benefit from this book.

This book is really quite informative and helpful (but I must warn that most parents may feel at least a tad disappointed in what they have fed their children to date, the authors are a bit unforgiving in that area, which is why it got 4 and not 5 stars). I only wish that I had had this book 4 years ago when my first child was born. The book has lots of wonderful information that frankly I have not found anywhere else. It tells you how much of each nutrient your child will need at various ages and suggests some child friendly sources for those nutrients. What the book does not have is an instantaneous solution for getting a vegetable hater to eat vegetables. Their answer to this problem is to keep offering it and eventually they will eat their vegetables (or whatever else it is you want them to eat). I have been trying this forever with my daughter and it only works with non-green vegetables. They do provide some excellent advice on preventing picky eaters (which I have followed with my second and which works). One way I judge books such as these is to decide if the book could have been condensed into a useful magazine article, or if the content really needed to be put into a book. The information in Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health definitely belongs in a book. There are not many wasted pages or irrelevant information. I highly recommend this book to all parents of young children, with the caveats discussed above.

I found the information in this book well organized and clearly focused on how to develop good lifelong eating habits in children. This book provides the kind of comprehensive information on growth and nutrition that you are unable to get in short, well child checks at the pediatricians' office. As a mother of an infant and a toddler the book provided clear advice on how to direct better food choices for my toddler and avoid repeating many of the same feeding problems with my infant. I recomend it for anyway who is concerned with developing healthy and life long eating habits in their children and family.

FEEDING YOUR CHILD FOR LIFELONG HEALTH strikes me as a book that will become as indispen- sible an addition to a new mother's library as the currently invaluable WHAT TO EXPECT... series (...THE FIRST YEARS;...THE TODDLER YEARS). It was exciting to discover a book devoted entirely to the very complicated and perplexing business of feeding a child. I'm the mother of an almost-two year old, and upon opening this book I found myself quickly absorbed. I had never heard of "metabolic programming"--the concept that what and how you feed your child permanantly affect his/her metabolism, eating habits and tastes, and even IQ levels, later in life. Anxious to get on the right track, I was able to easily fast forward to the chapter dealing with my "terrific terrible two". Included were strategies to help with common feeding issues and difficulties in this age group, as well as recipes and sample menus. Especially helpful is the appendix of good food sources. I count this book an essential tool in helping to realize my dream of giving my daughter the best start possible for a lifetime of physical health and mental well being.

Over the course of their first six years of life we probably spend in the region of 20-30 thousand dollars on food for each of our children. What we give them to eat will have lifelong effects on them. Given the size of this investment and its importance I don't think anyone can afford not to take some guidance from experts about exactly how to proceed.

As a scientist working on obesity and a parent of two young children I found this excellent book worked well at two different levels. First it satisfied my scientific curiosity about why certain things were important in a very readable and understandable way, but second it actually showed me how to put the theory into practice with my own children. It is this latter reason why this book is such a winner. It is all very well to tell people that children should eat more vegetables and less sweets - this book shows you how to achieve it.

At just over 12$ the value for money is just amazing. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that if you have children under 6, or are planning a family this will be the best 12$ you ever spent. BUY IT NOW. There arn't enough stars in the amazon.com system to recommend it.

With a toddler and an infant always on the go, who has time to read another parenting book? But this one hooked me right away with the realization that the "healthy" low-fat, high-fiber food I'd been feeding my family was not necessarily the best thing for my children at their different stages of growth. "Feeding Your Child.." helped me better understand food from a child's point of view - mentally and physically. Lots of popular misconceptions like mine are unveiled, with loads of easy-to-use everyday feeding advice. An excellent book for any parent or caregiver who wants to help children enjoy healthy food, in a developmentally appropriate manner. (And for those of us in need of the occasional quick fix, the comprehensive index and table of contents make it very easy to locate specific topics.)

'This book should be on every parents bookshelf.' Actually, one of the original endorsers of the book said this, but it is so true it deserves saying again. A radio interview with one of the authors on Talk of the Nation earlier this month prompted me to buy the book. The book is very easy to read, and gives some interesting information about the nutrients kids need and how you can help them get them. I found particularly compelling the information on the importance of multivitamins, and also found it interesting to learn why some foods, like eggs and red meat - normally not a part of my own diet - are really valuable foods for growing children. I tried some of the tactics recommended to get my 4 year old to eat a more balanced meal. Much to my surprise, they are working. Also, having a greater variety of healthy food (and a boring selection of junk food) around the house works not only on them, but on myself as well! I'm going to need the sequel to this book on older kids and hope the authors are already writing this.

Of all the books I have read on feeding babies, toddlers, and children, I find this the most realistic and most the clearly based in scientific research.

It's clearly written and well organized, and doesn't recommend any strange foods you wouldn't put on the table for guests or tuck into yourself.

That said, I was disappointed at the authors recommendation to start kids on refined breads and crackers because 'they don't need the extra fiber' -- along side the suggestion that you not start your child out on anything you don't want them to prefer. It seems contradictory to me, and my little guy is getting whole grains only. I was also disappointed at the author's lack of knowledge about breastfeeding. In the parts of the book that deal with slightly older children, they have some misleading and out of date information that discounts the benefits of extended breastfeeding and overstates the benefits of cows milk and artificial baby milks.

But, even so, I must say that they have some extremely wise and useful information about how children think about and respond to food and some excellent advice for how to raise a child with a good relationship to food -- it's balanced (an occasional piece of candy at a friend's house or a packet of chips after swim class won't kill most children) but weighted in favor of whole foods and higher nutrition.

Just what I was looking for!

The best thing about this book is the advice to avoid making feeding times a battleground, and using non-nutritious food as a reward to eat nutritious food. It is excellent in providing sample menus and charts at different stages. I reccommend it to many new parents.

A couple of caveats: I do wish it had more recipies. I mostly use my adult cookbooks instead, but I would love more healthy "brown bag" lunch ideas. I also think the reader must keep in mind that the approach of "keep putting it on their plate" does not always work, sometimes a child (just like an adult) simply won't like the taste of a food. Finally, the authors don't encourage giving whole grain foods (bread, pasta, crackers) to toddlers because they have a low fiber requirement. However, the authors do advise getting the child to like healthy food early on. To me this is contridictory as I would never feed my dd more white bread if I can give her less whole wheat.

All in all I think this was money well spent.

Please note, I have done a lot of reading on feeding my 5 month-old son. What I was looking for were guidelines to supplement my intuition, not black and white rules to follow to the letter. That is how I used this book.

What I really like about this book is how nutritional needs at each stage of your child's life are explained in a simple manner. I also liked the moderate approach to feeding your baby. This is something I can do and it fits well with my lifestyle. It does not require that I spend half of my life tied to the kitchen creating strange, special meals for my son and then cooking something completely different for me and my husband. I skipped over the breastfeeding section, so I really can't say anything about that. I prefer this book to "Super Baby Food".