Customer Reviews

No Fear Guide for First Time Parents (Focus on the Family)

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This is a good, basic handbook, with generally good advice.

I was initially prejudiced against this book when I read their extremely negative take on homebirth, which is biased, outdated and unreasonable. Our baby was born at home with a midwife, and I know from experience that homebirth is far, far superior to hospital birth in terms of safety, emotional comfort and medical supervision of mother and baby. Midwives are extremely skilled individuals who are constantly monitoring both mom and baby, rather than running between ten patients. There are far fewer risky medical interventions and midwives consistently have lower c-section rates and rates of other interventions. Knowing what many friends of ours have gone through in "modern" hospitals with rude and uncaring medical staff, having to deal with strangers and pressure from staff toward unnecessary intervention, I would never have a birth any other way, and I found the authors' take on homebirth (that it's risky and supervised by unskilled and untrained individuals) absolutely insulting, and I was hesitant about taking the advice of the rest of the book.

After that heated spiel, however, I should add that the book did seem pretty good aside from that - just a wee bit too conservative and leaning towards "we've always done it that way, and that was good enough for us!" I am a fervently evangelical Christian, like the authors, but that is no reason not to embrace new ideas such as homebirth and other more recent options.

One thing I LOVED about this book is its pro-life stance. Having read many prenatal care books, I am absolutely revolted by the pro-choice stance of many of them - "If you want it and it's healthy, it's a baby and here's how to take care of it. If you don't want it or it's not perfect, ditch it in a biowaste can - it's only fetal tissue anyway!" I really appreciated the positive stance of this book toward all unborn babies, something that is quite rare.

This book also seems to be quite well-researched and put together by a great team of people. I would say that it is generally trust-worthy and free from fringe-type advice.

I would recommend this book with reservations - read it, but read others also. Or do what we did - get it and keep it as a reference guide.

I received my book in a timely manner and somewhat in the condition I expected to get it. But the book was exactly what I was looking for and was able to do my paper on time.