Customer Reviews

The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Being an Expectant Father

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

 

 

After finding out that I will become a father soon, this was the first book that I read to hopefully begin to prepare for this major life transition. To the author's credit, it is relatively comprehensive and covers a lot of important topics, if only in brief. Since most of us who are becoming dads for the first time are presumably rather uninformed about many things, it is helpful that he covered so much ground. The index provides a simple way to refer back to appropriate sections, as needed. And the book is manageable and accessible for anyone, in contrast to many of the encyclopedic pregnancy tomes written for new moms.

Having acknowledged the helpful content, there were several weaknesses that prevent this book from being nearly as helpful as I would have liked. First, the author was trying so hard to be folksy and informal, presumably to accommodate male readers who might not be naturally inclined to read even slightly academic books, but I found this writing style to be rather unprofessional and more distracting than engaging.

He was also very clear at the beginning to declare that this book was intended for every sort of father, whether married, unmarried, gay, or adopted. But this attempt to write a book for every possible permutation of fatherhood (repeatedly acknowledged by random inclusive disclaimers throughout) made it seem rather annoyingly generic.

Ultimately, I'm glad to have read this book and expect to refer back to it as my wife progresses through pregnancy. It's certainly not a classic piece of literature, and I feel like it could have been much better, but it remains a helpful resource that I would recommend to other expectant dads.

awesome book. my husband was so immature and didn't understand what was going on with my body until I bought him this book. Suddenly he turned into an understanding mature guy. i really thought we were going to divorce if he kept on going. and the book got to me in a very timely manner!

This book is great and easy to read. I really like that the author includes gay men as Dads.

Book was helpful, some of the stuff in it is meant for idiot's, but there was a lot of useful information. We use the book to look up different things we don't understand about whats going on with our pregnancy.