Includes index.

Preparing to Be a Parent -- The Decision to Become a Parent -- The Many Faces of Family -- Making Room for Your Baby: Mental Images and Practical Realities -- The Course of Pregnancy -- Bringing Your Baby Home -- Partners: You and Your Pediatrician -- The Basics of Child Development -- Understanding Your Child's Development -- Genetics and Your Child's Development -- The Developing Brain -- Your Child's Unfolding Mind -- Mastering the Body's Basic Functions -- Your Baby's Motor Development -- Feeding and Eating: Food for the Whole Child -- Sleep: Helping Your Child Through the Night -- Sexuality and Gender: How Children Come to Know Their Bodies -- Cognitive Development: The Learning Child -- How Your Baby Learns: From First Perceptions of the World to Making Sense of It -- Child's Play: Child's Work -- First Words and Beyond: How Children Discover Language -- Sharing Books with Your Child -- Off to School: What You Can Expect -- Working with Your Child's School: Challenges and Opportunities -- Emotional Development: The Social Child -- Your Child's Inner World of Feelings -- Hard Feelings: Helping Your Young Child Cope with Fear, Worry, and Anger -- Children and Violence -- Friends: Your Child's Expanding Social World -- Exercises for Life: Having Fun and Taking Part -- Family Culture: Passing on Traditions -- Learning Right from Wrong: Your Child's Moral Development -- Predictable Bumps on the Development Path -- When Both Parents Work -- Choosing Child Care: Day-Care Programs and Nannies -- Why Do We Need a New Baby? A Sibling Joins the Family -- Anxious Moments: Helping Children and Parents Handle Separations -- The Unpredictable Troubles in a Child's Life -- Children's Physical Troubles: Facing Illness, Injury, and Hospitalization -- Children's Mental Health Problems -- Family Troubles: The Impact of Divorce and Remarriage -- A Death in the Family: Helping Your Children Through a Final Loss -- On the Threshold: The Flowering of Sexuality.

Founded in 1911 by Arnold Gesell, M.D., the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine is world-renowned for its contributions to the scientific and clinical understanding of infant and child development. A mission of the Center is to bring the insights of this cutting-edge research directly to parents. In The Yale Child Study Center Guide to Understanding Your Child, Dr. Linda C. Mayes and Dr. Donald J. Cohen and their colleagues continue a long publishing tradition that includes Gesell's own The Child from Five to Ten and also Parents magazine.

This is a book that empowers parents to build healthy families in their own way, finding their own styles. Since becoming a parent starts well before the birth of your baby, Dr. Mayes and Dr. Cohen begin with making room for your child in your mind and in your life. How you view being a parent shapes your parenting style, which, in turn, influences your children. Your interactions with them vary as they grow and develop new skills in four key areas: physical, cognitive, emotional, and social. Understanding your child's remarkable development is, in part, a matter of knowing just what is happening as your child grows, appreciating how your child is feeling and how those feelings are different for a two-year-old and for a five-year-old, and also realizing how your experience as a parent influences your child's experiences.

The authors map out how children develop and what parents do -- often in the most basic of their daily interactions with their children -- to enhance their children's growth. The perspectives of both child and parent are brought to bear on essential topics, including choosing child care and balancing family and work responsibilities, coping with bullies, and talking with your child about sex. Special chapters help parents and children deal with new siblings, divorce, death, and other difficult passages in life.

Whether you read The Yale Child Study Center Guide to Understanding Your Child as a rich fund of information or consult it when questions arise, you will find within its pages the common sense, compassion, and insight that are the hallmarks of the Yale Child Study Center.