The Confident Parent: A Pediatrician’s Guide to Caring for Your Little One–Without Losing Your Joy, Your Mind, or Yourself

After years of experience in pediatric medicine, Jane Scott has fielded a lot of questions, and she knows which issues are the biggest ones that parents struggle with. In her new book, The Confident Parent, Scott addresses these issues head-on, hoping to provide parents with the knowledge she wishes she’d had as a new parent. Among other things, this book addresses support networks, baby sleep, breastfeeding, picky eating, and discipline. While there is some good information to be found within these pages, there are plenty of unhelpful suggestions, too, and readers who tend toward a more “natural” parenting style will be anything but reassured by her outdated, non-evidence-based approaches to sleep training and breastfeeding. Scott makes some fantastic points about self-care and non-corporal forms of discipline, which will hopefully benefit some readers. But overall, this book just doesn’t live up to its promise, and many readers will find better answers from other sources. Doctors may know a lot about treating illness and injury, but when it comes to general baby-rearing, they aren’t always the best place to turn.