Families Online Magazine

Enjoy the Ride and Sleep Tight are both penned by Suzy Martyn. Ms. Martyn has an impressive professional history (and educational background) in caring for young children and also mentoring moms and parenting groups on childrearing issues. She takes a refreshing 'back to basics' approach to parenting, which is devoid of psychobabble, refrains from advocating the use of nonessential gadgetry or bribery and instead works with the children's developmental states rather than seeking to work against them.

Enjoy the Ride: Tools, Tips, and Inspiration for the Most Common Parenting Challenges euips the parents to handle anything that comes after being handed their baby in the hospital. Copious books prepare parents for the birth, but very few actually help them navigate through the maze of confusion that sets in when being presented with the new life and its various demands and needs. This book helps new parents get off to a great start and recognize that there is a course that needs charting. Although not so in depth as to tackle each and every eventuality, the book manages to touch on the highlights (and lowlights) that are sure to be experienced by virtually all parents.

Sleep Tight: Help Your Child Attain a Good Night's Sleep in Three Days in Three Days tackles the issues surrounding baby, toddler and tot sleeping patterns. Near and dear to any parent's heart, sleeping is an

activity that children get too little of, which makes it hard for parents to rest as well. Mistakes are easily made in this arena and Ms. Martyn is the first to acknowledge that there are different methods that work well in different settings. She urges parents to take heart because any child can be trained to adopt a healthy sleep pattern.

What sets apart Sleep Tight and also Enjoy the Ride from so many other parenting books are the easy to understand techniques and thought processes that guide parents through the sometimes thornier side of parenting. Instead of being so narrowly defined that it may only hold value to a select small group of parents, both works are sufficiently broad to hold nuggets of wisdom for any parent, while offering enough in-depth suggestions for follow-up that even more involved problems can be solved by the parents who are experiencing them.

These books represent a comprehensive how-to for the milestones of parenting and pitfalls of parental permissiveness. It is interesting to note that Ms. Martyn offers numerous resources that the reader, who may need more information or help on a certain topic, may choose to research. When read together - preferably prior to junior's arrival - the odds are good that a good many of these problems can actually be avoided.

Pick up both books together or give them as a baby shower gift to an expectant mom. It'll be the best $25 you'll ever spend on a baby gift!