No frills, this short book follows a format that is easy to understand. With Harry Potter trade links, Bloomsbury Education has created a bitesize product from the team behind the popular My First Five Years parenting app, led by renowned early childhood experts Alistair Bryce-Clegg and Jennie Johnson. Everyday activities are presented which support play and contribute towards the developmental welfare of individual infants. The lessons are neatly pieced together to form a 96-page account that can be of immense help to parents and early years educators.
The authors have clearly produced excellent prescriptive measures aiming to support the development of babies in line with their natural spontaneity, in a way that offers definite advantages to the new born and guardian alike. The book has six chapters and these focus on six themes supporting skills ranging from ‘gross motor’ to ‘cognitive’. These bring to the scene an air of formality that does not reflect the essentially casual tone employed by the work, which can best be described as informal and spontaneous. Chapter one depicts social and emotional streams; chapters two and three ‘gross motor’ and ‘fine motor’; chapters four, five and six address sensory, language and cognitive skills and make for a good number of easy and realistic ideas for play.
When it comes to the question of modern publishing requirements and the presentation of a laid-back yet informative way of delivery, the book seems to come into its own and to tick all the right boxes. The underlying trend is for a basic message to be understood: you have a wonderful baby and against a background of entrepreneurial and environmentally friendly activities, let’s induct the baby in the best way possible.
The approach is to embody current developments in a move to get away from traditional stuffiness and outdated ideas. The emphasis rather is to give guidance and to help solve problems.
The language is simple and accessible generally, and the activities presented make use of recycled materials, household objects and natural resources, making them easy for practitioners and parents to reproduce. They are designed to give playful comfort to babies, who can relax and enjoy the fun while learning and developing key skills. The bedtime routine, so that the youngsters can understand it, is couched, for example, in terms such as ‘Goodnight, Teddy’. So the child is given a sense of ownership over what happens.
The activities are not devoid of theoretical input and the occasional reference to psychological observations does not go amiss. The reader is informed that the areas of the brain that process information from the senses begin to develop before the baby is born. The text later enunciates that our bodily and mental frames of thinking are linked to receptors. Knowledge of these can spill over to other learned areas, such as mental health, which while not explained in the book, can open up new topics for practitioners to explore.
To conclude, My First Five Yearsdoes not claim to be a winner for the Nobel prize for science, but nevertheless succeeds in supporting the wellbeing and happiness of infants – a goal that can be attained through forms of dancing, smelly socks, animal noises and masking-tape toys.
However informative the content may be, Bryce-Clegg provides a series of doable and ‘easy to understand’ activities that can enhance the development and welfare of babies, and presents a series of instructive gems that can sow the seeds for both joyful moments and play.
My First Five Years Baby: Everyday activities to support your baby’s development By Alistair Bryce-Clegg and Jennie Johnson Bloomsbury Education October 2023 pp96, £9.99 ISBN: 978-1801991568
