Author Description

'Learning to Love: The Developing Relationships between Mother, Father, and Baby During the First Year' is an informative and engaging book for new and expectant parents that explores the evolving relationship between mother, father and baby. Focusing on the first year of life, it looks at the emotional dimension of becoming a parent and offers an understanding of the baby's emotional needs. Author Lorraine Rose understands the hopes and fears that every new parent has. In 'Learning to Love' she describes how the process of becoming a parent puts a person in touch with feelings and with memories of their own infancy and childhood. These can help parents relate to their own child, or can make it more painful and difficult. 'Learning to Love' reveals the emotional intensity of pregnancy, childbirth and the first year of parenting. It brings alive the reality of the baby's emotional world and looks at how relationship and love grow and how emotional growth can be felt and enjoyed. Lorraine shows parents how they can learn from their baby as it grows, and how both the baby and parent can guide each other. She reassures parents about the daily subtle shifts in feeling and confidence they will experience as they and their baby gradually come to know, trust and understand each other. The delicacy of this relationship is sensitively, reassuringly and informatively described. A capacity to 'read' each other develops within the parent and the baby. It is this capacity that lays the foundation for empathy with others and for future intimate relationships. 'Learning to Love' examines the key mental and emotional milestones in the first 12 months, parents' changing relationship with each other as well as their baby, and common parenting dilemmas. Unlike many books about early parenthood, 'Learning to Love' gives important information about the emotional lives of infants and their parents.