Making Sense of the First Five Years

I had spent a decade in rooms full of other people's children. Then I brought home my own, and six days later I was sitting on a bathroom floor at three in the morning with a baby who would not stop crying, looking up an article I had once recommended to somebody else.

My son turned one in a house with too many people in it. Three months later the country closed, and the world he had just learned to walk into shrank to seven metres of hallway with a laundry basket in the middle of it. He did not speak until he was three. He cried at the childcare gate for six weeks. And when he finally stopped crying, he stood at the edge of the sandpit holding a spade and watched the other children dig, for eleven days, while I stood on the other side of the fence doing arithmetic about everything he was not doing.

Every book I owned told me what he should be doing. None of them told me what he was doing.

This is a book about understanding children. Not managing them or correcting them or fixing them. Understanding them. It follows one ordinary boy from his first smile to his first day of school, and uses the everyday moments, the thrown spoons, the supermarket meltdown, the endless questions, the lost rabbit, as a way into what is actually happening inside a developing child.

You will find the science here, explained the way you would explain it to a friend. Why a tantrum is not a negotiation. Why forced sharing backfires. Why falling over is the lesson rather than the accident. Why the child who watches is not the child who is behind.

You will also find a father getting it wrong, learning slowly, and eventually finding the one question that changed everything. Not how do I stop this? But what is he practising?

Understanding your child will not make parenting easy. It will make it make sense.