Faculty Bibliography

Perri Klass reviews the book 'Damages: One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine' by Barry Werth

Klass discusses the different ways children behave when they're sick: Some are stoic, denying pain or suffering, while others seem to revel in it. She recalls an incident involving her own daughter, who seems unaffected by illness

''Do parents matter?'' ask the magazine covers, as controversy swirls around the new book ''The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do'' by Judith Rich Harris. The book apparently comes down heavily on the side of heredity and peers over parents as the major influences on children. As our children grow, parents talk about the joys and sorrows of trying to civilize them. Parents like me who have 14-year-olds tend to sidle up to one another at parties and express the opinion that maybe we've already given our children as much as we can give -- or as much as we can hope they'll take. And always, in all of these conversations, there's a rueful acceptance that right from the start, not everything is under our control. But then there is the larger debate about child rearing that our culture engages in at fairly regular intervals. Perhaps it is unfair to call it a debate; perhaps it is more an epiphenomenon of marketing, book and magazine hype, and that peculiar combination of breast beating and navel gazing that marks our rather childish preoccupation with our jobs as parents and adults. We always seem to be ready to engage in yet another round of astonished debate about children and parents, and cause and effect

Sage advice is my business, my true stock in trade. Sure, I give shots, look into ears and listen to chests, but by far the largest part of my job involves listening to people talk about their children and then responding with guidance, recommendations--what I hope I can call expertise. As a pediatrician, I start from the assumption that my job is to avert danger and promote my patients' healthy growth and development. I believe that healthy children are more than the sum of immunizations and safety precautions, and that parents want more for their children (and from their pediatricians) than the absence of disease and injury. So conversations in the exam room veer easily from medications and child-proofing to emotions and discipline and on to behavior and bonding, and even to books and reading--a topic that has become my special obsession even though it seems remote from the medical realm. Regularly and faithfully, I counsel parents about the importance of reading aloud to their children, about beginning early with books and helping their toddlers grow up to love the printed page. Of course, when it comes to giving strictly medical advice, the answer is relatively easy. It's all part of my professional duty. I know it's my responsibility to teach parents how to take a baby's temperature, or explain the difference between a cold and a serious bacterial infection. And I feel I have a right and responsibility to cover areas that the pediatric profession has increasingly taken on: sleep position, say, or car seats, speech and language. I have the wisdom of pediatric textbooks and a weight of experience in the office and on the hospital wards on my side

`Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbles Jo March on the first page of 'Little Women,' her family facing the prospect of a grim holiday season. Christmas season is a time of giving -- to our friends, relatives, and organizations that make sure poor children get presents. Now think about a needy child unwrapping a package. Then think about the best presents you ever got -- not necessarily the ones you nagged for or even greeted with the wildest whoop, but the ones you remember, the ones you may still own and honor. For most of us, the most remarkable gifts include books, books that were somehow the right book at the right time, books that thrilled us, shook us, changed our notions of the world, or introduced us to characters and places we never forgot. We saved them, reread them secretly during adolescence, maybe took a couple off to college. The giver who gives the right book to the right child at the right moment can kindle joy, create memories, even change a life. A book may be the present a child enjoys the most. It may be loved, read, and reread when all batteries have expired and all new toys been dismembered. But it also has important implications for a child's future. Before children learn the alphabet -- in fact, before children really start talking -- they can start learning to love books, because the books come with parental love and attention (or because parental love and attention comes with the books)

Klass comments that nowdays children who don't do well in one subject or another seem to be diagnosed with a learning problem. Nobody is just bad at math or not a good speller anymore

I was born in Trinidad in 1958; my father was doing a year of anthropological fieldwork, and my parents were living in a small East Indian village. One of the family stories about my birth is that my mother, hoping for a child, had brought two books along in her luggage, ''Childbirth Without Fear'' and Dr. Spock. That is, she had brought ''Baby and Child Care'' -- but she just called it ''Dr. Spock.'' The people in the village were much amused at the idea that anyone would need a book to take care of a baby. My mother, though, knew she had a friend and adviser at hand. I looked at them and felt completely overwhelmed, so I thought about my mother's story, and I reached for the smallest book on the pile: Dr. Spock. Opened it to the first page and read that magic first sentence, which has been calming parents since 1946: ''You know more than you think you do.''