The Toddler Survival Guide: Child Behaviour Secrets from a Professional Nanny

In this informative debut, Amies draws on more than 20 years of experience as a private nanny to offer guidance on caring for young children. She touts the benefits of what she calls “logical parenting,” which encourages helping kids work through challenges without doing the heavy lifting for them. Anecdotes from Amies’s career illustrate how to follow this parenting style, usually by showing the ill effects of deviating from it. For instance, she urges readers to hold boundaries in the face of tantrums and recounts how one parent reinforced their toddler’s outbreaks by capitulating to the child’s resistance to sitting in a car seat and asking Amies to bring the toddler to day care in a stroller instead. Techniques for helping children calm down when they’re overwhelmed include a breathing exercise in which a toddler traces their hand with their pointer finger, inhaling when moving up a digit and exhaling on the down slope. Amies brings humor to the proceedings (“I once cared for two siblings... who fought so much that I decided then and there that if I were to ever have my own children, I only wanted one!”), and her “top tip” sidebars distill the guidance into easy-to-follow directives, as when she suggests playing musical statues to help toddlers practice impulse control. Parents will value Amies’s hard-won wisdom. (Feb.)