Child Sense: From Birth to Age 5, How to Use the 5 Senses to Make Sleeping, Eating, Dressing and Other Everyday Activities Easier While Strengthening Your Bond with Your Child

According to Australian child-development expert Dunstan, every child falls into one of four sense-based categories for experiencing, interpreting and relating to the world: tactile; auditory; visual; and taste-and-smell. Simple-to-use checklists and evaluation tools help parents identify a child’s primary sense orientation (and their own) so that they can better understand that child’ s behavior, ranging from sleeping and feeding problems through stubbornness, temper tantrums, fear and hurt feelings. While a tactile two-year-old prefers to eat with her hands, a visual three-year old insists on lining up all his plastic dinosaurs just so, and a taste/smell five-year-old is naturally hypersensitive and emotional, each presents a different challenge to his or her parents. Dunstan’s advice is to “customize” parenting to the unique needs of the child, with some practical solutions and communication strategies just to get through the day at first, and then the week, and eventually most early childhood milestones. The process appears to take time and involve everyone in the family with a lot of trial, error and dedicated effort, but it may be just right for frustrated parents who are struggling with calming and encouraging their infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Like astrology books, this will speak to believers, and since Dunstan appeared on Oprah! and established her Los Angeles clinic, her readers will be numerous. (Nov.)