Book Review: Parenting Matters & Happy Healthy Child

Author: Sophia Bygrave-Sam

Publisher : Self


These two titles may well be considered as one, even though the latter has a slightly different format, speaking as it does more directly to youngsters.

The multi-hyphenate Sam (financial advisor-trainer-motivator-author) brings her personal experience in another field, parenting, to bear on both these volumes, humanizing the text as she provides valuable insights (common and uncommon) to the oft-described "most difficult job in the world".

Even from its title, "Happy Healthy Child" serves notice that though its content is serious, the overarching mood is light, or at least lighthearted. Unlike its companion piece, this book eschews formal chapter divisions and goes directly into topical headings such as "Full of Hope, With Great Expectation" and "Strength to Soar". Under these headings, the author offers some homespun philosophies and advice to youngsters on such matters as conduct at home and at school, getting better grades, expressing themselves and beating peer pressure. Liberally interspersed within these commentaries are rhymed verse exhortations - poems in miniature - that the author uses to not only break the text monotony, but to create an adaptable rhythm for children to read aloud, as might be expected.

Elsewhere, as in "Red Eyes is a Pinful Thing" she plays on the classic Jamaican slang term red eye  (envious, covetous) by offering at the end of her "sermonette" a "treatment" for the condition, comprising various parts "Contentment" "Thankfulness" "Faith" and lastly, an "Anti-jealousy Solution" in the manner of an eyewatch.

"Parenting Matters" despite its playful building blocks and paint handprint cover image, is more of a conventional thesis, a manual, if you will, aimed squarely at parents, and first-time parents in particular. Beginning with the author's own life-changing experience as a mom (her first-born, of two, is now a teenager at nearly 15), Sam neatly segments the book into chapters that take parents from infancy through the exploratory (and often mind-boggling) toddler/ambulatory stages and into the school years.

Throughout, the emphasis is on establishing and maintaining whole family units, with both parents having input, if not full-time presence (the book subtly deals with the issue of separated parents) in the lives of their children in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Sam, a Christian minister, makes this focus the undergirding of the book, quietly "railing" against moral degradation in the society which she argues, places greater burdens and challenges on parents seeking to raise wholesome, well-adjusted children. Biblical allusions and actual Bible quotes pop up throughout the book.

This approach may strike some as quaint, but in a world of increasing secularity, it is precisely this quality of quaintness and homespun wisdom and traditional empathy, that gives the book (both titles, in fact) a unique appeal. The earnest delivery has an authentic ring, and this virtue will give the books some legs to last in these categories after some of the more faddish titles have faded.

Indeed "built to last" may well be the most appropriate summary of these two robust, heartfelt reflections of family.