Children first

by Penelope Leach

Children First is the most important and urgent book on childcare we have yet had from the internationally admired author of the classic Your Baby & Child. In it Penelope Leach calls on us as individuals and as a nation to make good on the promise of our endless rhetoric about the importance of family by creating the indispensable economic and social supports for children that are now so tragically missing. She asks us - in our legislation, in our policy-making, in our industrial might - to think of children first and thereby let a new rush of sanity and health into our society. She presents us with the paradox that after spending spectacular millions and employing the most sophisticated medical science to help children come into the world, our society turns its back on them in the very years during which they are developing. She shows us how, while paying constant lip service to family, we fail to acknowledge the difficulties of parenting in the nineties and to make sure that conditio