Feed the Baby Hummus: Pediatrician-backed Secrets from Cultures Around the World

Lisa Lewis Familius (MARCH) Softcover $18.99 (256pp) 978-1-945547-79-9

Feed the Baby Hummus presents a wide array of good choices that parents can make during their baby’s first year.

With decades of experience as a pediatrician, Lewis knows just how challenging it can feel to make good choices in the early months of a baby’s life. Her comprehensive guide offers practical advice and cross-cultural wisdom that serves to bolster, add depth, and provide contrast to the book’s more thorough, fairly conventional American advice about how to care for a baby.

The book is divided into sections covering stressful developmental issues like sleep and soothing, practical choices like naming and childcare, every kind of feeding question from breastfeeding to weaning, and caring for the baby’s body and immune system for long-term health.

Cultural lessons include the open, nonjudgmental attitude of Icelandic mothers about breastfeeding; Japanese parents’ hundredthday-of-life celebration, which introduces the baby to diverse foods; Indian parents’ use of coconut oil for cradle cap; and Norwegian mothers’ use of wool breast pads, among other examples. The book takes a positive view of culture, and every idea is treated with respect, highlighted for its positive impact.

Ideas from more communal, less individualistic cultures will prove the most insightful for modern Americans but may also be the most difficult to put into practice, especially for those who live far away from the baby’s grandparents and extended family.

Every part of the book affirms the parents’ rights to make their own choices, offering refreshing confidence in parental judgment in a time when so many discussions of infant parenting are fueled by extremes.

Feed the Baby Hummus is a guide to nurturing happy, healthy babies that goes beyond conventions.