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This is an unusual variant of the current crop of books on psychopathology of childhood. The author apparently has a reputation for "common sense" writing in his earlier texts. If this means a liberal borrowing from many fields (often without acknowledgment) and putting it together in a rather didactic and at times dogmatic style, then he has succeeded once more.
To the reader, however, there may be many confusions in his mixtures of advice and admonition. In general, he follows a fairly commonly accepted dynamic line in the handling of most problems. His basic advice—to love, to limit, and to let children grow up—is essentially sound, but it includes many odd phases. As far as this reviewer knows, no textbook in psychiatry in the last 50 years has given as clear a description of how to spank children as is offered by the author. "A properly administered spanking consists of