She’s Having a Baby – and I’m Having a Breakdown is a 1998 book by James Douglas Barron. You can tell it has been around a while because you have to get a physical copy of it: no ebook or audiobook, just one of those old-fashioned tree-based things.
It was recommended to me by a friend and is designed to offer helpful advice to men.
It certainly has the format right. It is a bullet pointed list of 237 things. That is more than the amount of pages in the book. Each has a heading and a paragraph of text to read, making it very easy to consume. You can pick it up and read a little bit more in a minute, or you can find yourself spending an hour on it, telling yourself you will just read one more entry.
I found it was showing its age. Or perhaps its target demographic. It is clearly written by an involved dad, but feels like it was from a time when that was not the usual situation.
The advice contained in it is useful stuff to know, but I don’t feel like I learned much. Perhaps it helped reinforce what I had already guessed (be nice to your wife, buy a carseat, things will change, etc) and a few things I perhaps didn’t expect, but nothing I felt I would have missed if I had not read the book. It was quite a good laugh though.
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Tags: baby, fatherhood, pregnancy
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2016 at 10:56 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.