Lynn Berger began working on the illuminating Second Thoughts while pregnant with her second child. "What did it mean," she wondered, "to have a child for the second time? Why did we want a second child at all? Our first had been nothing less than a miracle, an event without precedent, but what did that make our second? A repetition? A perpetuation? A trip down memory lane?" Unable to answer these questions for herself without tripping into one assumption after another, Dutch journalist Berger went looking for writing about second children. In the overfull world of parenting books, however, she found very little that spoke to the transition from a family with one child to a family with two (or more) children--and so Second Thoughts was born.
What impact does birth order have on personality? Are children with siblings better off than only children? Are second children disadvantaged by never having their parents' full attention, or do they benefit because their parents have some sense of what they're doing by the second time around? Berger suggests that much of what we think we know about these (and other) topics is pure myth, and not borne out in scientific study. In addition to providing easy-to-understand summaries of complex research studies, she draws on her own experience as a mother of one (and then two) across the pages of Second Thoughts, which is peppered with touching anecdotes from her own family life. The result is a welcome invitation for self-reflection and contemplation about the complex emotions that surround every aspect of parenting, be it of one child or many. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm