their names slowly, repeating several times. At the end, Go through it again – as often as your baby wants.”Don’t feel embarrassed by your reading style“Children don’t care if you’re not a good reader, they just want to hear your voice” says Wendy Cooling

teaching them, or should you leave it up to the professionals?Parents as teachers"I don't really think parents should teach their children to read," says Wendy Cooling, who pioneered the Bookstart scheme that encourages parents to share books

Q. I've been trying to read to my baby every day, because I keep hearing how important it is, but she is very uncooperative. She always tries to pull the book out of my hand or starts chewing on the corners. Should I wait until she is a little older

When you read to young children, the emphasis should always be on fun rather than education: there’s a lot of learning going on but it’s important that your child enjoys the experience rather than seeing it as a chore. Make it an interactive

wonderful) thing a new life coming into a family is and2) How much new babies look like aliens! (to any friends reading this, of course it wasn’t your baby that made me think this…). From there, all the pieces of this book fell into place.I wanted to tell

What inspired you to set up Naty?When I was pregnant with my youngest son Edvard, I read in a newspaper article that said every Swedish baby produced half a ton of non-biodegradable nappy refuse a year. This shocked me into investigating

, it seems that this temptation is one we should resist. In the last decade, paediatric and orthopaedic researchers have agreed that babies learn to crawl, pull themselves up, cruise and walk most effectively with bare feet.Research has shown that babies

and heartbeat. I believe them. Proximity to the parents in general, and to the mother in particular, is the most soothing of environments for any infant. 
I had an idea of what shape the pod should have. So with the assistance of my sister, who’s a seamstress, I

, softly singing, 'Yes Sir That's My Baby' and… Oh, now that I think about it, that was just a dream and I slept through the whole thing.But my point is this, sleep is overrated. Dads do get up in the night. Well they should, anyway. Let's face it

twiddling my thumbs! I wrote a new TV series and got a new publisher. We’re working on re-editing and re-launching the Old Bear series. I’ve read them so many times in schools and for children that I knew exactly what needed to be changed. It’s a long time