This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received this book from the publisher to review.
When you are a new mother, you tend to believe you have found the One True Way of parenting. If you have an easy baby, you say that it is because of your parenting. If you have a difficult baby, you either look for other parenting styles or decide “(s)he would be even more difficult if we didn’t do it this way”. In an ideal universe, your next child is the complete opposite of your first, and you learn about hubris first hand. And not for the last time, either! In time, through friendships with other mothers and with children that follow your first baby, you learn about different baby types, how they respond to different parenting styles; children who are outliers on every curve; the exceptions to every rule; and that what you do as parents of babies is rarely important when they are 8.

What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, by Naomi Stadlen can be the stand-in for those years of experiences. This is a mothering book that turns mothering books on their heads – this is a chorus of women telling you about mothering.
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