Known all over the world for her best-seller Your Baby and Child, Dr. Penelope Leach, British psychologist and mother of two, is a favorite source of child-care advice for American parents, and a powerful advocate for the needs of families. Her television program Your Baby and Child with Penelope Leach- shown on Lifetime Television, won the CableAce Award, the cable industry's highest honor in 1992, and Dr. Leach was nominated for an Emmy in 1995.

Dr. Leach followed a first degree in history at Cambridge University with a diploma in social work and then a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of London. She carried out a pioneering four-year study of the effects of babies on their parents, under the auspices of Britain's Medical Research Council, and has since studied many aspects of child development and child rearing, specializing in making research findings accessible- and useful- to parents. Her current research is with the Anna Freud Center in London, where she is a consultant to under-files research.

A fellow of the British Psychological Society, Vice-President of the Health Visitors Association, Chair of the Child Development Society and member of the professional board of the American Institute for Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies, Dr. Leach also works on both sides of the Atlantic for parents' organizations concerned with birth, child care and early childhood education, as well as for various organizations concerned with children's rights. She is also a contributing editor for Child magazine.

Her first book, Babyhood was designed to bring the best of academic child development research to parents, and was fully revised in 1983. The first edition of Your Baby and Child appeared in 1977. Now in its second million, and 29 languages, a new edition for the 1990's appeared in 1989. It was a response to readers who wrote saying "Help, we're running out of books" that Your Growing Child: A Handbook for Children's Health Growth, and Happiness, a sequel running right through childhood and adolescence, was first published in 1985. Dr. Leach still has a focus on the first months of life, though. In 1986 she wrote The First Six Months: Coming to Terms with Your Baby and in 1990, The Babykit, illustrated by Shirley Hughes, used a "pop-up book" format to convey parenting information.

Since 1990, while researching Children First: What Society Must Do- and is not doing- For Children Today, Dr. Leach has contributed booklets on positive discipline to the campaign against physical punishment which have been widely distributed; collaborated with a theater group in writing a play for 3-7 year olds, Snap Happy, that offers non-violent conflict resolution, and produced a practical guide to early childhood educators, Young Children Under Stress. Her most popular book, Your Baby and Child, was recently updated for the nineties and has been awarded with first prize for a Popular Medicine Book by the British Medical Association.

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