This book represents a milestone in our understanding of child development and what parents can do to give their children the best start in life. The author uses the latest scientific research to demonstrate how a baby's relationship with the mother has a lasting and fundamental impact. She emphasizes ways that changes in society over the past fifty years--such as delayed motherhood, the limited practice of breastfeeding, and mothers' early return to work--interfere with important developmental milestones that are essential to success and wellbeing in later life.

"We need a state," says Sally Goddard Blythe, "that gives children their parents and, most of all, gives babies their mothers back."