Books: August 2025
Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender — Louise Bates Ames
⭐⭐⭐ This book is part of a series by the child developmental psychologist Louise Bates Ames. Each short book covers a year in the life of the child: how the child is changing psychologically, socially, emotionally, physically.
I was motivated to read this because my two year old was driving me insane, nearly to the point of tears. I truly wanted to know: what is going on in there?
I got a lot out of reading this. Short, to the point, and the right tone for me as a parent: fairly relaxed, low stakes, more about adjusting your expectations to your child than what more contemporary child-rearing books tend to emphasize, which is improving or maximizing your child in some respect. I feel that I understand my two year old better after reading.
If I had to characterize Ames’ approach for a child this age, it is to avoid confrontation – not caving to the child’s demands, more like the way in judo you use your opponent’s momentum against them. Don’t ask questions where the answer can be “no” or where they can refuse without consequence, because they will. At two, the child is testing boundaries, discovering autonomy. They will refuse and reject almost by nature.
One parental instinct is to say “that is unacceptable,” I will hold my ground. Ames would say this is basically fruitless because the refusal is part of the developmental stage. And it is a stage; they will not stay there. It is therefore OK to leverage the fact that you are much smarter than them to divert their attention, change the subject. At least this week, it works; who knows about the next.
The book has a fair number of bad reviews, due to its age (written in the 1970s), which shows in many parts. Things like the book warning you not to let your kid touch the dash when they’re riding in the front seat is funny now. There are also gendered assumptions about mothers and fathers. Doesn’t bother me; easy enough to mentally update. I actually found it touching how much felt timeless.
As someone in the social sciences, I can’t help but be skeptical about the harder claims. How could Ames “know” what is going on in the child’s mind? She also breaks stages down to 6-month intervals, which seems impossibly precise. Of course, Ames is carefully observing hundreds of children over long periods, which is more than a sample size of one.
How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 — Joanna Faber
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen is a sequel to the classic 1970s parenting advice book. From what I can tell, the core ideas are much the same.
An interesting thing about the book is that it doesn’t foreground a particular philosophy about child-rearing. There is definitely one there, but it is more subtext than text. The authors are not telling you “this is the way the child works,” they are presenting approaches to problem-solving common challenges with children.
The philosophy the book does espouse is that one should take kids, and especially their emotions, seriously. This might sound obvious, but as a parent, it is often not. Imagine a toddler asks you to cut a strawberry in half, regrets it and asks you to reverse that process, then tantrums when you cannot. In these moments, it is hard to see past the insanity of what they are crying about. It is easy to see little kids as irrational.
And maybe it is irrational. But they are upset nonetheless, and you cannot tell someone who is upset not to be upset. It doesn’t matter if the reason is that they were brutally fired from work, or that they ate their M&Ms in the wrong order.
This was a really effective component of the book: drawing analogies between what children feel and what we feel as adults. These analogies make clear why acknowledging emotions is important. You can’t tell an adult whose mother died that they should stop crying, their mother was old and sick anyway.
In practice, this means talking to your child with empathy. It also means modeling how to deal with emotions and problem-solve, which is not easy. There’s a ton of ideas here, and the “workshop” narration (parents in a room talking about issues, approaches) works great.
I also appreciated how much the book highlights the parents’ experience. There’s a short chapter on when parents feel overwhelmed by anger at something their child is doing, which I found refreshingly candid. That anger is not ideal, but children will encounter people who become angry at them. They need to learn how to deal with these moments, and it is instructive post-rage to come back together and “make up.”
Like with all things, not everything works like you imagine. There’s a passage where the author’s kid is struggling with starting/stopping tasks, and she gets a timer with a shade that shrinks as time passes – a “visual” timer so the child can see time running out. Smart! But the kid apparently found this so anxiety-inducing that they began throwing up at the sight of the timer. Kids, man.
Lou Reed: The King of New York — Will Hermes
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lou Reed: The King of New York seems like the most complete biography of Lou Reed out there, covering his childhood, time with the Velvets, solo career, and his death in 2013.
A personal anecdote: I went to graduate school imagining I would do qualitative, deep-history research on Colombia’s armed conflict. Then I got there and all anyone wanted to talk about were coefficient estimates, standard errors, and natural experiments. I went through a crisis: is this really what I want to do? If I do it “their” way, am I selling out?
My therapist laid out the story I would come to re-learn in this book: Lou Reed starts his music career writing songs for Pickwick Records, a company that was proto-AI slop – they would hire musicians to quickly and cheaply write a ton of songs about specific themes. The payments from writing this stuff is what allowed Reed to live as a musician and eventually write some of the most influential rock music of all time. The lesson is something like: you can be practical and still true to yourself.
It’s interesting that Lou does not sweat this at all; there is no crisis of legitimacy. He sees working for Pickwick as practical, not a reflection of him as a person. This ethos continued throughout his life as he licensed his music for commercials (clearly influenced by Warhol): having his songs appear in a Ford commercial is fine if it lets him finance his weird, commercially unviable rock albums. The Pickwick workflow of putting music out at inhuman speeds also came in handy for the Velvets, who were operating on shoestring budgets.
My exposure to Reed was through the Velvets, a band that made a huge impression on me as a teenager, drawn to the band’s experimental sound and lyrics. I still remember hearing “Heroin” for the first time and being blown away by the droning viola, the drumming, Lou’s delivery. Even today, it is still in heavy rotation at the house.
One of the more surprising things about the book is how short-lived and unsuccessful the Velvet Underground’s tenure was. Shorter still once you realize Lou kicks John Cale out after the second album, and most people would agree the first two albums are far and away the best. The biography is good at capturing the Velvets’ relationship with Warhol, which is ultimately transactional. Warhol gives them access to an art world and cultural scene that they desperately want. Reed and Warhol are also similar in interesting ways: both comfortable with commercial art, both obsessed with fame, both cultivating a deliberate persona.
On the solo career: it’s easy, as a Velvets snob, to mostly ignore the solo stuff. But there are clearly great records there: Transformer, obviously, but also Berlin, Coney Island Baby, and New York. On the other hand, there are records like Metal Machine Music, four sides of guitar feedback that Reed presented as a serious artistic statement, which the book treats as a troll.
Reed himself is complicated. The book does not shy away from his abusive behavior toward partners and bandmates, his erratic personality, his stubbornness. He could be funny, but also cruel. The relationship with Laurie Anderson towards the end of his life provides what seems like genuine tenderness and stability.
A great, thorough biography. The level of detail may be too much for anyone who isn’t deeply interested in Reed or the downtown NYC scene.