Parenting Books
Buy and sell parenting books in Panama.
Most parenting books are read in a few weeks, while one stage lasts, and then sit untouched once the child has grown past it. They run from pregnancy guides such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which reaches Panama in two different Spanish translations, to first-year handbooks, sleep books from both sides of the Estivill debate, toddler titles on tantrums and positive discipline, Montessori-at-home guides and the newer books on raising children around phones. Copies change hands new and second-hand, in Spanish and in English, and a well-kept one can see several more families through the same stage.
Parenting books from the first scan to the first phone:
they follow the child, and most households work through them in order. Pregnancy guides come first, and the best known, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, exists in two separate Spanish translations under different titles, so it is easy to end up with the one you did not mean to buy. First-year books deal with feeding, sleep and a newborn’s routine. Then come the toddler and preschool titles: Jane Nelsen’s Positive Discipline, Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child, Simone Davies’s The Montessori Toddler. The newest shelf is about older children and screens, with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation passed between parents of teenagers. Books meant for the child, the board books with sloths and toucans under the flaps, sit in animal books, and activity pads to keep a preschooler busy in coloring books.
The sleep-book divide between Estivill and Carlos González:
with parenting books, the school of thought matters more than the topic. Eduard Estivill’s best-known book teaches a baby to fall asleep alone on a timed routine, while Carlos González and Rosa Jové have each written a book arguing against that approach. A parent who buys one expecting the other closes it after a chapter, so read the back cover and the contents page before agreeing on anything. The same split runs through the discipline shelf, from reward charts and sticker systems to the respectful-parenting books of Míriam Tirado or Maritchu Seitún.
Shelf price against a once-read copy of a parenting book:
new, a Spanish-language parenting book costs around $15 to $28 in Panama, and the publisher moves the price more than the subject does. Most are read in a few weeks, during a phase that ends, so a clean copy with no highlighting is worth $6 to $12 to the next parent. A pregnancy guide from an older edition sits at the bottom of that band, and one underlined from cover to cover sells mainly as part of a bundle.
An underlined parenting book and the edition on its copyright page:
these books get read with a pen in hand. Leaf through the whole thing, not just the opening chapters: underlining tends to start in the chapter the last owner needed most, sleep or tantrums, and stop there. Workbook editions, such as the exercise book that goes with The Whole-Brain Child, lose most of their use once the exercises are filled in. On pregnancy and newborn guides, turn to the copyright page and check the edition. Recommendations on newborn sleep and feeding have been revised over the decades and the big guides are reissued to follow them, so the edition year counts for more here than on any other book on the shelf. Gift copies are the opposite case: a pregnancy guide is a common baby-shower present, and duplicates turn up with the spine never opened.
A stage’s worth of parenting books, passed on as a set:
once the child moves on, the books for that stage tend to go together, and a bundle of pregnancy and first-year titles moves faster than any one of them alone. Say which ages the set covers, give author, title and edition for each book, and be honest about how much is highlighted. Photograph the spines lined up, the copyright page of any pregnancy or baby-care guide and a marked page if there is one, so nobody is surprised on arrival. Where a book exists in more than one translation, say which one you have. Whoever drives over from Arraiján or Costa del Este for a first-year bundle is usually counting the weeks to a due date, so answer the edition question before they set off.