Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an expert in the development of children.

Born in the late 30s, she herself had an unhappy period in childhood when her parents divorced.

She was forced to live with her father, the novelist Nigel Bolchon, which was not her choice.

After her mother married again, they were reunited and life became more settled, and she went on to win a scholarship to Cambridge.

Her book, Baby and Child, first published in 1977, is now considered

a central work on the relationship between parents and their offspring. You cannot, she says,

spoil a child, and she argues that the first six months of a baby's life are crucial to the happiness of the whole family.

It's beliefs like these that have made are one of the country's most eminent child psychologists.

She is Penelope Leach.

You've got two children of your own, Penelope, now grown up, but did you bring them up by the

book, as it were?

And whose book?

Yes, there wasn't really a book in that sense.

I mean that's not quite fair.

I in as far as I used a book at all, I used Benjamin's box book.

And I think we all have cause to be grateful to Ben's book because if he hadn't

written that book, the whole idea that you could write books that were addressed to parents

as people rather than as kind of receivers of

of instruction would never have been born.

...