Title: The Vital Touch: How Intimate Contact With Your Baby Leads to Happier, Healthier Development
Author: Sharon Heller
Publication Year: 1997
Website: sharonheller.net
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Review: When I bought this book, I honestly thought it was going to be about infant massage based on the title. It turns out this book has almost nothing to do with infant massage, but instead is the most thorough, well-written, data supported, convincing book on parenting at infant that I have read. While the author doesn’t focus on “attachment parenting” as a parenting style, she advocates many of the same tenets of attachment parenting, extolling the benefits of touching, holding, baby-wearing, nursing, co-sleeping, etc.
The author supports these and other forms of intimacy between parent and child based on an examination of cross-cultural, multi-generational evidence as well as formally conducted studies and experiments. A word of caution is that, while fairly easy reading, this book is dense. I generally finish books in two or three days. This one took me the better part of two weeks, party due to the length, and partly because it is so packed with details that after reading a chapter or two, one feels the need to put it down for awhile to digest all the information.(Personal Rating: 10/10)
Michelle has a PhD in Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor's Degree from the California Institute of Technology. 
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