Originally published in 1963, this account, based on a lifetime of first-hand experience of the growing child, covers all the situations and problems which a child - and its parents and educators - meet in the first twelve years of life, from the earliest of feeding and sleeping right through to learning to read, write, and adjust happily to other people. Every parent wants to be sure that his or her child gets the best possible start in life. At the time so many books that were supposed to deal with the formative years of a child's life gave advice that was incomplete, conflicting or ambiguous. It was for this reason that there had been so many pleas for a book which gave full explanations for its recommendations without sacrificing either warmth or humanity. The author produced such a book.

The late Beatrix Tudor-Hart's early study of psychology at Cambridge and in Germany and America was followed by six years of running her own nursery kindergarten for children of two to seven years, until in 1933 she felt that it was wrong to separate this age group from older children. For sixteen years, from 1938-1954, she ran a cooperative, non-profitmaking school for children of two to twelve years. At the time of original publication, the author was a lecturer in Child Psychology for Department of Child Care at the North Western Polytechnic, London.