Excerpt: 'YOU: Raising Your Child'

Oct. 4, 2010— -- For the seventh book in the "YOU" series, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen offer tips for keeping your child healthy from infancy to first grade.

Read the excerpt below, and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

Whether your child is an infant or a toddler, performing puppet shows at preschool or using your belly as a trampoline, we know how hard it can be to pry your eyes off your little one. Babies are as mesmerizing as they are miraculous, so it's easy to lose yourself in your adorable, sweet, gas-blasting bundle of beauty. When your infant graduates to being a little more mobile, perhaps you'll have a radar lock on him for other reasons, such as to prevent a monkey-bar mishap or to stop him from dunking your iPhone in his cereal. So we appreciate that you've taken a moment to take a look elsewhere, and we suspect that one of the driving forces that has directed your attention to this book is that you have a big question: One that both excites you and scares the diaper decorations out of you. How will my baby turn out? Good question. How will your baby turn out? As a parent or a parent-to-be, you've probably run through a couple thousand different life scenarios: will he be healthy? Smart? Polite? Will she reach all of her milestones on time? Will she turn into a modern Mozart? Will he be able to throw a ball sixty yards? Will she be a good citizen? Will he grow up to be a CEO or have trouble holding a job? An everyday hero or a smack-talking punk? A selfless volunteer who wants to change a little bit of the world or the latest reality-show knucklehead? Will she grow up to find her soul mate, or, as someone else put it so nicely, will she have enough sense to know that if he likes her, he shoulda put a ring on it?

Some of these big-picture questions may not be easy to think about -- especially during a time when you may be feeling such powerful feelings as love, joy, or even stress -- but they are indeed the kinds of issues that will keep you up at night (more so than you already are). Of course, it's convenient to credit (or blame) the genetic life force (aka DNA) for providing our children's biological and psychological blueprint for life. But more and more research indicates that the real life force that escorts children to their destiny has less to do with dnA and more to do with... you.

Now, we don't mean "you" in the blue-eyes, big-feet genetic sense of the word, but in a much different way: How your behaviors, actions, principles, and all of the overt and subtle things you do as a parent shape the environment in which your child grows up.

That's right. This is a book about children's health, but it's as much about you as it is about your boy or girl.

In YOU: Raising Your Child, you'll get our best information and advice on all of the nuts-and-bolts issues that are important to handling the challenges of parenting. We'll teach you about allergies, infections, safety, nutrition, and the many things that you can do to help keep your child healthy.

But if this book were just an A-to-Z guide that listed everything from asthma to zoo animal obsession, then we'd close up shop and direct you to the nearest encyclopedic medical website. This book is more than a problem-solution guide. It's a book that will teach you how to be a smart parent.

What does that mean?

Many of us parent by instinct, and that approach works well much of the time. Smart parenting, in addition, is really about conscious decision making: selecting choices based on what we feel is best for our children in the short term and the long term. (Decision making starts from day one: breast feed or bottle feed? Which vaccines and when? You'll see our take on the vaccine issue starting on page 392.) Many smart parents like to think of parenting as a "reverse engineering" process -- that is, always keeping the end goal in sight.