Gordon, Jay 1948-

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GORDON, Jay 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born 1948; married; children: one daughter.

ADDRESSES:

Office—901 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90403. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Pediatrician, author, lecturer, and consultant. University of California Medical School, Los Angeles, teaching attending faculty member; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, teaching attending faculty member. Consultant for film and television programs; medical consultant for children's programming for CBS-TV; medical correspondent for Home Show. Member, La Leche League professional advisory board.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Sloan-Kettering Institute senior fellowship.

WRITINGS:

Good Food Today, Great Kids Tomorrow: Fifty Things You Can Do for Healthy, Happy Children, Michael Wiese Productions (Studio City, CA), 1994.

(With Brenda Adderly) Brighter Baby, LifeLine Press (Washington, DC), 1999.

(With Maria Goodavage) Good Nights: The Happy Parents' Guide to the Family Bed, and a Peaceful Night's Sleep!, St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 2002.

Listening to Your Baby: A New Approach to Parenting Your Newborn, Perigree (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to parenting Web sites and magazines; columnist for Fit Pregnancy. Consulting physician for Natural Home Remedies, Future Medicine Publishing (Puyallup, WA), 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jay Gordon is a pediatrician in private practice in Santa Monica, California, and the author of several books on parenting. He is a frequent contributor to parenting and pregnancy periodicals and Web sites, and has also worked as a television script consultant on medical matters. Gordon's patients include the children of Hollywood's top celebrities, a fact that has earned him a reputation as "Tinseltown's top kids' doctor."

Gordon developed an interest in nutrition and alternative medicine during his medical training and accepted a senior fellowship in pediatric nutrition at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City. He completed his residency at Children's Hospital, Los Angeles, before becoming a teaching and attending faculty member at the University of California—Los Angeles Medical School. Gordon's first book, Good Food Today, Great Kids Tomorrow: Fifty Things You Can Do for Healthy, Happy Children, covers the role of nutrition in childhood illnesses and also discusses juvenile weight problems and ways to discuss nutrition with young children. Interestingly, Gordon advocates a vegetarian diet; as Nathaniel Mead commented in Natural Health, "What's lacking from Gordon's discussion …is a clear statement of the possible dangers of vitamin B-12 deficiency in children on strict vegetarian diets." However, Mead concluded, over all, Gordon's "commonsense advice should appeal to diet-conscious parents from all walks of life." In his second book, Brighter Baby, Gordon offers parents advice for increasing their child's intelligence through massage, nutrition, and mental exercises.

In Good Nights: The Happy Parents' Guide to the Family Bed, and a Peaceful Night's Sleep! Gordon and coauthor Maria Goodavage weigh in on the issue of whether children should share a bed with their parents, arguing in favor of the practice. He offers advice on safety, maintaining a healthy sex life, and handling outside criticism. Library Journal contributor Annette V. Janes noted that while many people are skeptical of the practice, "the authors conducted impressive research and present it convincingly." Janes concluded that while the book is "not for everyone," it "provides a good alternative" to dealing with difficult bedtimes. In Listening to Your Baby: A New Approach to Parenting Your Newborn Gordon covers topics of concern to new parents, such as child development, breastfeeding, and sleep patterns, and advocates an instinctual approach to parenting.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Express on Sunday (London, England), June 2, 2002, Elaine Lipworth, "Doctor to the Stars," p. 60.

Library Journal, August, 2002, Annette V. Janes, review of Good Nights: The Happy Parents' Guide to the Family Bed, and a Peaceful Night's Sleep!, p. 132.

Natural Health, May-June, 1995, Nathaniel Mead, review of Good Food Today, Great Kids Tomorrow: Fifty Things You Can Do for Healthy, Happy Children, p. 168.