Practical Parenting > Reviews (10)

It’s a long time since I’ve been pregnant – fifteen years, in fact! So to help get me up to date on any changes in the intervening years, one of the things I did when discovering I was pregnant was to stock up on pregnancy magazines. When I had been pregnant in the 1990s, my favourite magazine was Mother and Baby, which is still around. I also liked reading Practical Parenting, which has since been renamed Practical Parenting and Pregnancy. It comes out monthly and costs £2.99 an issue.

It is a glossy magazine with around 145 pages in, so it does feel as though it is worth the money. You get free gifts quite often too, which are always an attraction for me. The latest issue (September 2011) comes with a free soother (dummy) and muslin cloth.

Like all magazines in this genre, they have articles which cover aspects of pregnancy, plus ones on newborn babies, older babies and toddlers. I generally just read the ones on pregnancy at the moment, but I store the magazines to use as reference guides, so later on, I plan to go through them again and read the articles on newborns when it is nearer my due date.

Each issue, the contents page is divided up into clear sections, so you can find which bits interest you. The sections are – Up Front, Mum 2 Be, New Mum, Your Baby, Your Little One, Me Time, Shopping, Your Family plus Competitions and Offers. I tend to enter some of the competitions as you can do them online for free, so why not? The magazine also has a website which is madeformums.com and is worth a look.

I enjoy reading the reviews on certain products and especially the ones that are tested by mums. In recent issues, they have compared six baby rockers, six potties and various car seats, and these are done in a really clear and helpful way. It makes it easy to see which item scores best in each department and I think this will be a feature I use to help me decide on some of the baby equipment we purchase nearer the time.

The items on maternity fashions are good too, as they include some cheaper items alongside the more expensive ones. There are some photos of celebrity mums with their children and actress Angela Griffin has a monthly column, but it certainly doesn’t feel as though it is centred on celebrities, more on the everyday mum and mother-to-be.

The Mum 2 Be section of the magazine is the one I enjoy the most, of course, as it is the most relevant to me at the moment. One of my favourite parts is the regular Bump Blogs, where they have three women featured, one from each trimester, who is interviewed and tells you about their pregnancy at that particular stage. So whether you are in the first twelve weeks, between 13 and 26 weeks or in the final 13 weeks of pregnancy, you will have someone to relate to and compare your feelings and experiences with. As I don’t know any other pregnant women in my village, this is useful for me.

There are pages of adverts in each issue, but these are often interesting ones, so they don’t seem too annoying. They are pretty much all relevant to the subject matter of the magazine so you find adverts about baby milk, baby food, buggies, toys and the like.

In the July 2011 issue, there was a three-page article on the size of pregnancy bumps (Bump Size – Does it matter?), which I found especially interesting, as my bump is already quite big and many thought I was carrying twins before my twelve-week scan confirmed it is just one baby in there, so it is probably just because it is my fifth baby, that I look more pregnant than I am!

The article that most attracted me to buying the September 2011 issue was ‘Six Rules of Pregnancy You Can’t Afford to Break’ which was also an interesting read. However, one of these was perineal massage and I really don’t fancy doing that in the slightest! I do try to keep remembering my pelvic floor exercises though!

The tone of the magazine is friendly and chatty, informed but never patronising. I have found it really useful for answering questions and concerns I have, as well as updating my knowledge on the latest baby things available and the latest schools of thought on when to wean your child, sleeping positions for babies, the new technologies in ultrasound scans and all the things that have changed in the fifteen years since I last had a baby.

I try to buy at least one pregnancy magazine a month and Practical Parenting and Pregnancy is certainly establishing itself as one of my favourites. If the subject material is relevant to you, I would definitely recommend you give it a try.