A New Baby-Care Book with a Spiritual Component

Anne Marie Williams reviews Nurturing Whole Health: You, Your Baby, and God in the First Year, written by a pediatrician and a nurse practitioner.

Nurturing Whole Health: You, Your Baby, and God in the First Year 

By Nicole Lea, CPNP and Kathryn Italia, MD 

Published by Hello Eema

Mothers of today — especially first-time mothers — don’t lack access to knowledge about every possible pregnancy- or baby-related topic under the sun. The internet in general and AI in particular have seen to that. But mothers also often feel conflicted about where to turn, whom to trust, as they make important, impactful decisions regarding the health of two precious people: themselves and their babies.

Nurturing Whole Health: You, Your Baby and God in the First Year is the debut book of maternal wellness practice Hello Eema founder and nurse practitioner Nicole Lea, CPNP, along with co-author pediatrician Kathryn Italia, MD. With Lea and Italia’s combined medical backgrounds and lived experience as mothers, these two make a strong team.

The Component of Postpartum and Baby Health Most Baby-Care Books Miss

Nurturing Whole Health has many strengths, but the one that outshines the rest, and makes this the one baby care book I’d give to a new mom friend, is the inclusion of a mom-and-baby care aspect I didn’t know I was missing: an emphasis on and education about spiritual health.

Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional health

Mom and baby’s spiritual as well as physical and emotional health is what the title of the book refers to with the term "whole health." At first, I expected “whole” to mean “all-natural” or “holistic,” as in pharmaceutical-free or outside the conventional medical model. (Perhaps these were foolish assumptions to make about a book written by a nurse practitioner and a pediatrician!) If this had been the book’s focus, it would have been a great fit for some of my mom friends and not for others. But once I realized that for Lea and Italia, "whole" includes physical + emotional + spiritual health, I knew that this book could make a great gift for all the Catholic, or even Protestant, mothers I know.

Addressing Baby’s Spiritual Health

Since we understand that the body dies but the soul lives forever and is intended to be with God for all eternity, nurturing our baby’s spiritual health from a young age makes perfect sense. To be clear, Lea and Italia aren’t insisting on audiobooks of the Summae Theologiae in the car or tummy time with Gregorian chant in the background (though that could be soothing!). But they do, for instance, advocate taking baby to church from an early age, introducing developmentally appropriate faith-based toys, and helping young children learn to pray.

Addresses General 0-12 Month Baby Care

Nurturing Whole Health also includes baby care recommendations readers would expect from conventional books. As a nurse and a mom of five, I appreciated the all-in-one-place reminders about what’s normal and not for infant breathing, practical encouragement and items that can help with breastfeeding success, signs to watch out for that would require immediate medical attention, and more. It’s nice to be able to look through the book without having to sift through Google results and the fractured focus (and maternal confidence!) of trying to remember and incorporate ideas from multiple articles or links.

Back-to-Basics, and That’s a Very Good Thing

This represents another key strength of Nurturing Whole Health: it’s a relatively slim book and there is a good deal of emphasis on using common sense and recognizing where maternal preference and flexibility, not medical dogma or rigidity, are in play. While social media accustoms us to skim “what I eat in a day,” or “the exact baby sleep routine I use to get baby sleeping through the night by two weeks old,” (yes, I’m exaggerating on the second one) and then to robotically “plug and play” those identical prescriptive steps in our lives, Lea and Italia’s book does the opposite. It leads with principles and then leaves moms to experiment and develop their own intuition. This can go a long way towards reducing new mom (or seasoned mom!) anxiety about doing “all the things” just right.

The Bottom Line

For its recognition of the importance of spiritual health, even at a young age, as well as its reassuring and reasonable back-to-basics approach to baby care, Nurturing Whole Health gets a big "yes" from me.

Is this a book you'd like to read? Share your thoughts with the Catholic Mom community! You'll find the comment box below the author's bio and list of recommended articles.

Copyright 2026 Anne Marie Williams
Images: Canva