Born and raised in the north of England, Tracy earned her RNMH (registered nurse mental handicap) after graduating from a three-year course at the Doncaster School of Nursing, where she specialized in children with severe mental and physical disabilities. Given Nurse of the Year Award for the excellence and compassion she displayed in her fieldwork, her continuing education training included courses at the Great Ormand Street Children's Hospital in London; Children's Hospital in Leeds; a stint with the World Health Organization in India; and St. Catherine's Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped, where she first discovered her gift for understanding children's cries, gestures, body language, and other nonverbal cues – a talent she would later apply to babies.
In addition to working with private clients, she organized and taught classes for babies of all ages and their parents, counseled breast feeding mums, and ran groups for fathers.
In 2001 Tracy, working with her co-author, award-winning journalist Melinda Blau, published her first book, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How To Calm, Connect, and Communicate With Your Baby, which instantly became a New York Times bestseller. In its pages, Tracy laid out her basic philosophy and showed parents how to unlock the secrets of infant language. Her simple programme, a blend of intuition and careful observation, builds on practices she developed after years of experience with thousands of babies.
In 2004, even as she was battling a life-threatening disease, Tracy and her co-author collaborated on The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Because Tracy knew that this might be her last book, she was determined to cover every conceivable problem so that even if she couldn’t help parents personally, her book would. Basing the contents on the problems that Tracy dealt with in her many consults since the publication of her first two books, both in person and on the phone, as well as questions that poured into her email, this third book in the Baby Whispering series is the most comprehensive and detailed to date.
Sadly, Tracy lost her battle to melanoma on November 25, 2004.
