Someone to Tune to About Parenting : Television: With cable’s ‘Your Baby and Child,’ British child development authority Penelope Leach takes her bookshelf advice into the talk show arena.

The format is familiar: an expert dispensing advice while earnest audience members pour out their problems.

Only this time, the issue at hand is not alcoholism, spousal abuse or even sex--not directly, anyway.

“Is my 1-year-old ready for books?” a bespectacled father asks with almost overwhelming sincerity.

Penelope Leach, child development authority-in-residence on Lifetime Television’s new parenting program, responds with equally intense enthusiasm: “I seriously think that books should be part of the environment of every infant.”

From behind her own owlish eyeglasses, Leach, with her crisp British accent and her sensible British attire, might seem an unlikely candidate for U.S. television talk-show stardom. Leach, 50-ish, finds that prospect at once amusing and improbable.

She is no Phil Donahue, and certainly no Dr. Ruth, said the focal point of “Your Baby and Child With Penelope Leach,” a half-hour show that began its 26-week run on the Lifetime cable channel this month. It airs weekdays at 9 a.m., joining two other parenting programs from Lifetime: “What Every Baby Knows,” with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, and “Growing Up Together,” with Leeza Gibbons.

“I’m not sufficiently American to know who the great talk-show hosts are,” Leach said. And in any case, Leach said, her show--which looks at children’s development and their relationships with their parents--is “not personality driven, it’s topic-driven.”

On the other hand, Leach is no stranger to the land of friendly and helpful advice. Her book, “Your Baby and Child, From Birth to Age Five” (Knopf), has been translated into 28 languages and has sold nearly 2 million copies since it was published 15 years ago. Along with Brazelton and Dr. Benjamin Spock, Leach, with a Ph.D. in child development, has ascended to the ranks of writers whose books are known better by their authors’ names than by their titles--as in, “Omigod, the baby just poured ketchup on the cat. Quick, look it up in Leach!”

Leach accepts her appointment to this august circle of authorities with a quiet lack of modesty. “Well, I dare say they wouldn’t have put me on this show if no one knew me,” Leach said. She said that one reviewer had called her book “a benevolent grandmother on a shelf,” a description she embraced wholeheartedly.

Her very presence on a television advice show suggests that “we don’t have an awful lot of people around a lot of us who can help us” with the grand adventure of raising a child, Leach said. “It means that extended families and communities are just not what they once were.

“That’s not to say that a book can replace people,” Leach added.

As for a television show, “at least it’s a real voice, talking to real people, and at least it’s not exclusive,” she said. Only about 10% of the U.S. population reads books, Leach said, whereas the old faithful tube is a standby for many millions more.

Leach said television “probably encapsulates the content” of her book and her range of knowledge. She praised the rather relaxed structure of her program for allowing her to transcend the sound-bite syndrome and, occasionally, even prattle on and on about a subject, such as potty training.

“Probably nobody has been given such fantastic scope. Even David Frost doesn’t get what I’ve been given,” she said.

Leach said she turned down earlier television offers because the proposed programs began with an emphasis on children’s problems. “I hate the equation that kid equals problem,” Leach said.

By contrast, she said that her series begins with the assumption that parenting is a natural process whose participants occasionally encounter pitfalls.

“I suppose if there is one overall message, it’s that while there are problems in parenting, parenting per se is not a problem,” Leach said. “When all is said and done, most of us have kids because we think it will be rewarding and exciting, so let’s have fun while we’re doing it.”