Experts have plenty of advice for new parents. If only they could agree.

I am raising my baby all wrong. You’re probably raising your baby wrong, too. I have it on good authority. The authority comes from an assortment of books, mostly large-format paperbacks, strewn around my living room. I can tell they are addressed to me because most of them have “Your Baby” in the title or subtitle.

Like most parents - probably more than most parents, considering everything - I am looking for guidance in handling My Baby. Parenting seemed to be a straightforward proposition when I was on the receiving end of it: I had parents, and they fed me and clothed me and discouraged me from biting and petty larceny. Only when I became a father myself did I start to consider the sheer volume of details, let alone the philosophy behind those details, let alone the possibility of there being a raging culture war over different philosophies. Suddenly I needed assurance.

The books are nothing if not assured. The uncertain project of bringing up an infant is, like losing weight or cultivating inner peace, an outlet for the American faith in the perfectibility of human endeavor. What we lack in cultural continuity, we make up for in consumer spirit. There are right answers to choose, and wrong ones. (…)

Consider the pacifier. “Most babies don’t need them and are better off without,” Penelope Leach declares. “Pacifiers,” the American Academy of Pediatrics counters, “do not cause any medical or psychological problems.”

Or the perilous issue of whether a baby should sleep with its parents. “Family beds do have snags and it’s sensible to foresee them if you can so that you can weigh the pros and cons,” Leach writes, on tiptoe. The American Academy of Pediatrics chooses its side by omitting “family bed” and “co-sleeping” from its index altogether; the Searses, partisans of love and attachment, present a bullying hard sell for cuddling through the night: “If there were fewer cribs, would there be fewer crib deaths?”

(…) The more we read, the more the experts began to sound like the nattering advice we were already getting. Feed the baby cereal with a spoon. Feed the baby cereal with your finger. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a recurring footnote, explains that its Section on Breastfeeding and its Committee on Nutrition could not agree on whether to start solid foods at four months or at six. Perhaps, the Searses say, you only want to start solids because you’re trying to force your baby to conform to an arbitrary timetable. (…)

Source: Boston Globe, United States
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