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Strict four-hourly feeds? Or bottles on demand? Should you put your baby to sleep in a separate room, or allow it to nestle in with you all night? The whole baby-raising debate has now become so polarised there is even a Channel 4 reality show devoted to the topic, with “routine” gurus in the red corner, and “relaxed” ones in the blue.

Myself? As with most women really, when I had each of my children, I tended to muddle along a bit. I was completely unable, however, to let any of my four lie sobbing on its own in a darkened room. When the first squeak emanated over the baby monitor, I would rush over and pick them up. And yes, I breast-fed wholly on demand. My reasoning? No baby is born with a watch, therefore how on earth can they understand the “four-hour rule”, a rigid feeding sermon preached by the likes of Gina Ford, who thinks that babies need to fit in with your adult schedule, rather than the other way around.

Have I ended up with spoilt, demanding children? Well, maybe, but that is probably more down to their upbringing in modern, affluent Britain than any breast-feeding policy.

My viewpoint would horrify Claire Verity, a uniformed, self-confessed “complete bitch” in the Bringing Up Baby series, which starts this Tuesday, who swears by the strict routine developed in the 1950s by New Zea-land paediatrician Truby King, and given a 1990s spin by Ford. No moses baskets, no touching, prams outside in all weathers, no feeding on demand, no free and easy hugging. And a lot of controlled crying.

That’s the worst, in my view. Why torture yourself hearing your dear little baby crying itself silly? That precious period when your offspring is newborn is so fleeting that to me it is sheer perversity to deny yourself the instinctive reactions of a new mother or father, by insisting that your baby cries in a “controlled manner” (surely an impossibility). At the very best, this means you are missing out on the intense parental pleasure of picking up a yelling infant and having the power to comfort it. At the worst, I feel you leave your baby feeling abandoned and afraid.

Watching Verity on a preview DVD made me distinctly uncomfortable, as again and again, she shut the door on a tiny human being, and forbade its parents to interact with it. I am much more in step with Dreena Hamilton, a glamorous grandmother who advocates the “you know more than you think you know” orthodoxy of Dr Spock. “It’s your way. It’s your baby. There is no right and wrong and therefore there is no guilt,” suggests Hamilton, gleefully hugging a tot in a babygro.

I also had a bit of time for Claire Scott, who advocates the “continuum concept” of the 1970s, sling and all, where you had your baby with you at all times. I found that popping a baby in a sling was a brilliant calming method. Indeed, I could be found (occasionally) vacuuming the house with a snoring baby slung around me in a Wilki-net baby carrier, and as for sleeping with my offspring, I am your woman.

When my children were born, and took an instant dislike to their moses basket (let alone the cot in the spare room), I realised they had to go in with me, otherwise nobody would get any rest. I chucked out my duvet and invested in some lovely 1,000-thread count cotton sheets, and a blanket. This ensured that nobody got too hot, and crucially that baby’s head was never covered by a duvet.

At the very least, Bringing Up Baby will probably instil in most parents or in most viewers the strong feeling that nothing should be done by the book. Yes, I fed on demand, à la Dr Spock, and allowed my children to sleep in bed with us. But I also popped each new baby outside, in its pram, under a cat net, for several hours in the garden each day. This is classic Truby King policy and I have to say I am a great advocate of it. My children seemed to enjoy watching the leaves waving in the trees above them, and if they were yelling with frostbite, I never heard them. It also gave me a couple of guilt-free hours to myself.

Daisy Goodwin, who produced Bringing Up Baby, explains that she came up with the idea for it, having had her two children 10 years apart, during which time childrearing fashions had utterly changed. “With the first one, I read Penelope Leach [mother knows best], and with the second, Gina Ford. I was amazed by the gulf between them,” she says. “New parents are very vulnerable, it’s a very hard time and there is a lot of advice out there. We wanted to show how passionate people are about one regime or another, and how different each one is.”

Intriguingly, Goodwin suggests that each policy was born as a direct reflection of its cultural atmosphere. “Fashions in childrearing change as swiftly as hemlines,” she says. So the policy of the 1950s sprang from the still recent experience of the second world war, where military discipline was admired and national service part of life. The Dr Spock “no baby can be loved too much” mantra is typical loved-up 1960s fodder, whereas the continuum concept of the 1970s was advocated by a woman called Jean Liedloff who had examined how Amazon natives bought up their babies.

Modern history aside, what will your averagely confused new parent gain from the series? “It will show you the advantages and disadvantages of each method,” says Goodwin. “A lot of people will think that a ‘strict routine’ is cruel, and will produce remote, detached babies but we have no evidence of this.” How were the babies themselves by the time their televisual experiment was over? “They were all happy and smiling,” insists Goodwin.

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