Never in the history of bringing up babies has so much advice been so easily accessible by so many. Every bookshop has a parenting section and pretty well every book has a website. If you Google a problem, you will find contradictory solutions galore. Individual blogs and such parenting forums as mumsnet contradict the experts and curse each other with the fanatic vim that the anonymity of the keyboard encourages. TV parenting programmes now run in prime time. We seem to love being bossed about: Supernanny and House of Tiny Tearaways attract huge audiences.

My own history of childcare advice, Dream Babies, written as a perverse form of occupational therapy while I was bringing up our four daughters and now extended to help them with their own babies, aimed to guide parents through the labyrinth of advice, help them to sort out the essential basics from the fashionable frills, divert them with still useful tips from the past, and encourage them to think for themselves. I came to realise during what I thought would be an amusing social history that childcare advice changes as fast as hemlines, and not always for the better.

It has always reflected parents’ life-styles more than baby’s. Maternal breastfeeding was strongly recommended in the 1800s, when most alternatives proved fatal, but was seen as faintly indecent in the 1880s, when hygiene was better understood and feminism was gaining ground. “Let no mother condemn herself to be a common or ordinary ‘cow’ unless she has a real desire to nurse,” wrote the redoubtable Mrs Panton in her 1896 book The Way They Should Go. It took the maligned Truby King’s “Breast fed is Best fed” crusade of the 1920s to make breastfeeding valued once again. By the 1980s, supersensitivity to women’s preferences had turned it into an optional extra.

Experts advised rigid discipline for babies and children during such national emergencies as the two world wars and the economic depression between them. Besotted gurglings over the infant genius of His Majesty the Baby in the leisured 1900s gave way to J. B. Watson’s suggestion in the 1920s that you teach your toddler independence by leaving him alone in the garden to puzzle his own way out of difficulties – watching him, if you must, through a periscope so that he doesn’t seek your help.

For centuries, keeping baby alive at all was the prime purpose of the manuals. But in the past 50 years, medical science and an improved understanding of child development has allowed us the luxury – or anxiety – of choice. In 1946 Dr Spock rubbished the timetables that had reigned in nurseries for centuries. His famously permissive ideas were in part a reaction to his own exceptionally strict mother, in part a reflection of Western antipathy to spartan Soviet ways. They were also influenced by theories about children’s developing minds and the fashionable new belief that they needed unstinting praise to boost their self-esteem.

Spock’s advice required easy-to-run homes and general affluence. Now that property prices mean that both parents need to be wage earners to finance a family home, and we are beginning to wonder if children don’t have a shade too much self-esteem, it is not surprising that routines are being enthusiastically rediscovered. It is not chance that makes Gina Ford so popular. Great as slings are, they don’t always wear well in the office. New parents need advice, especially if there’s a shortage of helpful mums and chums.

But they don’t need to force themselves into straitjackets unsuited to their personalities.

At a Cambridge University seminar attended by Daisy Goodwin, producer of the recent, controversial reality TV parenting series Bringing Up Baby, many mothers said they felt hypnotised and disempowered by both the abundance and the contradictions of all the advice, especially when claims are made (wrongly in the case of Goodwin’s programme) that certain practices can permanently damage, even threaten, the lives of babies. Putting them to sleep in the fresh air does not amount to child abuse, nor does nudging them into a sleep pattern that suits their own digestions and their parents’ needs.

Most of the fury the programme provoked arose from panic at the supposed damage that newborns might be experiencing and the nation’s horror at the strutting self-assurance of Claire “Cruella de Nursery” Verity, who preached the 1950s strict routines and fresh-air fetishism of Truby King. There were lengthy editorials in national newspapers and vituperative blogs on parents’ internet sites. “I hadn’t realised that babycare is as emotive and divisive an issue as foxhunting,” Goodwin wrote ruefully.

At the seminar, academics likened the “nursery wars” on the internet and on TV to “a morality play, complete with baddies and goodies”, and deplored the “new fundamentalism”. An internet journalist said that the experts didn’t realise how daunting they were to mere mortals and that most parents find it easier to take tips from their friends than from books and a bossy nanny state.

My advice to any parent is to survey the parenting shelves, the TV programmes and the internet sites with the same subjectivity that you use when you select a magazine or a cookery book. Some of us like Prospect, some prefer People’s Friend. Nigella is a goddess to most of us, but anathema to a few. Like the couples in Bringing up Baby, you can opt for an approach that suits you. The odds are that your baby – just because it is yours – will like it too.

Christina Hardyment is the author of Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford (Frances Lincoln, £12.99). The Cambridge University Forum Bringing Up Baby: Parenting, Expertise and the Media was organised by Charlotte Faircloth.

Download an audio version at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/baby.html

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