Today's basketcase parents should look to the good old days

I HOPE my regular readers will not be disappointed to know that although I have managed to have nine children, and am now the hands-on grandmother of three, I have never read a baby book. In fact, I used to wonder why my American friends with grumpy babies kept mentioning Spock. Perhaps they were propping themselves up late at night in front of old episodes of Star Trek? Personally, I went for the gripe water; for the baby, that is.

So the huge fuss over a program shown on ABC1 called Bringing up Baby left me somewhat nonplussed. I wondered why so many parents watched the show and were so personally affronted. They should have obtained a decent DVD and a bottle of plonk and got into a mood for the type of entertaining evening my colleague Bettina Arndt would approve of.

But no, they tortured themselves with this bad program. Unfortunately, we live in a world of so-called experts although I always thought that when it came to rearing one's children, parents were the experts. The reaction to this program indicated just how appallingly lacking in confidence most Australian parents are.

My research has uncovered 926 book titles available in Australia under the heading of parenting and child care, and that does not include the magazines and associated DVDs. The size of the market is astonishing when one compares it with the popular self-help categories of diet and weight loss. There are only 79 and 33 titles respectively in print in those categories. Are women who are used to control over their working lives incapable of listening to their instincts when they have a baby? Hence, instead of seeing it as a normal, natural part of life, it becomes a huge upheaval. Instead of listening and learning from our own and other mothers, we formularise infant care and think we can learn it like we learned our maths times table. We can't.

So what help is there for the well-meaning modern parent? And what about the methods displayed in the TV program?

I have to confess the only method I knew of was Truby King's, the one supposedly used by the horror nanny Verity.

However, sadly, both in the program and the reaction to it, King's methods are badly misrepresented and his enormous positive legacy totally ignored. So, for example in a popular parenting blog, I read this: "Apparently the Truby King method arises from King's vet days where he noticed regular feeding times and plenty of fresh air resulted in happy healthy calves. Yes, calves. Baby cows. Hmmm."

The author, Felicity Moore, using the de rigueur "it is all so crazy" vein of parental humour, describes herself as a Brisbane mother of three who "divides her time between looking for her sanity and looking for her waistline. She hopes parenthood doesn't send her to an early grave." Very droll. But what a pity she apparently knows nothing about one of the greatest figures in the history of maternal and child health, credited for almost single-handedly cutting the infant mortality rate in New Zealand from 88 per thousand in 1907 to 32 per thousand during the next 30 years. He pioneered the postnatal home-nurse system, which we had almost abandoned and are only beginning to rediscover. And he was never a vet.

King set up the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society, whose methods were exported to Australia and Canada via the Karitane movement that runs postnatal hospitals and outreach centres in Sydney and other large cities and forms the basis for all modern postnatal mothercraft institutions. Contrary to the cliched bloggers, King's was not a 1950s method, the '50s being a shorthand like Stone Age. In fact he formulated his ideas at the turn of the 20th century, but some methods were still used in the '50s. Yes, he was adamant that babies needed routine regular feeds and sleep, and mothers needed rest. Also part of that routine was strict hygiene, and in the time before routine immunisation it was truly vital, as was daily exposure to sunlight. He had been a doctor in Glasgow and he had seen rickets. He was not against breastfeeding but, quite radically for the time, he insisted that the protein content of artificial feeds should mimic breast milk.

Mary Kirk, director of nursing and executive officer of the Queen Elizabeth II Family Centre in Canberra, is quite happy to give King his due but points out that modern methods of infant care have evolved and are much more responsive to babies' development. Nor has she anything against Benjamin Spock, the one who sold 50 million copies of his book, although he himself acknowledged that, judging by the more selfish members of generations X and Y, his child-centred methods didn't always work. But Kirk, a hands-on nurse with a long career in child and maternal health who sees 1600 families a year in Canberra, has no doubt about what is plaguing modern parenting. It goes beyond which technique of infant management is used. It is fear.

"Today's parents' instincts are paralysed by fear. They cannot read infants' cues and don't know whether to respond or not. So they become hyper-vigilant, responding to everything, resulting in the modern phenomenon of 'helicopter' parenting. And because so many parents cannot identify the difference between wants and needs themselves, they fail to identify that in their infants and then older children," Kirk says.

"Parents really need to look at their own values and distinguish between wants and needs, to be secure in those and then set boundaries for the child. It is actually very stressful for children not to have developmentally appropriate boundaries."

The mothering instinct can be smothered and parents are simply not prepared for the change in their controlled life, particularly if they have spent years childless and focused on themselves, investing their identity in a career. But when we have children we really find out who we are, not what we do.

Of course so much of the problem with modern parenting is modern families. Aside from the increasing number of pathologies, such as alcoholism and drug taking, even relatively healthy families are fragmented. People live all over the place, families are small and grandmothers are almost too old by the time they have grandchildren to advise, help and do all the other grandmotherly things.

Worse, in the future, as first-time mothering is pushed further and further back there is a distinct possibility that some children will grow up without any grandparents.

It might also help to realise that once we didn't have conveniently gender-neutral parents, we had mothers and fathers. How odd that we make a fuss about infant management techniques but are willing to subject our children to bizarre social experiments such as same-sex parenting and serial step-parents or father figures that will be much more harmful than any infant management technique could be.

Men and women are complementary. Fathers are lifelong learners but it is the mother who has the guiding instinct. So having children as early as possible with a loving father who is a willing learner makes for better mothering and better fathering.