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An absolutely wonderful read. I read three widely recommended books, which diametrically opposed each other on almost everything. So I decided to ignore most of the advice, and rely on friends, family, medical experts, and my own intuition. Anything the books mostly agreed on, I did tend to follow.

The three books I read:

* The Contented Little Baby - https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-eboo...

* The Fourth Trimester - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Prot...

* The Baby Whisperer - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Comm...

The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that every parent develops nostalgia."

Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of 8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning', who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of love from their parents.

When we had our first born, advice was to wake the baby for feeding so they get used to regular routines. We did this once and he screamed for the entirety of that day so we just fed him at irregular intervals but tried to ensure he still got the right number of feeds in a day.

When we had our second we were told not to wake her. But when she did wake she was so hungry she would have a screaming fit so we learned she preferred to get woken for lunch.

Moral of the story: try as hard as you might to generalise child rearing, they'll always find a way to contradict good advice.

As a father of four girls ranging from 8 years to three months old, I have to agree with that elderly lady. My daughters are all very different persons, with their own personalities, likes and interests. There's very little I could do to change who they fundamentally are, even if I wanted to. I also believe that as long as you love your children (which is very easy to do), and provide them with a safe environment where they can feel empowered to try things (a bit harder, but still very doable), they'll turn out fine.

There's this trend in parenting nowadays, where we're all pursuing perfection via different techniques / philosophies, but anything involving living things, especially humans, is inherently messy / imperfect. Raising children is no exception.

Stellar advice.

I likewise didn't find any perfect instruction manual for keeping a baby healthy and alive, but I did find the process of reading and considering the advice they gave to be helpful in forming our own processes and opinions.

I'd recommend that any prospective parent take some time to read several baby books from conflicting perspectives, to give you the opportunity to be intentional about your parenting style.

Watching other parents is also really really helpful if you have the chance. More often from a "we need to make sure we never ever do that" perspective than anything else.

Exactly! Beautifully put.

The most insidious thing about a lot of these books is the way they can undermine your confidence as a parent at exactly the time you're most vulnerable. Look at these guarantees, look at all these testimonials, look how we use the word 'science' on every page; if your baby isn't sleeping then you're obviously still doing it wrong, you're a bad parent, it's all your fault.

I'm pretty sure it was The Baby Whisperer that nearly drove my wife to a breakdown before we agreed to bin it.

If the answers were all diverging, perhaps the questions themselves could be of help? Gives you things to watch out for. Were the questions answered by the books similar enough?
I think the real secret of many advice books, baby or otherwise, is that nobody knows what they're doing. It's especially hard for baby and other parenting advice, though, because the goals are so varied. What is the aim? A quiet baby? A happy baby? A hard working child, a smart child, a well-behaved child, a happy child? A well-adjusted (whatever that means) adult? A driven and successful adult? A good relationship with the kid? Any of thousands of others?

It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them.

My wife was given/bought at least a dozen baby books when she got pregnant. Skimming through several of them it became clear that everybody was making it up as they went along. Some were far more neurotic than others for sure, but even among the ones with the same temperament and written around the same time the advice varied wildly. The one constant was an underlying fear that if you get this wrong you're going to ruin your child somehow, maybe even kill them.

In the end I took their advice with a grain of salt and mostly went about figuring it out as I went, like most parents do. The one piece of advice I can give is to not worry so much. Kids won't be ruined because you didn't pay attention to them once, or did pay attention to soon, or attempted to engage, or were disengaged, or whatever. Also, every kid is different so blanket advice is of only marginal utility.

Final bit of advice is to try not to bring up the subject of breastfeeding. Everybody knows it is the best, but some people are absolutely nuts about it and will go as far as tell you you're poisoning your child if you ever try to bottle feed them, practical concerns be damned.

In my view, its even misguided to try and 'make' your baby into any of these things. You can help them develop, but its largely up to them to be smart or hard-working or happy later in life. We can at most give them good examples, and try to socialize them?
>It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them

Yes and even if there somehow were credible, reproducible studies that addressed all aspects of parenting and all childhood outcomes then these still couldn't tell one how to parent because there's a moral component.

When my first son was born, my wife subscribed to a website called something along the lines of "The Net Midwife". A former midwife answered health questions from parents.

All her answers were available online for free but if you wanted her to answer your questions, you would have to pay for the subscription.

Why would you want to pay for something which was freely available to you?

Well as it turns out, even though 99% of the questions parents asked were already answered parent's had this idea that their child was unique and they would ask questions like "my child coughs and it says a little noise everything she inhales right after"

The only group of people more naive and easy to persuade are modern dog people.

It's easy to be persuaded by answering services when you're dealing with what's arguably the thing you will ever be most responsible for.

Plenty of people/businesses take advantage of that.

> The only group of people more naive and easy to persuade are modern dog people.

That gave me a good laugh, thanks.

Modern dog people are those too sensitive to have lasting relationships or the responsibility of a baby human and therefore their dog is their baby-by-proxy.

I like that they started with comparison to other animals, with humans being born "sooner" in the development cycle due to our larger brains.

To me, this sets up a nice mental model for the first ~18 months of parenting: your child is still developing the extreme basics, in particular its brain, which is forming pathways based on your actions. So set to work forming those pathways with lots of talking, face time, and letting your child observe the world. After all, it came out to get an "early" start!

Many call the first 3 mo the "Fourth Trimester" for that very reason. The baby is still basically a fetus in many regards. It's around that 3 mo point that they start to really respond to external stimuli in more than basic ways and start to be able to explore their environment.
Here's a fun point of applicable biology terminology (by way of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial
Except that there are plenty of other altricial animals. Many birds, rodents, cats, dogs, other primates, etc. It's not unique to humans.
A business mentor of mine once gave me this wisdom:

The best selling diet books don't contain the best diet advice.

The best selling dating books don't contain the best dating advice.

The best selling business books don't contain the best business advice.

I think this is logical, to some extent, i.e.:

Advice books are optimised for excitement and the illusion of inspiration. Because results take a long time to demonstrate, massive aggregate data, and the elimination of countless other factors, nobody can possibly work out whether the advice in a book is any good before they buy it. Instead they look to reviews, which are based on enjoyment and inspiration. Someone will read it, and coincidentally find success, and you have your testimonial. Someone will read it, and fail, and nobody will know. So to make your book sell, the quality of the advice is mostly irrelevant, it is the engagement that makes the sale.

Exciting truisms and unfalsifiable chattiness sell advice books, not good advice.

Reading advice books 'just in case' you come across good advice, is like reading a string of random numbers 'just in case' you come across the lottery results.

Personally I'm a bit less sceptical, but only a very small bit.

Surprised they don't mention economist Emily Oster's book Expecting Better, which is an imperfect book but takes a data-driven Freakonomics-style approach to pregnancy. I enjoyed it.

The real challenge is that there's so little good data to begin with.

If you read with your kids and don't get divorced then you've already done a great job I think.
I grew up w/ divorced parents and generally most of my friends also had divorced parents. I don't think the divorce as such is such a big deal, its really whether or not both parents keep "showing up". I'd take divorced parents that show up vs married-absentee's any day.

EDIT: I realized you might be meaning -- if you don't let the struggle of parent-hood tear apart your relationship with your spouse, you're doing a good job. In which case I agree 100%.

Ouch, sounds like an actual experienced parent left that comment... People underestimate the difficulty of not getting divorced when you have kids - more so if you have twins etc.
Frank Abagnale's ("Catch Me If You Can" protagonist) take on divorce gives some insight into his life story [1], and is an interesting counterpoint. A transcript for those who hate watching videos. The transcript starts from the link and transcribes 132 seconds of his speech, up to the 23:57 mark.

--- BGN --- I was one of those few children that got to grow up in the world with a daddy. Now, the world is full of fathers. But there are very few men worthy of being called daddy by their child. I had a daddy; loved his children more than he loved life itself. Steven Spielberg told Barbara Walters the more I've researched Frank's youth, without having met Frank, I couldn't help but put his father in the film through the likes of Christopher Walken.

My father was a man who had four children---three boys and a daughter. Every night at bedtime, he'd walk into your room. He was 6'3". He would drop down on one knee, kiss you on the cheek, pull the cover up, and he'd put his lip up on your earlobe. And he'd whisper deep into your ear, "I love you. I love you very much."

He never, ever, missed a night.

As I grew older, I sometimes fell asleep before he got home. But I always woke up the next morning, knew he had been at my bedside.

Years later, my older brother joined me in my room, temporarily; he was in the Marine Corps. He was 6'4". He played semi-pro football for Buffalo. But my father would walk around to his bed, hug him, kiss him, whisper in his hear he loved him.

When I was 16 years old, I was just a child. All 16 year olds are just children. Much as we'd like them to be adults, they're just children. And like all children, they need their mother, and they need their father. All children need their mother and father. All children are entitled to their mother, and their father. And though it is not popular to say so, divorce is a very devastating thing for a child to deal with, and then have to deal with the rest of their natural life.

For me, a complete stranger, a judge, told me I had to choose one parent over the other. That was a choice a 16 year old boy could not make. So I ran. How could I tell you my life was glamorous? I cried myself to sleep 'til I was 19 years old. I spent every birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day in a hotel room somewhere in the world where people didn't speak my language. --- END ---

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI&feature=youtu.be...

and in that case then everyone else needs to back the fuck off (I'm looking at you mothers-in-law)
It's not just baby advice that is fuzzy, it's baby products as well. Every baby business that is ads-based (from blogs, to registries) festers insecurities in parents, so they can sell ridiculously expensive basic products to make you feel a little better: I just bought the "best" (most expensive) rocker on the market, I will be ok. Google also prioritizes the wrong things in content as well (word count and recency) - so most of the searches lead to the same crap - the same shallow ideas, reiterated with as many words and ads as possible. As a parent with the skills to build, after seeing all of these problems with my first child, I started building a private, actually safe baby registry and vetted ads-free recommendation engine under https://www.dreamlist.com .

The books industry leans on extremes. If it doesn't trigger controversy and insecurity in you, in some way, it doesn't sell. Every child is different and every pregnancy is different. The best source of information so far are medical studies, wherever you can dig them out.

How is this any different from all the 'advice' we get on programming topics, how to write code, how to be a good leader, how to interview well, how to hire, how to fire, and on and on..
It is almost like self help is a difficult topic that has a large market of people looking for prescriptive help.

Snidely, I can't help but muse on the traps and fallacies that are abound in this sort of "looking for answers" method of searching.

Does make me wonder, do folks have collections of "experiments that failed" with speculation or answers as to why? A journal of "the experiments that failed replication this year."

After spending a little too much time on advice books, I put them permanently on the shelf, dispensed to used book stores as time went on. Particularly awful were the "What to Expect" books, which were doctrinaire and promised great ills if the doctrines weren't kept.

I kept a couple anthropological books, including Lancy's, and the Mayo Clinic's medical guides to pregnancy and the first year. Too, a developmental book "Touchpoints" which seemed to have a pragmatic style and gave some understanding of typical development.

For specific baby management concerns, we were trained by the nurses at the hospital, and visits to the doc addressed things that came up otherwise.

Thing is - what the anthro and historical views of baby raising taught me -

If your kid has Issues, that will be a medical situation, and should be addressed medically. If your kid does not have Issues, then largely they will turn out as they will, if you treat them decently and well, for the first year. Feed em, clean em, read to em, put em to bed, and it'll be largely okay. As they come to more reasoning and thinking, influence increases, but the first year is sort of a wash in many ways. There are huge variations in how different groups treat the first year, and it doesn't seem to matter in turning out functional humans.

Behavior issues can be mitigated by routine and structure, but not avoided.

The idea of each kid being this special & unique flower is sort of a 20c development. That's important to remember and contemplate.

> There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.

Yeah... no. As a new father of a now five-month old boy, I very highly recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father by Armin A. Brott. They are a far cry from a "wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer". It's unfortunate that this (so far) otherwise interesting article is doing what so many of the books it is criticizing do... giving little attention to the fatherhood side of parenting.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. The Armin Brott books are quite reasonable. Respectful to new moms, broad enough to cover a range of parental experiences. I would strongly recommend them to any new father, and I make sure my copies circulate to any expectant dad I know.
Weighing on every new dad I ever met (at least in the background) is, "How the hell am I gonna pay for all this?"
Highly recommend these books too and also about to read Fathering Your Toddler by the same author.
This type of comment is all too common across The Guardian to the point that it is almost editorial policy. It's a real shame as The Guardian is one of the better major papers out there in my opinion. I just wish they could face the fact that they have a real problem with this type of snide anti-male remark.
When I reached the age of reason, I asked my boomer parents (a mental health practitioner and a corporate V.P.) if they really thought there was a book that had every answer they'd need as parents. "Of course," they replied.

But as a former subject of the material, I can tell you they definitely didn't have all the answers. As privileged and intelligent as they were, they still fucked up. But I'm also not dead, and on the whole I'm only mildly traumatized by the unnecessary drugs and suffocating restriction on personal freedom and privacy. So I really don't care about what kind of baby advice they intoned, and I don't think parents should care either. Just keep the little bastard alive until it can move out on its own, so you can have a whole new world of worries to consider.

Every single baby guide book is 100% absolutely garbage. I encourage every single one of you that are about to have children to never EVER buy one. All they do is talk about the "average" baby, and you'll soon find that you and your spouse feel entirely inadequate because your baby isn't sleeping as much, eating as much, moving as much, interacting as much, etc.

What the books never tell you is that sure, there may be average numbers available, but the STANDARD DEVIATION is HUGE. No baby is average. My wife was convinced our first child had sleeping issues because he slept 2 hrs less than average. It turns out that's just who he is, he sleeps a lot less than most kids, but still at the bottom of the range of healthy. All it does is fuck with your head, so just take a cue from other parents around you.

There is a popular anecdote along these lines that comes from the 1950's US Air force.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all 10 dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.

Zero.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.

Using their definition of "average range", which is the middle 30% (in height, waist circumference, etc), we should expect to find one such individual for every 1/0.3^10 = 169,351 people on average.

When our kids were babies everyone we knew here in the UK seemed to have an obsession with getting their kids off to sleep as early as possible (about 7pm usually - mostly by putting them in a separate room and ignoring them) and then were amazed that their kids woke up really early.

We let our kids stay up until they went to sleep at their own pace and then they seemed to wake up at a relatively civilized time.

> All it does is fuck with your head, so just take a cue from other parents around you.

A parent you make insecure by gaslamping the hell out of them, suggesting there's something wrong with their child if it doesn't conform to xyz is going to spend a lot of money on solutions to problems that don't exist.

We made tons of these mistakes the first time around. For the rest, we just bought diapers, formula and toys and let nature take its course. They turned out fine.

Baby books are the Fox News of childrearing-- lots of bold opinions and advice, most of it dubious/inapplicable.

If you enjoyed the article, I'd recommend his book "Help", which picks apart self-help books on other subjects.
Just because there is a lot of bad advice. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Attunement and Attachment is real and worth investing in.

My wife, an expert in early years education, was mightly impressed with raising boys by steve biddulph.
I've found baby advice books to be 85% fluff/filler and 15% actionable advice. But that 15% can dramatically improve quality of life / the amount of sleep I get each night.
As we are born so helpless; "who or what raised the first human baby?" is the first thought that comes to mind!
That development didn't happen overnight. Our species gradually evolved into one where babies are born helpless because it apparently made evolutionary sense. Logic dictates that it was a gradual change enforced by the survival of the fittest.
Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise.

You could replace “Attachment Parenting” with so many different ideas, from anti-vaxxer ideology to AGW denialism. It’s painful to think about just how broadly applicable the observation of the author is beyond the realm of this article. As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power, profit, or comfort.

In particular New Age-ism, political identity, and alternative “medicine” are hotbeds of this.