So much advice

BABY manuals, according to York mum Lucy Hjort, are great - "for propping up a wonky cot." Not a fan, then? If the sheer number of bringing-up-baby books weighing down the shelves in bookshops and the virtual shelves on the Internet is anything to go by, she may well be in a minority.

Baby manual enthusiasts tend to fall into two camps: Leach lovers and Ford fans.

Following the doctrine of child psychologist Penelope Leach, set down in her 1977 book Your Baby and Child, the former tend to favour a "baby knows best" approach. The latter, led from the front by former maternity nurse Gina Ford, whose book The Contented Little Baby Book was published in 1999, advocate strict routines that put parents firmly in the driving seat.

Leach believes you should always pick up a crying baby, you should encourage good behaviour with incentives rather than discourage bad behaviour with punishments, and you should feed on demand.

Ford, on the other hand, believes you should follow a set sleeping and feeding routine, you should not pick up a crying baby during a designated sleep period, and you should set a baby down before it falls asleep so it will learn to drop off on its own.

It's difficult to imagine these two hitting it off at a coffee morning, isn't it? Particularly as they are undergoing something of a war of words in the national tabloids.

Talking about her rival's advice that parents should wake a baby who falls asleep at the wrong time, Dr Leach is quoted as saying: "If they kept waking somebody in an Iraqi jail, we'd call it torture."

In reply, Miss Ford said any implication that her methods were damaging to children was ridiculous, adding: "My book is strict on the parent but not on the baby. For more than 20 years mothers were told to do what the baby wants. That can be very tiring."

So, it is dummies at dawn in the battle of the baby experts; but where does that leave parents seeking advice, tips and information on raising their child?

"Sometimes a book can be a useful tool," says Lucy Hjort, who runs the Bumps & Babes informal support group in York for the National Childbirth Trust. "It can give parents permission to leave their child to cry if they want to, or to pick them up and give them a cuddle if that's their choice.

"It can give parents the confidence to do what they wanted to do in the first place, only now they have the backing of some expert or other."

She believes contact with other parents, through support groups, coffee mornings or an informal gathering of like-minded friends, is more useful than a stack of baby manuals. In fact, the only book she ever recommends is Libby Purves' How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, an irreverent, anecdotal volume that doesn't pretend to be anything other than entertaining.

In the introduction, Purves, a Radio 4 presenter and fiction writer, equates buying baby manuals to buying false teeth by mail. You get a perfectly good pair of teeth, but they just don't fit.

"It's great because it doesn't tell you what you should and shouldn't do," says Lucy. "It tells you seven or eight ways of doing something, using personal anecdotes, and leaves it up to you to choose your own way.

"I first came across it when I was having my first child nine years ago. It taught me an important lesson: if a particular technique doesn't work for you, it's not your fault. It's a case of horses for courses."

This is not a difficult concept to grasp, unless you have just had a baby and haven't had a decent night's sleep for a month.

Most first-time parents are vulnerable and virtually unable to make rational decisions in the first few weeks. They are bombarded with information from all sides and are usually trying to live up to unrealistic expectations.

"Everyone descends on you with their own tips and advice," says Lucy.

"It's very tempting for other parents to say, 'This is how we did it, why don't you try it?'. In the main, they are well-meaning, but tired, stressed new parents often think they are saying, 'You are incapable, so why not just do as I say?', which is unhelpful and insulting."

When it comes to being a Ford fan or a Leach lover, she ploughs her own furrow somewhere down the middle. She sympathises with the idea of letting a baby cry, but couldn't do it herself because her daughter had eczema.

"The more she cried, the hotter and redder she became and the worse her skin would get," she explains. "That technique was just not for me. But it could be a real boon for people who need a routine if, for instance, they have to get up for work and get the kids to nursery."

It seems the answer then is not to choose a single baby bible, but to cherry-pick ideas from a number of sources and to talk through your troubles with people going through the same process.

"Your baby is going to be like you, so what suits you will probably suit them," says Lucy. "There are no hard and fast rules, so don't try raising your baby by the book."

For details of Bumps & Babes, a weekly coffee morning for mums-to-be and mums with babies up to nine months old, phone Lucy Hjort on 01904 654154. For details of other NCT support groups, phone Tracey Dixon on 01904 490048 or click on to www.nctpregnancyandbabycare.com

Updated: 09:34 Tuesday, May 18, 2004