Browse any major bookstore and you will find dozens of titles on how to help your child do X better (eat, sleep, behave…) or how to parent your child with regard to Y and Z. At first, it seems like a good thing to have all of these books and advice columns and television shows on parenting. As a first time mom, I certainly pored over my fair share of articles and books on everything from sleep to discipline. I didn’t know what I was doing; surely all of these experts could help me make the right choices!

Perhaps they can for some things; however, there is a disturbing theory that all of this parenting advice actually undermines our ability to parent our children. Are we losing confidence in our own parental instincts and knowledge in the face of dozens of popular methods for doing everything from potty training to stimulating our children’s creativity? Are we facing increased pressures, not only on ourselves as parents (to do things an expected way), but on our children because of popular parenting techniques/the parenting expert boom?

Psychologist Tanya Byron thinks so.

“I’m not saying all the books out there are bad, we’ve just got to restore parents’ confidence in their own ability rather than tell them what to do.[…]Parenting is not a job with a series of techniques that we do to our children,” she says.

She is also fully aware that often there are no definitive answers when it comes to youngsters and says that is what makes being a parent so exciting.

“I don’t know what a perfect parent is or what a perfect child is but I suspect both would be extremely dull,” she says. “Life is about challenge and emotion, it’s about the reality of living.”

Maybe we all ought to trust ourselves a bit more and look to the “pros” a little bit less - after all, aren’t we the real experts when it comes to our own children?

Posted by Sunshining.