Battle lines drawn over best parenting style

"Harsh disciplinarian" books that treat babies as "the enemy", are making mothers feel bad about their parenting skills, complains Sheila Kitzinger, one of Britain's leading experts on childbirth.

Her ire is directed at Gina Ford, the childless former nurse whose best-selling strictures for dealing with newborn babies so deeply divide parents. Both women's books will be high on the list of presents for prospective parents this Christmas.

Ms Ford's bible for new mothers, the New contented little baby book, has sold 700,000 copies in Britain alone.

But Mrs Kitzinger, who has five children and three grandchildren and whose own new book, Understanding your crying baby, was published last month, is icily dismissive of its prescriptiveness, saying she would give Ms Ford's book to one of her daughters only as "a joke". She remarks: "It is based on rules and timetables. It might work for dogs."

Mrs Kitzinger speaks with authority on children and birthing. Social commentator Polly Toynbee hailed her as "the earth mother, or birth mother of the nation".

Ms Toynbee wrote: "If Britain is now one of the most progressive countries in obstetric practices, it is largely due to her", and a newspaper bestowed on her the title of "high priestess of the childbirth movement" .

Mrs Kitzinger expounds her child-raising theories in her latest book, whose 176 pages amount to a stark riposte to "authoritarian" childcare experts such as Gina Ford and the American paediatrician Richard Ferber.

In it, she writes: "These books advise the reader to organise the home and command their children in almost military style.

"One book promises that if you follow the instructions you will become 'general of your household'. It says, 'When the troublesome intruder seeks attention at inconvenient times, show who's boss. If you don't, a baby takes over and ruins your life. Don't let a little dictator into your home.'

"That is the implicit message in these management systems. Compassion, tenderness - love itself - are symptoms of weakness, and of failure as parents."

Instead, Mrs Kitzinger says, evidence suggests that ordinary, spontaneous loving mothers who are alert to their babies' needs do better than all the experts put together.

"You don't need an MBA in baby management to be a good mother," she says.

Commenting on her own book, she says: "I wrote it because there were a lot of very bossy, know-it-all systems telling mothers how they can train their children, and they wouldn't be good mothers unless they did so.

"My book looks at what mothers' lives are actually like, what they do when their babies cry, and how they feel."

She says mothers are often plunged into despair when their baby cries, particularly if they have had a difficult birth and particularly if their baby cries for a long time.

She relates how many of the mothers whose babies wail relentlessly - sometimes for six hours out of 24 - talked about the profound depression that they experienced.

"Many were near the edge of violence."

Mrs Kitzinger, who raised her five girls in the 1960s, believes the pressure on modern mothers is immense and that "know-it-all" books merely heighten this anxiety. "[Mothers] think they have to show they are perfect and demonstrate that they can juggle their lives. They want to show that they have an easy baby."

Gina Ford's book stipulates that babies should sleep from 7pm until 7am. "With some [babies], the techniques work and the parents feel very pleased, even smug," Mrs Kitzinger says. "But if the techniques don't work and parents find they are training their own behaviour rather than their babies', then they can feel very guilty about it."

Parenting theory goes in cycles, reckons Mrs Kitzinger. "At the moment we are in a very directive phase when mothers are told babies must not disrupt their lives. Their babies should not affect their careers, they should not affect their sex lives, they should not affect their social lives - it's about 'me time'. Babies are treated like the enemy."

Instead, she says, parents should treat their offspring like "social beings", in need of human interaction rather than mere "servicing" such as feeding, bathing and nappy-changing.


Baby talk

Sheila Kitzinger
* British grandmother, social anthropologist and the author of 24 books on mothering, families and female sexuality. She communicates her wariness of the rise in caesarean and forceps births in lectures to midwives at Thames Valley University, where she is honorary professor.

Gina Ford
* Only child of a single mother, born on a farm in southeast Scotland. Writes passionately prescriptive attempts to introduce routine into the lives of both parents and children. Author of Potty training in one week. Her Contented little baby book is a best-seller.

- INDEPENDENT