My best-for-baby formula: be firm but fair and stick to a daily routine

Verity is only updating a method from the 1950s, as espoused by a New Zealand doctor, Frederic Truby King, based on the belief that children subject to a strict routine are more likely to thrive than those who are not — those my mother refers to dismissively as “free-range” kids.

MY mother was in a rage on Monday night, lambasting RTÉ for wasting valuable time on the programme 21st Century Child.

It’s not that she has anything against child psychologist David Coleman. Far from it. The general consensus is that he is an absolute gentleman, kind, full of wisdom and down to earth.

Rather, my mother gets irritated with what she sees as the notion that there were no children before the 21st century and that too many of these parenting programmes devote an extraordinary amount of time to stating the blindingly obvious.

Her attitude is born of the experience of having four children under the age of five in the 1970s and having to rely on her own instincts and commonsense when it came to parenting.

Although a book by Dr Benjamin Spock may have been somewhere on her shelves, there wasn’t enough time to dish out all the cuddles he recommended, and there was certainly nothing like today, when parents are being bombarded with self-help guides and parenting programmes which can have the unintended effect of leaving them more confused than they would be without them.

My mother has a tendency to throw her eyes up to heaven when child psychologists earnestly tell new parents on television that they should make eye contact with their babies, and that when babies begin chomping their fingers it might be a sign they are hungry.

She is surprised that little seems to be said when parents stick gigantic soothers in their newborn babies’ mouths and that some think it is reasonable to have children sleeping in their parents’ bed until the age of two.

She has a point. Maybe we’re being over-guided, and this at a time when women are having fewer children than ever before.

There are those who stand in stark contrast to David Coleman, such as Claire Verity, a self-styled baby guru who appeared on Channel Four last October in the programme Bringing Up Baby, determined to be obnoxious (and she charges £1,000 a day for her services).

Her starting point was a simple question: “How can you let something so small as a newborn baby rule your life?”

She justified behaving like a callous witch on the basis that her method works, though plenty of cynics were quick to point out that her “tough love” attitude is all fine and well for her because she is not a mother.

Verity believes in the rationing of cuddles (no more than 10 minutes a day), regular feeding at four-hour intervals and throwing kids out in to the fresh air on their own in hail and shine.

On no account should babies be picked up when they cry. “Most of the time when a baby cries, they are tired or attention- seeking. In both cases, ignore them,” she insisted.

That sounds very harsh, but Verity is only updating a method of child-rearing from the 1950s, as espoused by a New Zealand doctor, Frederic Truby King, which was based on the belief that children who are subject to a strict routine are more likely to thrive than those who are not — those my mother refers to dismissively as “free-range” kids.

Critics of the Verity method do not see any point in having a child if you are going to shut it out of your life for much of the day, avoid eye contact and ignore its cries, to which Verity’s response is that her method results in children sleeping from 7pm to 7am and the alternative is mayhem and exhaustion.

Others are champions of the so-called continuum concept which involves constant skin-to-skin contact with a baby in a sling for the first six months, which really is making it clear to a mother that she is not entitled to a moment’s space and perhaps may create children with dependency issues.

I have to admit my wife and I became convinced of certain aspects of a stricter method — not so much the Verity method but the approach championed by Gina Ford in her bestseller, The Contented Little Baby

This too is controversial, but is based on a simple concept — once you establish a routine, everything else will follow, but you have to be consistent, and sometimes cruel (my words) to be kind in order to get the result you want, with lack of eye contact in the dead of night, blackout blinds and absolute rigidity when it comes to bedtime.

We got our 7pm to 7am routine established relatively quickly, and though there were occasional bouts of guilt, we justified the regime on the basis that babies like routine and want to know what is coming next at all times.

It’s not for everyone. Our copy of Gina Ford’s book was actually passed on to us by my brother, also a father of two young children who couldn’t wait to get rid of the book. “That Fascist Ford” he used to exclaim as he mocked our enthusiasm. He and his wife rejected her method on the grounds that what it was really asking you to do was to think of your child as a machine and that it was unduly severe to demand of besotted new parents that they avoid eye contact with their baby in the middle of the night.

They had a point too — perhaps it is better to pick and choose the bits of these books that you find helpful, but not those you are uncomfortable with — though I’m sure the authors would dismiss that as cheating that ultimately will not work.

I certainly couldn’t follow the advice about lack of eye contact, but we did move our babies into their own rooms when they were two weeks old, which appalled some of our peers.

OUR justification was that this was what our own parents had done with us in the 1970s and we did not grow up feeling emotionally bereft.

The real question is how far you want to take the methods. We found them helpful for the first year with both our daughters, but we tended to be more flexible after that, except for insisting on the same bedtime every night.

At some stage you do have to take your head out of books and your eyes away from the television, follow your instincts, stop looking for problems, seek the advice of parents, friends and siblings with children and accept the fact that each baby has a unique personality and deserves to be allowed to be themselves within certain boundaries that you are entitled to impose.

My mother reminded me that when I was sleeping in the cot as a toddler, practically every night I used to constantly bang my head against the cot, so much so that in the morning the cot used to end up at the other side of the room.

I’m sure these days the child psychologists would have a field day with that scenario. I asked my mother did she consider seeking any help about this nocturnal routine of mine?

“Not at all,” she replied. “I used to turn to your father and say, ‘that fella has an overactive mind!’