Parents know their child best, right? Wrong, to look at the growth industry that is parenting advice. Every newspaper has its parents' page and resident expert; reality TV shows such as 'Supernanny' turn family dysfunction into 'infotainment'; the Government has launched an academy of 'parenting practitioners', and decreed how many each local council must have in place. At universities, academics specialise in analysing the whole trend.
'Lots of us have become advice junkies; lots of parents are on an IV drip of advice,' says Carl Honore, author of the bestselling book In Praise of Slow. He has just applied his 'slow down' brakes to families in a new book, Under Pressure: Rescuing children from the culture of hyper-parenting (Orion Books, £16.99). As society downsizes to smaller families, he points the finger at 'the culture of soaring expectations, where people think they've got to have perfect teeth, the perfect holiday, the perfect child,' and at the migration of a management ethos from the workplace into family life. Enter the childrearing gurus - 'Parents feel that they don't know anything, but that other people do, so who do they turn to? The consultants!'
Hot-housing and the yummy mummy may be products of the affluent suburbs, but Honore says the competitive pace that the middle classes set trickles down the social ladder. He says, 'I hate to think that even if they live on a council estate, on a lower income, somebody is having to ask, do I sacrifice a third of my grocery bill so I can hire a tutor for my child?'
Nowhere is the 'intensification of parenting' and its attendant advice industry more conspicuous than on television, where it may have come to a head last autumn in the backlash against tough-love advocate Claire Verity and the Channel 4 reality show 'Bringing Up Baby'. The TV programme even became the subject of an academic conference at Cambridge University in December, with its producer putting in a guest appearance.
A question of style
Another of the speakers there was Dr Ellie Lee, who herself organised an academic conference last May at the University of Kent, called 'Monitoring Parents: Child rearing in the age of intensive parenting'. Dr Lee said, 'Parenting gurus have always said they know better than each other and they have always given far greater import than is warranted to differences in parenting style. What is new is the polarisation among parents themselves, and what is most worrying is the prospect of a war among parents about the best ways to bring up kids.'
Her Kent colleague and co-organiser, the author of Paranoid Parenting, Professor Frank Furedi, likened the Claire Verity battleground to the one between 'Contented Little Baby' guru Gina Ford and the mumsnet.com website that Ford took to court for defamation last year. 'Parenting has turned into a lifestyle in which women, and increasingly, men, make statements about themselves via the tactics and techniques they use to bring up their infants,' he wrote in The Times. 'With so much emotional investment, parents are continually preoccupied with how their performance is judged in public.'
A Parenting Culture Studies group is now based at Kent University's sociology department. Its agenda includes 'the policing of pregnancy', 'the moralisation of infant feeding', 'the medicalisation of parenthood and the professionalisation of everyday life'.
Amid all these 'isms' and 'ations', where does the humble early years professional stand? They at least have one advantage over the media expert - they know a particular child and parent personally.
Carl Honore notes that early years settings, too, come under pressure from hyper-parenting. He says that many worried parents 'can't see the bigger picture' and recommends that they be introduced to other parents and children who had attended their child's nursery a few years previously, or that parents be invited to meet teachers from the infant school a few years up to talk about how they'd like to see children arrive at their class - 'Do they want them reading and writing formally, or do they prefer children who are just socially adept?', he says.
The nanny state
Of course, the real pressure for early achievement and more perfect children is coming from the Government. Ever expanding in its role as a 'corporate parent', the state takes the view, according to many of the academic commentators, that 'mothering is too important to leave to mothers'. Politicians - and not just those who have suggested that future criminals can be identified at age three - tend to see family matters in terms of intervention. The Government's action plan 'Every Parent Matters' requires all local authorities to have put a 'parenting support strategy' in place by last month.
One person charged with delivering it is Pat Wills, a local authority parenting co-ordinator in Blackpool and former head of a large primary school with a children's centre. However, Ms Wills thinks that professionals haven't been listening to parents enough, and that a certain trust needs to be restored. She says, 'The important message to put to parents is that they know more than they think they know' - as, indeed, Dr Spock said back in the 1950s.
The Government launched its National Academy for Parenting Practitioners last November with a mission to 'transform the quality and size of the parenting workforce so that parents can get the help they need to raise their children well'. Pat Wills thinks its job will be to introduce some sort of quality control over the multitude of parenting courses and initiatives that are about, and it could form a professional code and additional qualifications, much like the NPQICL created for the leadership of children's centres.
But she says it all starts with the early years workers who can build a trusting relationship with parents of children in their care, spot potential problems, and offer them 'somewhere you can go and put the kettle on, and have a chat'.
The importance of trust between early years workers and parents, in an informal atmosphere, is echoed by Rosalind Ashworth. She has just taken up the job of children's centre lead practitioner, which she describes as 'a nursery teacher with knobs on', at Beacon Hill in Blackpool. But it was in her previous work with a Sure Start programme in Preston that troubled parents were referred to her for firm but friendly advice.
'They understood the principles but didn't know how to put it into practice on a one-to-one basis,' says Ms Ashworth. She recalls one mother who was too embarrassed to take her over-lively son on the bus or to the shops. 'She knew you were supposed to set boundaries but didn't know how to carry it out. I sat her down and simply said, if he does this, you do that, and if he does that, you do this, no bribes or promises. It was so rewarding when this mum came in all excited one day and said "We went to town on the bus!"'
She describes how a quiet teenage mother who came to the parents' discussion forums at the Sure Start centre progressed in confidence from sitting passively at the back, to becoming chair of the forum. 'The more education she got, the more she had her own opinions.'
Role model rules
Ms Ashworth strives to impress on nursery staff that they are modelling behaviour for parents as well as children at pick-up times, such as when she stopped some disruptive boys who kept playing with the light switches. 'You've got to do it whether Dad is here or not, because that's the rule. And it's the rule all the time.'
She thinks that when problems arise in families it is often because parents have let the children get the upper hand. 'Some parents smack, or swear or scream and pull their children around, where others over-indulge their child. But the result is the same.'
And she makes short shrift of Frank Furedi's view of parenting as a lifestyle statement: 'It doesn't matter what lifestyle you have, the rules are the same!'
