Rachel O'Dwyer: I felt only confusion − even shame − about every choice I made as a parent

Lately there’s renewed friction between parenting styles. One school of thought models gentle parenting, the other an authoritative mode now sometimes called #FAFO (f**k around and find out). Gentle parenting ranges from acknowledging a child’s feelings to more radically child-centred philosophies that argue the word ‘no’ can trigger a stress response in little ears.Videos of authoritative parenting, meanwhile, feature satisfying reels of crying children put out on the side of the road during long car journeys, but the gist is that parents are in charge, and there will be consequences. Like everything on the internet, extremism wins. “You’re leaving to a different house because I won’t let you sleep in our room?,” a mom says to an adorable toddler in a reel labelled #FAFO. “See ya”. She slams the front door. Both styles promise that if you do the right thing now, you can shape the grown-up later. That promise is seductive because parenting involves decisions whose consequences we can’t know for years, if ever.I love nothing more than seeing what cursed rod another parent has fashioned for their backs out of internet wisdom and failed willpower. On the parenting podcast Stop the Madness, hosted by Jen O’Dwyer and Sophie White, one poor mother wrote in to say that her child could not fall asleep without thumb sucking. Tame, you think, until the listener reveals that the thumb was hers, squeezed through the bars of the cot each night as her baby lulled himself to sleep.READ MORESo I’m here to pay it forward in a national broadsheet and tell you that my son slept in our bed until he was eight. You’re welcome. At night I fantasised about practical solutions. By age three that wasn’t sleep training but a giant bed like you’d find in a cult leader’s livingroom or some Ikea of the future that spies a market for useless parents: “the GRÄNSLÖS family bed accommodates two adults, one child and the remains of your authority”.Was that a responsive parenting philosophy, weak parenting, bad boundaries? I still don’t know. I felt only confusion – even shame – about every choice I made as a parent. I’m normally someone who reads exhaustively before doing anything practical (I looked up a diagram of a clutch when learning to drive). With motherhood, I was the opposite: the more advice I encountered the less sure I felt.When my son was six weeks old I took him to baby massage in a nearby yoga centre. We oiled our baby’s fleshy thighs while singing blatantly sizeist songs about jelly. The babies might as well have been sourdough starters they were so inert and the whole exercise was a foil for our new mum dilemmas. We cheered on the poor woman painstakingly expressing two ounces of breastmilk into a sterile bottle because her baby would not latch. [ How did Offaly become one of the top breastfeeding counties in Ireland?Opens in new window ]Then there was the woman who had come across someone called Gina Ford and was thinking of trying her routines. Our instructor, a red-headed doula wrapped in many scarves, immediately stopped pummeling her fake plastic baby for its fake constipation. “Gina Ford??” she hissed, in the same way you might say Amelia Dyer?. Even the older babies seemed to wince, their tiny mouths curled in disgust like the Gina Ford mother had told us she was leaving her newborn in the green bin overnight to build its stamina. Inside the walls of baby massage, Ford was persona non grata, given the British author’s strict parenting regime. Later that week I ran into a warm, sensible mother who swore by her. This was a problem I ran into with parenting wisdom: the same practice could look like common sense in one room and violence in another.“You slept through the night from six weeks,” my own mother says with hardly a shrug, the routine so firm with eight children it barely gets its own thought. She didn’t think of any of this as a philosophy. This might be the only parenting attribute we have in common.My own approach was distinctly non-method. I followed my Velcro baby’s lead, wearing him in a sling, feeding him on demand, sharing a bed. I could tell you my approach was attachment parenting but I was more attached to sleep than to any doctrine. It built secure attachment or a spectacular baby woven rod, depending on what school of parenting you subscribe to.All I knew was I was ashamed and must be doing something wrong. By the time my baby was six months old I had absorbed the idea that a child sleeping in his parents’ bed was a parenting fail, though I couldn’t have told you exactly what had failed. Then when he was five and we were white knuckling it through yet another ropy attempt at “stay in your own bed for a whole night and win a gold star”, he got sick. After that he could not be left alone for a long time. “Parents of teenagers are co-sleeping in your situation,” his doctor said when I confided that we were all sleeping in the same room once more.[ The clock is ticking down to when I’ll walk through the door and no one is asking ‘what’s for dinner’Opens in new window ]Maybe this is the problem with parenting philosophies. They take the contingent, weird, embarrassing arrangements we make to raise humans and turn them, retrospectively, into evidence of good or bad parenting. In 10 years, I might be telling some poor mother that I practised extended co-sleeping when all I was doing was surviving. Shortly before he turned eight my son announced with minimal fuss that he was off. The nightly bed hopping stopped, quite literally, overnight. I’d love to say this proves that we were right all along, but it proves nothing at all. He got older. He got better and he decided to sleep in his own bed. And then we got a dog.