Just a brief stroll through Amazon’s list of parenting books reveals that there is no shortage of experts telling us how to raise our children. Each one presents their way as the tested and proven path to produce well-adjusted, college-bound, superstars of the future. (Kids that you can REALLY count on in your retirement years.) Problem is, these experts often contradict one another.

A recent book by Ann Hulbert and another by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner summarize some of the experts who offer contradicting approaches to raising children:

One expert emphasizes how important it is to train a baby to sleep alone through the night. Otherwise, sleep deprivation might “negatively impact an infant’s developing central nervous system” and lead to learning disabilities. However, advocates of co-sleeping warn that sleeping alone is harmful to a baby’s psyche and that he or she should be brought into the family bed.

One so-called expert favored early stimulation through interaction. One hundred years earlier, however, another expert cautioned that a baby is not a plaything. There should be “no forcing, no pressure, no undue stimulation” during the first two years of a child’s life. This expert also believed that a crying baby should never be picked up unless it is in pain. A baby should be left to cry for fifteen to thirty minutes a day: “It is the baby’s exercise.”

Other advice proclaims that breast feeding is the only way to guarantee a healthy and intellectually advanced child – unless bottle feeding is the answer. One expert says a baby should always be put to sleep on its back – until it is decreed that they should only sleep on its stomach.

Possible Preaching Angles:

You can’t follow everyone’s advice. You can only raise your kids one way. You have to choose what way that will be. Our Heavenly Father has confident advice about how you and I raise our children. But unlike these experts whose opinions sway over time, He actually is the expert on child-rearing.

Source:

Ann Hulbert, “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (Vintage, 2004), page 298; Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (William Morrow, 2009), page 148