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Who’d be a parent? Everything you do is wrong – at least according to somebody. The whole world believes it has the right to give you advice. And yet that advice changes all the time. This is a book about the ever-changing instructions given to generations of Australian parents. If you have wondered about the way you were parented – and where the ideas came from – you may find the answer here. If you wonder about how your own children tackle the task of parenting, you may meet the guru they’ve been following. And if you’re a young parent yourself, wondering why you are given such a hard time by nearly everybody, including your own parents, perhaps there’s satisfaction in knowing that they, too, were constantly being told they were doing it all wrong. Why write about parenting? My reason: it’s at the centre of our lives. We are all formed – not entirely, but significantly – by the way we were brought up. Many of us then become parents ourselves, helping form the next generation. Some, later, have the chance to be involved grandparents. As children, as parents, hopefully as grandparents, many of our most important moments revolve around parenting, and the various ways in which it can be done. There’s also the issue of human misery. So much unhappiness has been caused by past generations of experts offering a stream of strident, poisonous parenting advice. That advice rarely had a basis in science, or even in the close observation of children. Most of it was written by people who had no children of their own, yet it was delivered with such force and certainty. The result, often, was a bawling infant left alone in a bedroom, with a bawling parent alone on the other side of the door – the result of the ‘rule’ that it was wrong to comfort a crying child. Add to that the generations of children who were never told they were loved or admired by their parents – the result of the ‘rule’ that such openly expressed affection was damaging. So much misery, with so little point. And on the basis of, really, nothing at all. No science. Often no first-hand experience. Maybe it’s time the advisors were held to account. My own mother wasn’t great when it came to parenting. Maybe that’s another reason I’m so interested in taking this journey into the past. My mother largely left my life when I was 14, when she found herself consumed by a great love affair, but even before that, I knew her heart wasn’t in it. She’d have loved the recommendation, still common during my childhood, that mothers should have limited physical and emotional contact with their child. She always thought children were germy. Later, when I had children of my own, she thought them so germ-ridden she made them sit on a washable bedsheet on the two occasions when they came to visit her house: my two boys sitting on a plastic pouffe in the middle of a sea of sheet. The pouffe was so small, they had to sit back-to-back, only one child able to see the TV she’d helpfully switched on. I still remember my older boy, eight years of age, positioning himself so that his little brother could see the screen, while he sat straight-backed, staring patiently at a blank wall. Not all mothers were like mine, but some of her attitudes were generational. During my childhood, most children weren’t driven to sport on the weekend, or even to school. You’d make your own way to these things, by foot or bicycle. When you came home, it was rare – in my experience anyway – to be asked whether your team had won. In my book about the 1960s and 1970s, The Land Before Avocado, I quote the Australian filmmaker Stephan Elliott. It was the era, he says, before the three Ss – seatbelts, sunscreen and the supervision of children: ‘If you drank enough cask wine, it was almost like you didn’t have kids.’ And, according to my mum, and pretty much everyone’s mum, praise or excessive attention was the last thing you should give a child. Don’t let them get too big for their boots! Later, a few generations on, parents began to overdo the praise and attention, at least according to their critics. It was the era of ‘A prize for every child!’ It’s a debate we’ll visit later in this book. Our parents weren’t, most of them, making these decisions in a vacuum. Behind every generation of mothers and fathers stood an army of advisors: columnists, authors, nurses, priests and officials. Most of these experts were dogmatic about the rules they promulgated. After all, those rules had been formulated by no less an impressive figure than the expert themself. And any deviation from their rules would produce a dire result: you’d ruin a child. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Have we finally arrived at perfect parenting? Is today’s advice the best? Should we enjoy chuckling at the rules of the past, while cheering the wisdom of the here and now? Did they get it right in 1910? Or in 1970? Or in 2026? Should we forgive our parents for the way they parented us? You’ll have to make your own mind up about that. This book has a different mission. I hope you might discover and laugh about the ideas that fashioned the way you were brought up. You might shed a tear or two. You’ll also meet the people who tried to influence your parents – and discover their (usually) child-free lives. And, like me, you might read about some of the madder ideas and think: ‘Oh, at last I know which book Mum was using.’ And, for the current generation of parents, history offers a consolation. When relatives, and other busybodies, tell young parents that they are ‘doing it all wrong’, and that different (usually stricter) methods would make everything go smoothly, the experience of generations of Australian parents is wonderfully reassuring. Parenting is tough, however you do it. And the outcome, whatever your method, is usually the production of a perfectly decent human being. With the help of the past, we may even learn to be more critical of the experts. We may learn to ignore what the novelist Rachel Cusk once called ‘the dictatorial lust belonging to the scientists of baby management’. Along the way, you’ll also learn about the supposed dangers of allowing a baby to suck its thumb. And how allowing a child to use a dummy is a ‘lesson in self-indulgence’ from which they might never recover. And you’ll understand how the wearing of tight trousers, however natty in appearance, may lead to masturbation and thence to a life of sexual deviancy. Give me a moment to change out of my current pair of stovepipe jeans just in case that theory proves to be correct.