These days, the "not killing your child" experts still agree on some things: that you should always put a baby to sleep on its back, for example, and that it's still not a good idea to leave it alone in the local reindeer enclosure. But everything else? Try as you might to search books and the Internet for a consensus, you won't find it. You won't even find something that looks like a consensus if you step back from the screen and squint at it through a pair of those novelty New Year's Eve glasses that made sense in the 2000s but now block half of your visibility with the 1. Instead, you'll find a bunch of "experts" screeching angrily over each other like online gamers after someone spiked the country's Mountain Dew supply.
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"Your baby is gayyyyyy!!11" -the Internet, basically.
Take the seemingly straightforward issue of getting your baby to sleep at night. As I'm sure you know, the little darlings come out of the womb wanting to eat, poop, and scream round the clock, which is why many experts agree that at some point you have to teach them to sleep through the night, the same way you'll eventually have to teach them to eat solid food and to avoid searching for My Little Pony pictures without Google safe search on. A lot of these people recommend that parents use a process called sleep training, which involves letting the child cry for a while when it wakes up at night until it learns how to fall back to sleep by itself. If you slack off on this, you might actually hurt your child, as lack of good sleep can affect its brain and health.
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Not to mention yours.
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