It’s hard to be a parent these days. You’re bombarded with advice from all directions, and everyone has opinions about how you should be doing things.

When it comes to babies’ sleep, I keep reading and hearing that it’s important that the baby learns to fall asleep in the cot, and not in dad’s arms or while being rocked by mom. “Baby should be put down drowsy but awake.” Any help you give is labelled a “prop” and is BAD. The underlying message is always “once you start a habit, it’ll stick, and you’ll be sorry a year from now!”.

But no one says the same about other aspects of taking care of a baby. No one says “Don’t feed him – he needs to learn to eat on his own” or “Don’t change her nappy, or she’ll get used to it and then you’ll be doing it forever”.

Why do they have such a different view on sleep, then? (“They” being all those people who dole out advice in books and on the internet.) I guess parents’ comfort is the only reason. No one minds changing dirty nappies 7 times a day, but parents do mind being woken in the middle of the night. So they hope for a quick fix.

(Besides, a book that says “don’t worry, things will sort themselves out” is not going to be a bestseller. If, on the other hand, the author claims that the baby’s current behaviour can and should be fixed using their unique method, this can sell lots of books. And of course first-time parents are easy targets… it’s easy to make us worry that we’re doing things wrong.)

But the more I see Ingrid develop, the less I believe in this view. She is small and needs help. Just as she cannot change her own nappy or put food in her mouth, she cannot go to sleep on her own. And that’s OK.

Nothing is fixed, and no habit will be hard to change, because everything about her changes all the time. There is almost nothing about her that is the same now as it was three months ago. In fact I can’t think of a single thing. She eats differently, sleeps differently, poops differently, cries differently, plays differently.

So I’ve finally pretty much stopped listening to all this advice, and stopped worrying about her sleeping habits. (Don’t tell me “I told you so”! I know. But I’m good at worrying.) While we’re not as rested as we could be, none of us is collapsing from exhaustion. And things are getting steadily better, with the help of time, practice, love and common sense, without the need of any methods.