I guess you could say I’m a scientist. I come from a family with a very “scientific” background. I’ve read of the leaps humans have made in the name of science but with human’s quest for knowledge comes significant drawbacks – We discard our intuiton and think things through way too much. We want to know everything about everything. We try to classify things – usually it’s into the dichotomy of “normal” or “abnormal” when things often don’t fit into such crude classes.

This baby sleeping through the night is just one example : It *may* be normal for your baby to sleep through the night at 3 weeks of age. It may be normal for most babies over 6 months of age not to want to have a feed during the night. That doesn’t mean I should *expect* that of my babies and it certainly does not mean I should refuse them what they so obviously have woken up for.

If I hear my baby cry – my first instinct is to go to him, to calm him, to soothe him. This is quite simply what mothers *do*. They don’t do it because science has told them to – this is something so innate, it’s a feeling so completely natural it’s beyond description. If somebody tells you to do something that goes against this, chances are – it’s wrong.

I don’t know what made me go against my instincts when it came to controlled crying. The more I think of it, the more I realise I didn’t go with my intuition with a lot of things when it came to my first child. I am grateful I had the support of the child health nurses and the 24- hour parenting and breastfeeding hotlines but I can’t help but wonder had I been thrown in the deep end with little or no support, I might have faired better. I feel I relied too much on this support network and because it was so readily available to me, didn’t give my motherly instincts a chance.

I don’t doubt significant progress has been made in terms of understanding child development and child behaviour and I’m certain there are some very knowledgable experts in these fields. But mothers -listen to your instincts for surely *you* are the expert when it comes to your baby.

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