Advice for Early Parenting

When my daughter was born I read two books that significantly took the stress out of early parenting for me: The Happiest Baby on the Block, by Dr. Harvey Karp, and The Attachment Parenting Book, by Dr. William Sears. I learned an invaluable lesson about babies and kids and being a parent. In a nutshell, look at things through their eyes and go with your gut. There's another approach to parenting. It involves following rules developed by parenting authorities and using black-and-white techniques that blanket every baby and every parent with the same goals. The second approach is what I had acquired naturally from my own rearing and watching other parents around me. It set me up for a serious case of nerves when I became a parent myself. All the rules about scheduling and letting your baby "cry it out" so she would gain independence set my head spinning. And it felt so unnatural. How did maternal instincts fit into following everyone else's rules? I'm someone who likes to study and make sense out of anything anyone else suggests. And I confess I couldn't always see the connection between a screaming, flailing newborn stinging my maternal nerves raw and a happy, functional family.