Well, Rachael is now one year old. During the last year we have had to make lots of decisions about how to bring her up, and being completely inexperienced at raising children, we have had to rely heavily on the advice of others. Of course we wanted to give our child the best possible start in life, as all loving parents do, but there is an awful lot of conflicting advice on how to be successful – do we use a routine, or let the baby dictate? Do we wean at six months (as recommended by the World Health Organisation), or when the baby seems ready? How do we approach discipline? Even deciding what type of nappy to use involves sifting through a bewildering array of options! (We mostly use non-terry re-usables with wraps).

Some of the choices we made are considered fairly new concepts, and this has caused mixed reactions among others. We outline below the choices we made, with a brief explanation of each, along with Rachael’s response. We do not feel that to do things traditionally is wrong, as all babies will develop into children with roughly equal ability at some point; we just felt that these options would be advantageous for our family.