Parenting Advice From Uncle Sam
OK, so you've just left the hospital with your newborn baby. You're relieved, because the baby is healthy, your heart overflows with love and you're excited to begin this new chapter in your life. Then, most parents will tell you, on the way home a strange feeling sets in.
It's as if you went to sleep in one world and woke up in another, a world that seems familiar but slightly off-key. As you gaze into the eyes of this fragile new being, it hits you: "What have I done?" And, more importantly, "What do I do now?"
Anxious parents in the U.S. today have an overwhelming number of choices to help them figure out what to do when it comes to child rearing — books, blogs, celebrities and developmental psychologists are all too happy to supplement the usual circle of family, friends and community.
But it wasn't always so. A century ago, many newparents were just as eager for authoritative, trustworthy advice, but there wasn't that much of it around, especially for women isolated from extended family by oceans or frontiers, or for
