#4 Gina Ford, She Who Made This Site Possible

As a bright, angry young thing, you may build up an impressive athenaeum of improving, highbrow texts. Later, as a parent, you might as well stuff them into cardboard boxes and ferry them off to your good friend Sue Ryder.

Nietzsche could well have been on to something with that radical perspectivism thing, but if there’s nothing in Der Antichrist telling you how to make your (or is it Rosemary’s?) baby sleep like an, erm, baby (yeah, I know) seven through seven, it aint worth a hill of rubbish antihistamine chill pills.

This is where Gina Ford comes in. Before I go any further, I should explain that I’m a big fan of Gina. In fact, the missus and I have become mild Gina evangelists. I wanted to get that in early should any of Gina’s lawyers be reading who are, by all accounts, no slouches.

The top and bottom of Gina’s philosophy is “get baby into a routine from day one”. Many, like us, pick up her book and implement her strategies a couple of months later: from day one of feeling like doing a bus-stop belly flop.

Her routine for the suckling evokes a day in the life of a Foreign Legioneer. Exact timings for when you should put your “drowsy” baby down for a nap (if I’ve followed the steps to the letter, how come my baby is not so much “drowsy” as “Chucky on amphetamines”?) make a lot of detractors point to a lack of freedom. But the alternative is winging it, never being able to predict when she’ll (a “she” in my case) kick off next. Trust me, that’s no freedom when you’re out and about. Or in bed. Parents of near-newborns will never have much freedom, but a modicum of control is the closest we’ll get.

Gina polarises people. Those who don’t get on with her output express very robust opinions. Somebody told me that her sister told her (sound familiar?) that Ford’s work is the biggest contributory factor to post-natal depression.

I can’t imagine anyone who really (and I mean, really) gives Gina a fair crack of the whip not ending up with a more contented baby and a more contented soul. And there is room for manouevre despite preconceptions to the contrary. Some take it wholesale, others use it as a framework and adapt, but a few take out their frustration with accusations of child cruelty. Jibes about her not having any of her own are pointless and mean. I feel sorry for mumsnet. A couple of bad apples...

Ford’s tone has been described as patronising. But if you can get past that, the reward is often a harmoniously sleeping household. And that can't be bad.

Talking of patronising, when I filled in the form for Gina’s site (I was later put off by the less-than-paltry forty quid fee) it said, helpfully:

Surname (Like Ford) :
First name (Like Gina) :

Cheers, Gina.

Mind you, mumsnet asked me if I was pregnant.