In preparing to write his classic account of how liberals and conservatives think, where he defined as ‘ideals’ the conservative/liberal division between ‘strictness’ and ‘nurturance’, George Lakoff, the American cognitive linguist and political activist, recounts that he asked a friend how to identify the best indicator of liberal vs conservative political attitudes. His friend replied, ‘If your baby cries at night, do you pick him up?’ We now live in an age when Gina Ford, ‘Britain's number 1 best selling childcare author’, and Jo Frost of Supernanny fame, among many others, can each garner a huge following for their advocacy of teaching babies to ‘self soothe’ through ‘controlled crying’. Despite Lakoff's implication that liberals are more likely than conservatives to comfort their babies, the precepts of control, discipline, obedience and reward and punishment are subscribed to by child carers across the political spectrum, and are encouraged by parenting websites, the media, government pronouncements and health and welfare professionals. But it was not always so; or, if it was, it was something of a guilty secret only quietly acknowledged. One has to go back to the inter-war period when behavioural ‘habit’ psychology, associated with the American psychologist J. B. Watson, and F. Truby King's rigid feeding schedules were popular to find a similar approach to infant and toddler care. Over the last 30 years or so, much of contemporary writing and commentary about ‘parenting’, particularly mothering, has emphasised the stressful side of child rearing, the ‘misery’, and bemoaned what feminists refer to as ‘intensive mothering’ (‘emotionally demanding, financially draining, labour consuming’). This book has no patience with these political claims, posing as sociological conclusions when in fact they are forms of ‘advocacy research’, that is, research designed to advance an ideological position.