Weirdly enough, with all the things you shouldnt do these days, its a wonder we all got to live into our adult life!! I personally would use these things as a guide only, not the instruction manual for raising our kids, new parents of today must be terrified of doing the wrong thing at every step! I have 6 wonderful, healthy kids that have almost 100% attendance at school thanks to their consistant good health, and i did everything just as my gut told me to do and never even read one book unless it had crosswords in it LOL. One child has a problem with something and next thing you know they ban it from being OK to use with all of them, knee jerk reaction for parents is to protect  their children and understandably they do it all by the book coz they dont wanna risk something going wrong.. the facts are, things go wrong even when you do everything right. We have to be relaxed in our parenting aswell, the stress that ricoshays off us is actually worse for our kids than the big no no that book told us about! My thoughts are that every parent has the right to enjoy thier parenting experience and use that statistics report as a guide to educate us on the risk, not to be stuck up on the fridge and used at the new kitchen/raising kids bible.

hi lizzi.you are right ,but i was not implying that all parents are wrong and onother thing is when i had my children at birth i wish there was a hand book given to me in raising my children.But we learn and so do our children  and in my younger days i had no help with my first son as i do today with my other two boys.These days you hear alot of things on tv what is good for our children and is not.It is called a mothers instinked.We all do our best and i love my crosswords too when i get the time as i am a single parent and raise my children the best way i can.

hey heidil,

I totally know what youre talking about with the handbook thing.. now that I am beginning to raise teens, one of those would be a god sent! I have friends that cannot get their child to sleep and they take em to sleep school, the media has told the parents not to give kids this and that, mind you, things that caused almost no problems when we were growing up are now big no no's and parents dont know who to turn to for advice anymore, you have to keep up with the changing trends in order to give something to your child without another parent looking at you like you are the worst parent ever coz of something they read. The stuff i think that parents need to concentrate on, is lowering the amount of processed foods they are giving the children, anything with alot of numbers sounds pretty scary to me.. Get back to home baking and only keep water or freshly squeezed juice in the fridge as drinks unless its a special treat and try a once off  soft drink at parties just to give the children the ability to try differnt things. I have an autistic son, who is sensitive to differnt foods and when i start baking things fresh, his entire attitude changes and hes more manageable..I dont think that all parents are wrong, I think that most parents just want to do what is best for their children, but i also think that all these stats are scaring the parents into thinking that they are doing it all wrong, when infact, most of them are doing a great job! I say, keep up the good work and work on having fun with your kids.

Mel xx