I am on my third baby and I've been in many forms. I see people argue about front-facing or rear-facing Too Soon, co-sleeping, laying babies on their back side or tummy to sleep, cry it out method, feed on demand versus the training etc etc list of things to argue about and possibly feel very self-righteous about when it comes to raising babies, is endless.

Everyone needs to be careful about being too judgmental of what parents decide to do. It of course goes without saying that seeking advice is wise, and giving advice can be very helpful . But There is something I want everyone to think about. New studies on the " best way" to do things come out all the time. The trouble is 10 years from then they will sometimes discover that new, unforeseen negative sides came from their previous judgment.

I'm going to give you all an example. When my husband was driving the car with his one and a half year old baby son in the back, the car seat was forward facing ( back then the rules were different). His son was very quiet, you would think asleep. My husband glanced back at him and saw that his face was blue. He had to pull the car over to the side of the road and perform CPR while another motorist called 911. My stepson is 15 now and fine, but he had what seemed to be a slight cold, but it caused him to suddenly stop breathing. Had the car seat been rear-facing my husband never would have been able to get a good enough look at him, while driving on the highway, to see his life was in danger. For all we know 10 years from now, they will be telling us that we should forward face sooner, because children are dying from not being able to be properly monitored by their parents. You can't see if they found a dried Cheerio in their carseat, and they are now choking on it.

Another example. Babies in the early nineteen hundreds were being laid to sleep on their back. When I was a new born in 1981, my mom said they were all being told put us to sleep on our tummies, because babies could spit up in the middle of the night, and choke on their own vomit. Babies were all being laid down in their chest to save their lives. Then it was changed that babies should be on their sides, to keep them from spitting up and choking, but also to keep them from burying their faces into a soft mattress. Now we are told to lay them on their backs again like our great-grandmother's did. But of course now we have babies with flat heads that need to wear corrective helmets. This might still be the final answer... But my point is it takes time for a society to start strictly following a certain rule, for them to discover the unintended consequences of that particular rule.

I am not trying to say who is right or wrong. I am simply pointing out that so-called experts do not always have all the answers. And in 10 or 20 years your advice on what you did with your baby to your daughter-in-law might be laughed at as something that ignorant past used to do