Benjamin Spock, it turns out, was one of the worst fathers in the western hemisphere, indifferent to every one of the rules he laid down for the mothers of the 1960s. A television documentary about his life showed a wife driven to drink and two sons bullied into timidity, so painfully awkward that even when interviewed in middle age they were like frightened schoolboys.

The documentary sought to explore how such a bad father could write childcare books that would be bibles for millions of women the world over. My mother had his book, and passed it on to me when my first child was born – though I don’t think I ever read it, having no patience at all with any kind of instruction manual. I drew my own conclusion about the matter after watching that documentary: that Mrs Spock hadn’t just typed her husband’s manuscripts; she also wrote them for him. That would explain why the knowledge of children displayed in his books was entirely at odds with his behaviour. It would explain, too, her increasing resentment and descent into alcoholism. Once he became an idol on the world stage, she couldn’t very well come out and say: “It wasn’t him. It was I.” No one would have believed her anyway. So, like a good post-war wife, she put up and shut up, and drank herself to death. And in the interim, of course, he left her.

I put little trust in childcare gurus, and I can’t understand the women who stick to their every pronouncement as if they have no confidence in their own judgement. When I was raising babies in the late 1980s, the guru of the moment was Penelope Leach. Fellow mothers – or at least those who were the sort to “read a whole book” (don’t laugh; few women read whole books at the time, unless they were by Danielle Steel) would attempt to foist on me copies of Penelope Leach’s seminal works. I remember one of them being miffed when I said that, in the few minutes I had to myself outside and around babies, babies were the very last thing I wanted to read about. I never wanted to read about babies. Looking after them was more than enough bother.

There was one particular woman who would tell me not to do this or that, because Ms Leach advised otherwise. I wasn’t supposed to get mad at my toddler and tell him to get a grip on himself when he lay down prone and blue in the face in a spot of dog-shit on Sliema promenade. I was supposed to pick him up, make soothing, clucking sounds and ask him what the matter was, hanini. Like hell – the last thing you should do when a child throws a tantrum is make a fuss of him, because then every time he wants a fuss he’ll throw another one. Don’t we all know people who still behave like this?

Now the childcare gurus of the present moment have come up with another one. Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, has said that children should sleep with their parents until they are five years old. She has even devised a silly name for it: “co-sleeping”. This, of course, is a recipe for madness, marital breakdown, insomnia, no sex except by assignation on the sofa or the hall carpet, horribly spoilt and clingy brats, and very bad-tempered parents – especially the father. The tragedy is that those kinds of parents who lack all confidence in their own instincts and abilities will take this as gospel. They will either follow it to the letter, or they won’t, and then feel guilty. Take it from me: the best thing for all concerned is when babies sleep in their own cradle in their parents’ room and, immediately they have outgrown that cradle, in a cot in their own room. Anything else is sheer and utter insanity. If you want to ruin your nights, your days, your peace of mind, your privacy, your marriage, and even your child, then go ahead and put the baby in your bed. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’d like to know how many children these childcare experts have had in their beds for five years.

Ms Sunderland says that when children sleep with parents until the age of five, they are more likely to turn out to be calm, healthy adults. Perhaps, but in the process they will destroy the calm and health of the adults in whose bed they sleep. And I don’t agree with her anyway. The only children I knew who slept in their parents’ bed, in the days when I spent my days on the mummy circuit and found myself the unwilling recipient of such information, were those dreadful whiny sorts, clinging to mummy’s coat-tails and never letting her out of their sight. That, to my mind, looks more like anxiety than calmness. Confident children are those who are taught to be independent, and believe me, it’s never too early to start.

I still remember being five years old, and sleeping in my parents’ bed was not something that ever occurred to me – which is just as well, given that by that time I already had two younger siblings, with whom I shared a bedroom. By the time I was five, I was in the top half of a set of bunk beds. If anyone had tried to tell me that I should be sleeping with my parents instead, I would have probably bitten them very hard.

Ms Sunderland, who has already written 20 books, has given this advice in her latest, called The Science of Parenting. She says she has based her findings on more than 800 scientific studies. She also justifies her stance by saying that “there is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.” This is exactly what bothers me about experts like Ms Sunderland: they confuse one thing and another. Putting a baby in its own cot in its own room does not equate with letting it cry. It simply means getting the baby used to the idea that it sleeps in its own bed, because once you put it in your bed, getting it out again is a nightmare. If you’ve kept your child in your bed until the age of two, you are going to have a hard time making him understand that he now has to sleep in that little wooden cage in the next room. I have had to listen, as impassively as possible, to countless pained anecdotes of toddlers who climb out of their cots at 2am and try to get back into bed with their parents. “Didn’t yours ever do that?” these parents sometimes ask me. Well, no – because the only time I ever had a baby in my bed was when we brought our first one back from the hospital, and were so green that we thought we wouldn’t hear him cry if he was in the next room. On day two, he was in that cradle, sharpish. Because they had never been in our bed, getting in with us was not something that ever occurred to them. This did not mean letting them cry – far from it. Instead, we would take it in turns to sit by the cot until they went back to sleep, even on freezing cold February nights when the temptation to pick up the child and go to bed was almost too hard to resist.

The fundamental error that Ms Sunderland makes is to equate separate beds with a reluctance to comfort the baby. You can comfort a baby by leaving your own bed and going to his (a very good long-term investment, even if it is painful in the short term). When babies are asleep, on the other hand, they are asleep, and do not need comforting or the immediate presence of their parents’ bodies. Yet Ms Sunderland argues that 70 per cent of women who had not been comforted when they cried as children developed digestive difficulties when they grew up. What is this rubbish? I would say that they probably have digestive difficulties because they are self-absorbed and neurotic, which is why, in adulthood, they are still harping on their mothers’ failure to pick them up when they fell.

Ms Sunderland’s other argument is that “co-sleeping” is the practice in non-industrialised countries and this is therefore the natural way. This is fatuous. In non-industrialised countries, people sleep with their babies because they’re too poor to buy another mat, still less another room. They don’t only sleep with their babies; they also sleep with their mother-in-law and a whole raft of extended family, and surely nobody is advocating that. In Malta, parents used to sleep with their babies too – in the days when families slept 20 to a room. Children sharing a bed with their parents is a hallmark of poverty, not of enlightenment.

Ms Sunderland argues that when babies do not sleep in their mother’s bed, they are at risk of sudden infant death syndrome. In the UK, she says, around 500 babies die like this every year – but in China, where babies sleep with their mothers, sudden infant death syndrome is so rare that it does not even have a name. Let’s not go into the other reasons why babies die in China, and instead consider the practical difficulties of taking her advice on board. Co-sleeping may be compatible with a culture in which whole families wake up and go to sleep together. It is not compatible with Western culture, in which babies are put to bed between 7pm and 6am (or at least, they should be). The co-sleeping mother would be forced to choose between going to bed at 7pm, which is all wrong for the mother, or allowing her baby to stay up until the decent adult turning-in time of 11pm, which is all wrong for the baby. Ms Sunderland, in issuing her instructions, also presupposes that people have only one child, or one child every five years. If they don’t, it’s going to get very crowded in that bed – and very chaotic in the household, what with mummy and the children taking over the double-bed at 7pm and daddy sleeping in what should be the children’s room. The woman who sleeps with her baby instead of with her husband is just asking for trouble on all fronts.

As a more sensible childcare expert, Gina Ford, pointed out in her book The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers: “Bed sharing… more often than not ends up with parents sleeping in separate rooms” and exhausted mothers, a situation that “puts enormous pressure on the family as a whole.” Some gurus you should just ignore.