Parenting guru Gina Ford believes bending over backwards to please your children puts your marriage at risk. Sorry, Gina, but I’m not on board
G
ina Ford ruined my life. OK, technically not all of it, just a small but significant chapter: very early motherhood. The parenting guru’s bestselling tome convinced me I was the worst mum in the world, and that my baby was faulty. He didn’t do what her book said he was meant to, you see, even when I followed her strict rules to the absolute apostrophe, never mind letter. It was almost as though he hadn’t read it, or was an individual human being or something.
I was out of my mind with sleep deprivation, and perhaps not seeing the full picture, but I felt like a hopeless failure. I once woke my husband up at 3.47am to read a passage from Ford’s The Contented Little Baby to him, while pointing accusingly at our extremely uncontented one, who was screaming louder than I was.
All of this is to say – to admit – that I am not exactly an unbiased source when it comes to Ford, who this week reappeared to make people with kids feel terrible about a whole new thing. Apparently if you prioritise your offspring over your partner, you’re putting even the strongest relationship at risk.
