Gina 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.

“I think that so many parents, because they’re trying so hard to bend over backwards to make everything perfect for their children, they forget about themselves,”

© The Guardian