When talking recently to a woman in her sixties (I assume) about bringing up our twins, I was told that my habit of letting one of them often sleep in bed with us was on the road to ‘spoiling’.

Oh dear. To spoil sounds like something really very terrible – think of ‘spoil’ and think of rotten fruit, fetid meat, mould-covered cheese. When, rationally, I know that taking a baby to bed so that we all sleep better is not such an awful practice as letting food go off in the fridge, why did I find myself justifying in almost apologetic tones our current habits?

Whether it is possible to ‘spoil’ a baby is not a new debate. Don’t pick her up when she cries, or she will have ‘won’. Don’t take her to bed with you or she will want to sleep there until she is six years old (as one doctor said to me). The only way to get her to sleep through the night is to close the door and let her sleep a couple of nights in a row – that will learn her …

This adult application of adult rationale to a baby’s requirements, I find disconcerting. How does a baby know that the closed door and lack of response to her heartfelt cries means that she should sleep through the night all of a sudden? How do we know it will not terrorise her with nightmares of abandonment for years to come? Most likely not, but equally as likely that a baby can learn anything by being left to cry alone in a darkened room. Indeed, if babies do learn anything from such an experience, I would much prefer mine to know that I will always answer their cries regardless.

Perhaps it is time to let go of the desire to seek everyone’s approval. And, rather, to answer back and say, well I think it a terrible shame when people don’t enjoy their babies at their most vulnerable and tenderful stage.

As we lay in bed last night discussing at length once again exactly how we would handle one or both babies when they woke up in the small hours, from what time we would feed them rather than just comfort, whether we should put them back to sleep in the cot or let them sleep in our bed and then further investigating the whole round of possible short, and long term, consequences of each action, it occurred to us that much of this thought would have no affect on the behaviour of our babies.

It is tempting to see life as a project. Each challenge is to be analysed and solutions carefully plotted and planned. This works to a point, when at school or university with exams to pass, and again when applying for jobs or reaching a target figure. And, usually, in the aforementioned circumstances, your labour and intellect is rewarded – with good marks, a great career move or, even better, a bonus payment. You might recognise this as the classic behaviour of the slightly over-anxious, high achiever, into which category many of us fall.

All well and good, you may think, this approach has taken you a long way in life … until you start having babies. What we have realised over the last few months is that babies do not much respond to analysis or to tweaking improvements. There is no revision guide or project plan to which you can adhere to ensure your success. Sure, put them to bed half an hour later, having jiggled a grumpy baby on a large inflatable ball for those thirty minutes and they may once or twice wake up half an hour later correspondingly. But then there will be plenty of other times when they maddeningly wake up two hours earlier just for the hell of it, despite your sterling efforts on the ball and you know you would have been better off putting them to bed when they were tired and giving your thighs a break. All this analysis can leave you lying frustrated in bed at three o’clock in the morning listening to the beginnings of hungry whinging in the neighbouring room, thinking ‘they surely can’t be hungry again, it is not in the plan’.

But a baby is a baby is a baby, as unpredictable as the weather in June – midsummer and raining again. A little person who, just like you and I, sometimes sleeps peacefully all through the night, and other times wakes up inexplicably thirsty, but unluckily for us, is not yet tall enough to reach the tap.

The baby book business is almost entirely simply that – a business – (unless I ever write one and then you all, of course, must go out and buy it, whether expecting children or not). Read as many as you like, but if your baby finds it hard to go to sleep, beyond what your common sense would lead you to do anyway, the books are not going to aid him or her in slumber.

So tonight perhaps we will use the time to talk about more interesting things, like which type of vegetable to try pureeing next, or possibly falling straight to sleep so we are not quite so tired when we are almost inevitably woken up.