If you want to watch mothers go mental, mention Gina Ford’s Contented Little Baby Book. They will either tell you it changed their life and grip your arm with that half-crazed devotion of an evangelical convert or they will tell you it is evil and grip your arm with that half-crazed fury of someone who has escaped a cult.

All this, over a little book by a woman who doesn’t have any children? With its highly regimented approach (days are broken into minute-by-minute commands about what you and your baby should be doing), has divided parents wherever it’s been published. For first-time mother Lauren Quaintance it seemed a godsend. Until it wasn’t. First published in Good Weekend in The Sydney Morning Herald, Lauren writes here…