What do you really believe about parenting?

In her first column, Rhiannon Goulding says it is time to consider what we want to pass on to our children without simply following what everyone else is doing

Not many of us have studied the cognitive development of children or have a degree in child psychology. So how do we learn how to parent our own children? Most of us just pick it up along the way. We may instinctively copy the parenting styles of our own families as we were growing up – or, if we didn’t like our upbringing, we rebel against it and do the opposite. Some of us will watch shows on TV or read magazine articles or ‘How to…’ books.