This is a bit off topic but I studied history so I guess my first thought is always, "well, I wonder what people did 50, 100, 500 years ago?"

Strikes me that parents used to sing their children lullabies and now progress and so-called experts are saying that controlled crying is the go and don't worry about the vomiting. So much for progress!

If anyone knows of any 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th century parenting books, I'd be really interested just to see what was advocated then. I'm guessing thought that this knowledge was passed down verbally from mother to daughter. I'm not saying they had all the answers by the way, I'm sure they had some pretty strange ways of doing things too - but just curious from a historical perspective.