child-unless bottle feeding is the answer. A baby should always be put to sleep on her back-until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach. Eating liver is either a) toxic or b) imper- ative for brain development. Spare the rod and spoil the child; spank the child and go to jail. In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Ad-   vice About Children, Ann Hulbert documented how parenting experts contradict one another and even themselves. Their banter might be hilarious were it not so confounding and, often, scary. Gary Ezzo, who in the Babywise book series endorses an "infant-management strategy" for moms and dads trying to "achieve excellence in parent- ing," stresses how important it is to train a baby, early on, to sleep alone through the night. Otherwise, Ezzo warns, sleep deprivation might "negatively impact an infants developing central nervous sys- tem" and lead to learning disabilities. Advocates of "co-sleeping," meanwhile, warn that sleeping alone is harmful to a babys psyche and that he should be brought into the "family bed." What about stimulation? In 1983 T. Berry Brazelton wrote that a baby arrives in the world "beautifully prepared for the role of learning about him- or herself and the world all around." Brazelton favored early, ardent stimulation-an "interactive" child. One hundred years earlier, how- ever, L. Emmett Holt cautioned that a baby is not a "plaything." There should be "no forcing, no pressure, no undue stimulation" dur- ing the first two years of a childs life, Holt believed; the brain is grow- ing so much during that time that overstimulation might cause "a great deal of harm." He also believed that a crying baby should never be picked up unless it is in pain. As Holt explained, a baby should be left to cry for fifteen to thirty minutes a day: "It is the babys exercise." The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. An expert doesnt so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. Thats because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often