Is postnatal depression a label slapped onto the discomfort caused by the sudden change in a woman’s life when she has a baby, or is it a useful diagnostic category covering many and varied experiences, all of which can be significantly helped by treatment?

“Mommies who drink: Sex, Drugs and other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom” reveals just how judgmental we can be can be when it comes to motherhood, how deeply the expectations run that women transform overnight when they become mothers, losing not only half their brains but all their previous adult tastes, becoming wholesome and somewhat childlike themselves.

A study which has been all over the press reports research findings from the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, that children with one particular version of a particular gene scored higher in IQ tests, between the ages of five and thirteen, if they had been breastfed.

One of the most amazing things for my younger daughter, fifteen months, is appearing and disappearing. Being visible and then not. Hiding and reappearing. Curtains are the best for this, but any old surface will do, if it’s possible to get behind or under it. But it is already quite a grown-up game, she has already started to see the world as adults do, split up into separate entities.

In “Mother- and Father-Reported Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions: Relations to Young Children’s Emotional Understanding and Friendship Quality”, researchers led by Dr. Nancy L McElwain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied over 50 pre-school children, firstly assessing their emotional maturity, and then observing play sessions with a friend. In a situation designed to produce stress and conflict it turned out that the optimum situation for the child was one very involved parent and one much less so.

Psychology today reports on ‘permaparenting’, the phenomenon of young adults coming back to the nest for indefinite amounts of time, or never leaving it at all. It paints a fairly bleak picture of young adults who are not mature enough to leave, and parents who are not mature enough to let them.

‘Say Yes to No’ is the name of a Minnesota based movement designed to save children from what they define as the contemporary US ‘yes’ culture of self indulgence. Psychologist and author David Walsh calls saying no a parenting strategy which will save our children from a condition he calls “discipline deficit disorder, or DDD”…