By Susan Gower

Parenting your new baby is the most natural thing in the world, or so everyone tells you. Yet from the moment you bring your baby home, or maybe even before, the challenges of parenting are unavoidable. You may be finding that parenting is more difficult than you could possibly have imagined. But what if you think you should know what to do, but the truth is, you have no idea. What if you are too embarrassed to ask for help, or you don’t know who to ask?

How do we learn to how to be a parent? It is one of the most important jobs we will ever have, yet we don’t learn it in school. Until fairly recently, most people raised their children in the midst of family groups, grandparents and aunts and uncles who had long experience with babies and children. But now, many people have little or no experience with babies and young children, until, that is, they have one of their own.