In hundreds of thousands of homes in our country, parents are reinventing the wheel... of parenthood. Upon having a baby, they realize that they do not feel prepared to care for that baby. Often, after years of feeling competent at work, they suddenly feel incompetent and anxious.

Donald Winnicott, the famous and beloved British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst, wrote, "The most important element at any one moment is the ordinary home in which ordinary parents are doing an ordinary good job, starting off with infants and children with that basis for mental health which enables them to eventually become part of the community" (The Spontaneous Gesture, 1950).

However, in our country, and I suspect in other places as well, there is no "ordinary" way to raise a child. This sort of communal knowledge or this set of........

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