5 Disturbing Baby Care Myths That Just Won’t Go Away

Everyone has an opinion on how to look after a new baby. Your mother-in-law, the woman in the supermarket queue, that one friend from antenatal class who read a parenting book cover to cover once. “He’s drooling, he must be teething.” “She’s not sleeping through, try a bottle of formula before bed.” You’ve heard it all, and you’ve probably followed some of it too, because when you’re exhausted and a bit lost, advice from anyone confident-sounding is tempting.

The trouble is, a lot of this “wisdom” is either outdated, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. Here are five of the most common baby care myths that refuse to die, along with what’s actually going on and what you can do about it.

1. Your baby needs to sleep through the night straight away

Start with the basics: a newborn’s stomach is genuinely tiny. On day one it’s roughly the size of a marble and holds about a teaspoon or two of milk. By the end of the first week it’s more like a walnut. By one month it’s closer to the size of a large egg, holding somewhere around 3 to 5 ounces. A stomach that small simply cannot hold enough milk to see a baby through eight hours without waking.

Frequent night waking isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with your baby or your parenting. It’s biology. Newborns wake to feed, but they also wake because they’re too warm, too cold, uncomfortable, or because they’ve briefly lost the sense that you’re nearby. Light, fragmented sleep with lots of waking is actually thought to play a protective role in early infancy, and most babies simply aren’t developmentally capable of long, unbroken stretches of sleep until several months in, if at all in the way adults sleep.

“Sleeping through the night” in most research actually means five or six hours in a row, not the whole night, and even that milestone varies enormously from baby to baby. Some manage it by three months, others are still waking at a year, and both can be completely normal. If you’re worried about your baby’s sleep or feeding pattern, it’s always worth a chat with your health visitor or GP to rule out anything medical, but in most cases frequent waking on its own isn’t a problem to be fixed.

A quick safety note while we’re on the subject of sleep: current NHS and Lullaby Trust guidance is that babies should sleep on their backs, in a clear cot or Moses basket with no loose bedding, pillows or soft toys, ideally in the same room as you for at least the first six months. This reduces the risk of SIDS and is worth following regardless of how well or badly your baby is sleeping.

If you want to understand what’s actually normal at each stage, the What is Normal Infant Sleep? series on EvolutionaryParenting.com is a genuinely useful read, written with reference to real research rather than folklore. And if you do want gentle ways to help your baby (and you) get a bit more rest, there are some sensible gentle sleep resources worth trying before assuming anything is “wrong”.

2. Drooling at 4 months means baby is teething

Around three to four months, most babies suddenly turn into little drooling machines who want to chew on everything within reach. This is often the exact moment someone announces confidently that “the teeth are coming through”. Usually, they’re not.

A few things are happening at once. Babies explore the world with their mouths from early on, so the chewing behaviour isn’t new, it just becomes more noticeable as hand-eye coordination improves. The drooling itself is largely down to salivary glands maturing in preparation for solid food later on, plus babies at this age haven’t yet learned to swallow saliva efficiently, so more of it ends up down their chin.

Most babies don’t cut their first tooth until somewhere between 6 and 10 months, though it can vary a lot and some do start earlier. Genuine teething tends to come with a cluster of signs rather than drooling alone, things like:

• Red, slightly swollen gums, sometimes with a visible tooth bud under the surface
• Increased biting and gnawing on hard objects specifically
• Mild irritability or disrupted sleep for a few days
• Occasionally a slightly raised temperature, though a proper fever (38C or above) is not something teething should cause

If your baby has a genuine fever, diarrhoea, a rash, or seems properly unwell, that’s not “just teething” and it’s worth getting them checked by your GP rather than putting it down to new teeth. For everyday teething discomfort, chilled (not frozen) teething rings, gentle gum massage with a clean finger, and paracetamol at the correct dose for age if advised by your pharmacist or GP are generally considered safe options. Always check the dose and product suitability with your pharmacist, health visitor or GP before giving any medication.

3. Baby is ready for solid foods at 3 to 4 months

Current NHS guidance recommends starting solid foods at around 6 months, not before, and this is echoed by most health bodies internationally. There’s a good physiological reason for this beyond just tradition.

Newborns are built to digest milk, whether breast milk or formula, and not much else. Over the first several months their gut lining becomes less permeable (sometimes called “gut closure”), their digestive enzymes mature enough to cope with more complex foods, and they develop the oral skills needed to move food to the back of the mouth and swallow it, rather than just pushing it back out with their tongue (the tongue-thrust reflex). Most babies don’t lose this reflex until around 4 to 6 months.

Introducing solids too early has been linked to a higher risk of digestive upset, and some paediatric guidance suggests it may be linked to a higher risk of food sensitivities or allergic type reactions in some babies, though research in this area continues to evolve, so it’s worth discussing your own baby’s readiness with your health visitor or GP rather than following a fixed calendar date. Signs that a baby is genuinely ready tend to include being able to sit up with good head control, showing real interest in food (not just watching you eat, but reaching for it), and being able to move food around the mouth and swallow it rather than spitting it straight back out.

Parents.com has a helpful readiness quiz if you’re unsure, and AskDrSears.com goes into more detail on why waiting tends to serve babies better. If your baby was born prematurely, readiness is usually judged from their corrected age rather than their actual birth date, so do check with your paediatrician about timing.

4. Responding to crying teaches baby to manipulate you

This is one of the most persistent and, frankly, unhelpful myths out there. Manipulation requires a level of intentional strategising that very young babies simply aren’t capable of. A baby cries because something is wrong or uncomfortable, whether that’s hunger, wind, tiredness, a wet nappy, overstimulation, or just wanting to feel close to you.

Jan Hunt at The Natural Child Project makes a fair point on this: if crying really were a manipulation tactic, you’d expect it to increase the more it “worked”. Instead, babies whose cries are responded to consistently and promptly tend, over time, to cry less overall, not more. Paediatrician William Sears makes a similar point in his writing, that babies don’t cry to take advantage of parents, they cry because they have a genuine need, and ignoring the cry doesn’t make the need disappear.

None of this means every cry requires you to drop everything instantly forever, or that you’re failing if you occasionally can’t get to your baby the second they start crying. It simply means that responding warmly to your baby in the early months is building trust and security, not “spoiling” them. If your baby cries a huge amount, seems inconsolable for long stretches, or the crying pattern changes suddenly, it’s worth mentioning to your health visitor or GP, since things like reflux, cow’s milk protein intolerance or colic can sometimes be behind unusually intense crying and are worth ruling out.

5. Babies need to learn independence early

Compared with most other mammals, human babies are born remarkably underdeveloped. There’s a well known observation among researchers that if a human pregnancy lasted as long as it would need to for a baby to be born at a similar stage of neurological development to a newborn chimpanzee, gestation would need to run somewhere between 18 and 21 months instead of the usual nine (as discussed in Scientific American). Human babies are, essentially, born “early” relative to other primates, largely because of the limits of the human pelvis and the size of our brains.

What this means in practical terms is that a very young baby genuinely cannot self-soothe, self-settle, or manage their own emotions the way an older child can. They need you, not just for milk and nappy changes, but for warmth, comfort, physical closeness and reassurance that the world is a safe place. This isn’t a character flaw to be trained out of them. It’s exactly what a baby is supposed to need at this stage.

Independence does come, gradually, as your baby’s nervous system matures and they build the security of knowing you’ll come back. Rushing that process in the very early months by deliberately withholding comfort doesn’t tend to build independence faster, it just tends to build a more anxious baby. There will be plenty of time later on to encourage independence in age appropriate ways, once your child actually has the developmental tools to manage it.

If you’d like a fuller picture of what babies genuinely need in those first months, this piece on what babies really need in their first nine months is worth a read.

For more on newborn care, you might also find these useful:

“9 Essential Things You Need to Know About Newborns, Especially #5“