So I finally got the backbone together to take T for his TB shot (when I say backbone, of course I mean that loosely. C went in with him and I waited outside, biting a plank), and there was a notice in the ante-room that said, "Your baby learns from you. Talk to him!", and then at the bottom, "He needs to be able to hear you - without the television on." What evidence is there for that? I know that children who watch a lot of telly accrue vocabulary at a slightly slower rate, but how much evidence is there for a background telly-hum being a serious drain on a tot's concentration?

I only ask because you never hear anyone telling you to turn the radio off, or not to play music around an infant. You never hear anyone saying, "They won't learn to talk if you have a really large family and they can't hear one distinct speaker over all the others." And if there isn't any evidence for it, it dovetails neatly with my theory that, for every single thing you do that makes your life the tiniest bit easier, there are 56 people lining up to tell you why it's a bad idea. Everything from a dummy, to 15 minutes of In the Night Garden, to buying broccoli ready-pureed in a tube, from a factory where they've taken the precaution of making it edible first by mixing it with pear ... in some crowds you couldn't even get to the end of the phrases "CBeebies" or "Ella's Kitchen" before someone's taken you by the hand and walked you exhaustively around the full perimeter fence of your egregiousness.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining; this, along with "what value system shall I impart?" and "what instrument should he play?", is one of the cornerstones. "What should I take seriously, and what is just middle-class people trying to out-middle-class each other?" It's part of what keeps the whole business interesting. This is what parenting is all about. I am rubbish at it.

My sister is a really good parent, and I don't mean that in that backhanded "she's very maternal" way, used to denote: "She sucks at everything else." She asks the right questions and this results in her knowing useful things such as why salt is worse than sugar, and why you shouldn't spend 500 quid on a buggy. Before you are too impressed by her, this might just be the result of having two children. Who knows? I, conversely, have no way of knowing what's important and what isn't. All information hits me with equal force.

I'll give you an example. On Monday I went out looking for a book on attachment theory, which, broadly speaking, says that all human relationships are modelled on the infant-carer dyad. Say you are the carer of an infant - let's call you its mother, just for argument's sake. When it looks like you are just sitting about, staring, and you could be washing up, what you are actually doing is teaching the infant how to fall in love, laying down the foundations of attachment that will be the wellspring of its entire life, and the washing-up should definitely be undertaken by someone else.

As you can tell, my grasp of all of this is pretty sketchy, which is why I was looking for a book. Yet when I explained my needs to the independent bookseller, he looked at me like I was just making more of that noise that annoying women with pushchairs make, and directed me towards a quirkily ordered section that merged self-help, the Atkins diet and Annabel Karmel, the puree queen. I tsked huffily, "It is not self-help, it is philosophy" (kind of), and he redirected me to a shelf which contained no books at all apart from M Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled.

But back to T, one of whose arms was bright red. "How come you've got such a red arm?" I was asking - rhetorically, really, given T's language skills, when a woman passing me on Mr Arsey's threshold said, "That looks like sunburn." Gah! Of course! He's a baby! He's never even seen sunlight through a window before today. This is absolutely rudimentary baby care: feed them, water them, protect them from sharp things and extremes of temperature. I've dragged him across two commons in the midday sun looking for a book I won't read on an outdated 60s theory, and he doesn't even have sunscreen on! I'm totally rubbish at this.

But on the plus side, it is now warm; dressing T in shorts is a whole new world of fun.