Somebody, somewhere always seems to be having a baby - friends and families and neighbours, people you used to work with, parents of one's own children's friends. So obviously, you have to get them a present, and usually, that's easy - the cunning will even now be stocking up on end-of-line babygros from the summer sales. It can be difficult, though, if you want to send a card. You want something sharp, modern, unsentimental, though you have to be careful, what with those messy, mushy post-partum feelings. You want something that works with the particulars - lesbian, single-parent, mixed-heritage, depressive, smug-married-and-having-babies-because-isn't-that-what-you're-supposed-to-do. And most likely, you'll find your taste, faute de mieux, collapsing, towards the pastel, the boringly minimal, the weedy picture of the single flower - as though celebrating a new baby is in some ways a bit like marking a death.

I didn't know Penelope Shuttle's poem "Delicious Babies" until I came across it as the first selection in New Life, "a selection of poetry and prose for that most important event of all". "Yum, yum! Delicious babies! ... The pads of their hands! The rounds / of their knees! Their good smells of bathtime / and new clothes and gobbled rusks!" At last, I thought, a poem that is modern and realistic and enthusiastic about babies - perhaps I can copy it out and drop it round to my neighbour, who's just had a little girl. "Even their discarded nappies are worthy of them, reveal their powers," the poem continues. "Bring me more babies! / Let me have them for breakfast, / lunch and tea!"

Only then, just as quickly, I went right off it. It's generic, it's sentimental, it makes a fetish of baby-bums, like Pampers ads on the television, like those photos you get of rows of naked babies with cabbages on their heads. "You all know the kind of person who goes about saying 'I simply adore babies'," as DW Winnicott, the child psychologist, wrote in the 1950s; "But you wonder, do they love them?" And that's exactly it. Sometimes, the sight of a person holding their new baby can provoke unkind, uncomfortable feelings - sadness, envy, boredom, emptiness, desperate nostalgia that your own child-rearing days are over; disappointment, even, that a person you thought of as special has turned out to be just another boring breeder. None of this makes a person wicked, or means they are not also sincerely in favour of little babies. It just means that in public and private discourses around the topic, there is always going to be a disconnect.

Every English-speaking schoolchild sooner or later gets taught one or both of the loveliest baby-poems in the language, Sylvia Plath's "You're" ("Clownlike, happiest on your hands ...") and "Morning Song" ("Love set you going like a fat gold watch.") They're great for teaching prosody, metaphor and simile; they're also marvellously poised and exact. And yet, doesn't presenting poems such as these, in charming, context-free isolation, limit and blunt them? Plath's Collected Poems are arranged chronologically, in order of composition; "You're" appears between "Mushrooms" ("Nudgers and shovers / In spite of ourselves") and "The Hanging Man". "Morning Song" is trapped between "Face-Lift" ("Old sock-face, sagged on a darning-egg. / They've trapped her in some laboratory jar. / Let her die there") and "Barren Woman" ("The dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen"). The really singular thing about Plath's poetry, as Janet Malcolm has said, is its "not-niceness": the poet's refusal to hide her own aggression lends to her poetry new sources of truth and force. Plath's baby-poems, those delightful little bottles of love and wonder, were shaped by the same "not-niceness" as came up with "Lady Lazarus", showing off about suicide and bragging about how she can eat men like air.

It's "not-niceness" too, though of a completely different sort, that lends distinction to Rachel Cusk's wonderful A Life's Work (2001), a mummy memoir that is both beautiful and historically precise about the weirdnesses of its time - the sceptical, terrified new mother, the absent, ignored older generation, the "friends" who drop in and out and seem far too distant to be of any help. And yet, for every reader who admires it, another hates it, violently and personally - the author has herself summarised the main charges against her as being "of child-hating, of post-natal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual". That a writer might make an artistic decision not to share cosy, reader-pleasing moments, that a book's apparent selfishness might be sculptural and strategic, seems not to compute to these angry readers. Why can't Cusk just say that she simply adores babies, like everyone else? Is it maybe that simply adoring them is a bit different from producing them out of your body and the job of looking after them, day after day after day?

The birth of my son, nearly six years ago, caused in my house a crisis of representation. I'd not been one of those women who'd always longed to have children; I hadn't paid much attention to the state of being pregnant - I had other things on my mind. Then the child comes out and everything changes: your body splits, the world contains a whole new person, and suddenly, for the first time, you see the life and truth in familiar images that never used to signify anything much at all. In her book, Cusk writes about how, although she had always loved the Coleridge poem "Frost at Midnight", she had, somehow, never noticed the baby in it, placed slap bang in the very centre - "Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, / Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, / Fill up the interspersed vacancies / And momentary pauses in the thought!" And it's not just poems that suddenly turn out to be full of babies, but streets and parks and shops as well - in 2003 in fact, the UK birthrate did start edging up a little, from what had been an all-time low two years previously, but mostly, what looked to me like a sudden boom was a figment of my own solipsism. "Mothers had seemed to be odd, out-of-focus creatures, standing waiting outside schools, endlessly waiting," Sally Emerson writes in her introduction to the New Life anthology. "Yet once I had children I was propelled into a clear new world."

And it's not just the real world that's full of babies - the inner life, acknowledged and unacknowledged, is absolutely crawling with them as well. In Making Babies (2004) Anne Enright writes about aliens of both the Roswell and the Sigourney Weaver sort - "The foetus has no capacity for wonder ... It lurks. It is all potential. We do not know if it means us well." Roswell aliens, I remember, were popular on balloons and T-shirts when I was pregnant; I felt elated and also embarrassed when I saw them, it was suddenly so obvious what the image was all about. Nativities, too, and madonnas, and songs about stars and mangers and Baby Jesus; all different ways of broaching the mysteries of reproduction, concealed and revealed in folds of drapery and flesh. And I grew even fonder than I had been already of the old David Lynch film, Eraserhead, with that terrible, monstrous, snuffly baby. One of the many things no one seems to tell you is that babies really do snuffle as though about to give up breathing, and go on doing so, all night, every night, for months.

But mainly, in those long dark nights I remember sitting, almost outside myself, thinking about how terrifying it must be to be a tiny baby, the storming aches and popping pipework, the floppiness, like being locked inside a coma, without even a memory of language to help you structure what you see. That was why I spent a lot of time, to begin with, reading psychoanalytic accounts of infancy, especially Winnicott's in The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964) - "You know how your infant uses his fist or finger, how he pushes it into his mouth ... Well, screaming is like a fist that comes up from inside." Emerson writes: "In poem after poem we see both the grandeur of babies as they arrive on this planet, and their vulnerability" - but her anthology doesn't include Winnicott, or any of the other post-Freudian baby theorists, although it is they, in my view, who have written about such grandeur and vulnerability with more depth and tenderness than any poet or fiction-writer. A forthcoming book from the cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik is called, a bit archly, The Philosophical Baby: "Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined ..." Well here, for example, is one of Emerson's most striking selections, the astonishing opening passage - as it were - from Edward St Aubyn's 2006 novel, Mother's Milk

"Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother's abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead ..."

It's still unusual, though, to read writing that attempts to think about how matters might appear from the point of view of the baby, perhaps because the new mothers are too anxious, too much in the middle of the experience to be able to observe. Tired and housebound, unable to focus on anything for any length of time, new mothers instead form a captive audience for a massive, ever-expanding number of parenting sites on the internet - Mumsnet, the market leader, boasts "more than 20,000 postings every day on anything and everything from the advisability of using pull-up nappies to the acceptability of wearing socks with Crocs" and carries blogs and forums written in its own special Mumsnet language - dh hates me bf'ing and ds won't hug MIL - HTH and LOL ... !!!

Adrienne Rich was never more prophetic than when she wrote, in 1977, that for her, pregnancy was like being "a traveller in an airport where her plane is several hours delayed, who leafs through magazines she would never normally read, surveys shops whose contents do not interest her" - Pregnancy for Dummies, for people who'd rather be reading a software manual; the Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, for people who'd be happier researching a gap year; and the near-uniform rows of manically cheerful comic memoirs, each with their exhausted weak-pun title and diminishingly tiny USPs - You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman (the author is over 40); From Here to Maternity: One Mother of a Journey (the author is Mel Giedroyc from Mel & Sue); From Here to Paternity (which claims to be "the diary of a pregnant man"). The strange thing about these books is that the more of them you read - I binge on them sometimes, in the local library, chomping through them in piles - the sadder their authors seem, isolated and incompetent and suspicious of the other adults around them. The sense of inadequacy, the junkification of emotion, the all-pervasiveness of what is basically envy, reach an apogee in the many works detailing the alarming appearance, excessive possessions and multiple character flaws of the "SUV-driving, skinny latte-drinking, hair-tossing ... figure of both wonderment and loathing" they call the yummy mummy, as defined in a recent newspaper article as "an abomination not just to motherhood, but to ordinary people everywhere": "not-niceness", it seems, has a way of poking its head out, even in supposedly cheerful, light-comic easy reading. "Not-niceness" in fact is just part of the package with babies and children, whether a writer acknowledges it or not.

In her most recent book, Penelope Leach, the great childcare writer and campaigner, points out that there is "more written but less understood" about her subject than about "almost any other single topic that is relevant to almost everyone"; and that the area has become "dangerously hot to handle", explosive with anxiety and panic and guilt. Some of the reasons for this sense of panic are well known. In the rich world, today's adults were probably as children brought up in small families, meaning that they may never have changed a nappy or seen a leaky breast until suddenly, they find themselves the first people in the history of the world to be faced with such an abomination; they're probably older than first-time parents used to be, with their own parents perhaps too old, too far away, and/or too disrespected to be a lot of help. But Leach also thinks the problem has a cultural dimension. "The topic of childcare is becoming more sensitive because, after two generations of startlingly rapid social change ... we are still looking at it backward, treating the sole mother care that was typical of white middle-class families for a generation after the second world war as a gold standard ... It is difficult to imagine a less useful mindset."

Leach is right to remind readers that images and styles of parenthood have a historical context. This becomes shockingly clear, in one way, in Louisa Lane Fox's Love to the Little Ones, subtitled The Trials and Triumphs of Parents Through the Ages, in Letters, Diaries, Memoirs and Essays. "With only a few exceptions," writes the editor, "this anthology is about the 'survival of the richest' parents and children"; only the richest had the wherewithal to record the comings and goings of family life. And yet, writers accidentally include savage cameos of the wider society around them. The Duchess of Devonshire writes in 1783 that her daughter's nurse "made the bed stink of wine and strong drink whenever she came near it"; Georgiana pays her 10 guineas to be off. Mr Haydon writes in 1831 about the wet-nurse he has employed to breast-feed "my dear little child Fanny"; so the nurse has to wean her own "fine baby" in order to keep the milk for her job. And so, the "fine baby" dies of starvation, and Fanny follows shortly after.

And yet in some ways, the more traditionally literary New Life is more historically shocking still. There is Dickens, sharing dad-time with Paul Dombey; there is Tolstoy, sitting in on Kitty's childbed. Why, though, are there no Brontë sisters or Jane Austen? Why is George Eliot barely represented, why is Virginia Woolf's fiction only there with Flush, her novelty biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog? The answer is obvious when you think about it - these writers never wrote much about childbirth because they didn't know a lot about it, not having ever had children themselves. And neither of the present anthologies contains anything from the pioneers of late 20th-century feminism, disqualified, perhaps, by their failure to reproduce biologically: so no Simone de Beauvoir ("It is ... deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself"), and no Female Eunuch-era Germaine Greer: "The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him."

A little later, though, and there were lots of mothers among the writers who shaped the women's movement of the 1970s and 80s. Rich (born in 1929) was, like Plath, a young wife and mother in what she calls "the family-centred, consumer-oriented, Freudian-American world of the 1950s"; unlike Plath, she is still alive and writing. She published the magnificent Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976, and it's still the most lucid account ever written of how ambivalence tears at the insides of the modern mother: "I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself."

At about the same time, Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992) was writing The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), which was published in Britain in 1987 as The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World. This astonishing book argues that both men and women are basically monstrous creatures that rely - like the Wizard of Oz - on phony mysteries to keep them in their different sorts of power. And we'll go on being monstrous - by which Dinnerstein means unfinished, inadequate, living twisted, crazy lives, until we learn to disentangle the ghastly mess that gender relations - she called them "sexual arrangements" - have become, by getting men and women to take equal responsibility for raising children. Childcare, Dinnerstein argues, may appear to be a boring, low-status activity, but really, it's about teaching children the power and burdens of being human - far too important a task to be skimped. Both the Dinnerstein and the Rich book have been out of print for years.

Dinnerstein might be interested, though, to hear of dadlit, a brave new spirit beginning to come up behind the mummy memoirs. "Desperate husbands" was the headline on a story the other week in a Sunday newspaper, about a new generation of stay-at-home "recession dads". Michael Lewis, a journalist better known for writing about Salomon Brothers and baseball, has recently published a book called Home Game, sold grandly on its cover as "a story of raging egos, brutal power struggles and fraught decision-making". His kids eat their yoghurt only if it comes in tubes, frozen; his wife is on medication to silence her "brain screams"; "the American male", Lewis considers, has "at some point in the last few decades" been "fleeced". According to Leach, "While every child is uniquely the responsibility ... of his or her own family, all children are also everybody's responsibility: not-yet-parents, has-been-parents, the childless and the child-free." And yet, "the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother," contributes Lewis - suggesting that in his house if in no other, what Dinnerstein called "the male-female collaboration to keep history mad" has a bit more life in it yet.

• To order a copy of New Life, edited by Sally Emerson (Little, Brown) for £9.99, The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik (Bodley Head) for £13.99, Child Care Today: What We Know and What We Need to Know, by Penelope Leach (Polity) for £13.99, Love to the Little Ones, edited by Louisa Lane Fox (Frances Lincoln) for £13.99, or Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis (Penguin) for £8.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop