Who needs nappies, cots and buggies? When their first son was born, Harriet and Matt Rudd chose to snub the child gurus and do what came naturally
Matt Rudd

Harriet and Matt Rudd with their children Felix and Freddie (Vicki Couchman)Harriet and Matt Rudd with their children Felix and Freddie (Vicki Couchman) It is now more than a century since Sir Frederic Truby King wrote a bestseller advising women not to cuddle their babies or even look the little monkeys in the eye for fear of spoiling them. Ever since then, child guruing has been big business. With seductive titles such as From Crying Baby to Contented Baby, The No-Cry Sleep Solution and Teach That Damned Baby What’s What So You Can Get Back to Chinning Chardonnay Like the Good Old Days, they hook nervous, exhausted, desperate parents like dealers hook crackheads.

Harriet and I took an early decision to ignore the child gurus and do what came naturally. She always wanted to be an earth mother and I didn’t have to read lots of very boring, know-it-all books. Four and a half years after making that decision, what I can say is that it’s strange what you end up doing.

I’m 35 and I sleep in a children’s bunk bed. Can you imagine the fun the gurus would have with that?

You might end up co-sleeping. To us, this seemed a completely obvious and normal thing to do. You might also end up feeding the child when it’s hungry, not at four-hourly intervals, according to a strict routine. You might also decide to chuck the damned unwieldy buggy in the garden shed and use a simple sling instead.

If this whole thing of doing what comes naturally starts to get out of hand, you might begin to feel uncomfortable that Pampers now markets nappies for seven-year-olds. You might just not bother with nappies at all. Yes, from the day your child is born. (The Chinese are very good at anticipating when a baby is about to poo. We took a messy few months to work it out.)

I have a quiet little bet with myself. A hundred years from now, people will look back on us the way we look back on the Victorians and many will find it astonishing that we treated children the way we do. The more extreme parenting strategies appear to deny the fact that we’re parents at all. The aim is to get back to our normal, child-free lifestyles as soon as possible.

Now I wonder if the guru-free approach was worth it. I’d like to say 100% yes, but if I’m honest, the co-sleeping is a right fag. For a good three years, Harriet and I didn’t go out together in the evenings. And while our eldest does sleep in the bunk in his room, our youngest shows no sign of wanting to leave our bed. He sleeps in a starfish shape. So does Harriet. Two starfish means no room for me. So I sleep in the top bunk. I’m 35 and I sleep in a children’s bunk bed. Can you imagine the fun the gurus would have with that?

Going nappy-free
Let’s ignore the whole issue of the nation’s landfills overflowing with soiled nappies.

Let’s also ignore the fact that before disposables were invented, children were toilet trained within a year. Let’s just focus on the main fact: it’s boring spending your life in the stinking family rooms at shopping centres. We stopped with the nappies at seven months. The first time we sat Freddie on the potty and did pooing impressions, he curled out a beauty. We never looked back (or indeed down).

The “elimination method” does involve offering them a wee quite often — maybe every hour, as you get to know their rhythm. Within a few weeks, you know them and they know what’s going on, too. I’m not going to lie to you, there are going to be misses (we had a memorable one at a wedding, right in the middle of the groom’s speech) and the carpets are going to suffer, but it’s worth it. There is nothing worse than trying to unpeel a heavy two-year-old’s poo bag. The wriggling, screaming, wall-splattering ritual of misery — we’ve witnessed it a thousand times with friends who think we’re mad to have done what we did. You can always leave a nappy on anyway to catch the spills — we did for our second child.

Co-sleeping
This is the big one, the one that makes people lick their teeth angrily and look at us as if we’re serial killers, but we did this from day one. Harriet’s mother is east European and it’s normal there. We tried, half-heartedly, a couple of times to move him into a cot, but after a traumatic birth, it never seemed right. And given that he was waking up every hour, and Harriet had had a caesarean, it was totally impractical.

We bought a bigger bed (an emperor, if you must know) and on some nights — okay, most nights — I retreated to the spare room. We established a happy, hippie routine that lasted until we had our second child 2½ years later. After that, Freddie and I moved into a room together — which was brilliant, honest — while the newborn got the full mummy treatment. Now, 18 months on, Freddie is completely happy on his own. There were times when we felt very tied to this and wished we could stick the little blighters off down a separate wing of the house, but we don’t have a separate wing and the benefits far outweighed the losses. You must take my word for it.

Breast-feeding for ever
Channel 4 didn’t help with that documentary, Extraordinary Breastfeeding, in which hardcore mega-hippies were still suckling their eight-year-old kids. But Harriet was still at it when Fred was two and I did begin to wonder how we’d manage if he went to a university that wasn’t within suckling distance. Then he stopped. I like to think he’s taller, stronger and better at maths than his bottle-fed peers, but so would every dad. Nevertheless, life without sterilising equipment is an awful lot more straightforward.

Kill the buggy
So where are we: no nappies, no bottles, no cots… the fourth dimension in a stress-free, clutter-free parenting existence is to ditch the buggy. I struggled with everything else in this list at times, but using a sling instead of a pram has always been brilliant. The 4×4-style Bugaboos are heavy, expensive and cumbersome on a high street. They’re rubbish over stiles. They’re exhausting up an incline. We were given one, so I know. And we used it until we arrived one day at Luton airport for a flight to Spain. We had the buggy for our one precious child. We had bags. We had boxes. We had toys. We had, in short, an awful lot of crap. In front of us in the check-in queue was a Spanish woman with a baby sleeping peacefully in a sling. Her other two children were skipping around her feet being bilingual and charming. She had nothing but a purse and a tiny rucksack.

We haven’t used the bloody Bugaboo since. Well, not much, anyway. Harriet goes to Sling Meet, a group where parents can meet and drink Fairtrade coffee.

That’s a step too far for me, but it demonstrates the pressure you face from “normal” society when you adopt alternative parenting methods. Even sling-wearers have to meet and console themselves.

William’s Progress, Matt Rudd’s new novel, is out on July 8 (HarperPress £12.99)