Parenting is often called the hardest job there is, and the description holds up better than most clichés. Babies arrive without an instruction manual, and most of what parents do is worked out from experience, instinct and whatever they absorbed from their own upbringing. It is also the only job of its kind that runs the wrong way financially: there is no salary, and the costs run from the first pram to a contribution towards tuition, a first car, sometimes a deposit on a first home.
What parents generally want is to meet a child's needs, emotional as much as material, without disappearing entirely into the task — to come out the other side with something of themselves left. The uncomfortable part is that effort and outcome are only loosely connected. Time, money, patience and attention can all be supplied in large quantities and the result still cannot be predicted, because a child is a person rather than a project.
There are traditional approaches and much less traditional ones, and a good deal of the writing on the subject is really advocacy for one of them. Choosing a style is less a single decision than a running series of them, and most households end up with something assembled from several sources rather than anything a book would recognise.
Discipline is where most of the heat is. Children test boundaries because that is how boundaries get established, and the task is to respond consistently and without much drama, which is considerably easier to describe than to manage at the end of a long day. Life also supplies difficulties nobody chose: illness, upheaval, a bereavement that interrupts a child's view of the world as a safe place. Helping a child through those is part of the job and is rarely covered in the advice.
Then there is the teaching that happens almost incidentally — responsibility, the natural consequences of actions, how to get along with a sibling and what to do when rivalry turns sharp, how to deal with strangers, and how to become independent and confident without becoming reckless.
Communication runs through all of it, and it is mostly listening rather than telling. Stories and explanations matter less than the willingness to hear what a child is actually saying, including the parts said badly, sideways or not at all.
The adults have to manage that between themselves first. Where more than one person is raising a child — two parents, a parent and a step-parent, a grandparent who does the school run — consistency between them matters more than which approach they settle on, because children notice disagreement quickly and will work in the gap. Grandparents in particular can be the greatest help available or a steady undermining influence, and which it is going to be is worth settling early rather than leaving to become a grievance.