I'm not a parent, but my favourite line on parenting is from Frank Furedi's 'Paranoid Parenting' - 'abandon your fears and be a good parent'. The general line in the book is that children really don't need that much guidance, otherwise everyone born in the 1950s, or in many developing countries where children have to fend for themselves a lot of the time, would be fucked up, and we're/ they're not.

The pressure to 'parent' is social - and has emerged, according to Furedi, because adults have lost control over every other aspect of their lives, and are themselves anxious, so they transfer their fears onto their poor kids - the result is anxious kids and a mental health crisis due to over-parenting.