When childcare gurus talk about "learning from our grandmothers", they don't usually mean mine. She wasn't a Chinese matriarch with the secret of balancing the Yin and the Yang, or an Iroquois with a deft way of swaddling. She was one of the very first hospital-trained maternity nurses, schooled in New Zealand by none other than the notorious Dr Truby King.

Truby King is the Aunt Sally for almost all postwar child-rearing books. He invented modern baby formula and advocated feeding this to infants on a rigid, four-hour schedule. As the baby grew, the timetable also included strictly monitored naps and vigorous airings in the perambulator, all undertaken on the dot, regardless of how much the child wailed. His doctrines were adopted across the western world and he has been blamed for everything from the steep postwar decline in breastfeeding - almost certainly true - to autism, which is certainly false.

My grandmother, though, believed in him to the end of her life. She also acted as maternity nurse for all her grandchildren, took care us of extensively during our childhoods and lives in our memories as a most-loved, central person, someone with whom there was never conflict, just order, safety, games of spillikins on the carpet and multi-choice mini cereal packs for breakfast.

Nor, extraordinarily enough, were there conflicts with her daughters-in-law. My mother was a fully paid-up member of most 60s radical movements and made Glasgow's first muesli from ingredients then more usually found in pet shops. She is even pictured in an early Hugh Jolly childcare book - but it was my grandmother who taught her to breastfeed.

My grandmother also taught her to be confident in her ability to hold and bath her baby, to put him down to sleep and not to be afraid of his cries, to insist that they both rest. The only anxiety my mother remembers was about what on earth she would do when Granny left.

But my mother also remembers telling Granny fibs. I ate and slept regularly, but never on a Truby King routine (I wonder if anyone was) and so my mother was always telling her we were just in the process of shifting from one routine to the next. Granny knew better than to question her. She never questioned anyone, come to think of it, especially little children. Nor, apart from those cereal packets, did she offer choices. You simply put your arms up to have the garment she had selected (and had probably made) slipped over your head and went on with the next activity she had decided on - a nap, perhaps, or a visit to the ducks.

If it were possible for me to have my Grandmother with me in a couple of weeks' time, when I come home with a tiny baby, then I would, Truby King or no Truby King. I am not scared of the birth, as many of the women she worked with must have been, because modern medicine, modern information and modern choices have made me feel in charge of it. I'm much more frightened of the process I've seen happen to so many women after the birth: the exhaustion and anaemia that overtake women who are not given a chance to recuperate; the illness and depression suffered by women still breastfeeding a five-month-old baby every hour because that is what they think "demand-feeding" means; the sense of failure experienced by women who give up breastfeeding (a staggering 33% do so in the first six weeks) because the once-an-hour business defeated them; the wan, depleted faces of parents whose five, or six, or 15-month-old won't sleep through the night; the ugly hatred and rage that can flare up in a mother tyrannised by her child's cries. My Grandmother, I think, could help me learn to say no to some of this.

I want to try to avoid some of this pain for myself by moving my baby gently on to a regular sleeping and eating routine, though hardly a Truby King one. It's not that I think this will be a superior way of bringing up Baby, it's that I think it will be easier for me.

As this is now as unorthodox as my mother's breastfeeding in 1963, I expect I'll end up making all sorts of compromises and telling various fibs to the disapproving, just as my mother did. But I expect Chinese women lied to the matriarch about their consumption of ginger and Iroquois women fibbed about hours spent on the swaddling board. I suspect that fudging and fibbing and seeing how it all works out is what "learning from your grandmother" really means.