Mothers these days have a lot more to understand than just their children. Gentle parents, helicopter moms, tradwives, girlbosses: Parental identities abound. Which one are you? Should you be any of them?

You can scroll endlessly on Instagram, TikTok, and every other social media app for advice that re-inforces and shapes your chosen lifestyle—and tacitly or otherwise condemns the choices made by other women. Beyond social media, there is the whole mothering advice industry, which has migrated online along with everything else. Offline it is also impossible to escape commodified offers of help in raising your children. At the Barnes & Noble near my house in Connecticut, the parenting shelves are strategically placed next to the kids’ section. You can prepare your house for a “maximalist declutter” while your son debates whether Awesome Chemistry Experiments for Kids or Backyard Rockets will better blow it up again.

If you find yourself overwhelmed by all this activity and its attendant identity markers, I have a suggestion: Give up. Toss out the radical and extreme parenting books. Delete Instagram, or at least avoid looking at the things on it that make you feel lousy. Leave the crazy Facebook groups. I shouldn’t even have to mention TikTok.

All of the competing influencer paradigms for contemporary motherhood suffer from the same problem: assuming that there is a single path to a good life. If a woman only follows the right account or buys the right e-course, all will be well. Follow my prescription, these online personalities claim, and happy, well-formed children will result. Sadly, you cannot successfully scroll or purchase your way into being a good mom. I often wish I could.

If you really want advice about parenting, be discerning in choosing your guides. For my part, I try only to take seriously advice from people who seem well grounded in reality. Their defining characteristic is usually a sense of humility, a willingness to admit that when it comes to raising children, many things are outside our control. (This rules out many of the most popular influencers.) I am skeptical of short-form writing or videos of any length. Ignore the takemakers. Let them earn their keep by provoking outrage; we mothers have a much more important task at hand: actually raising our children.

But how are we to do this? I encourage mothers with young children to rely on three tools that I have found invaluable: observation, intuition, and experimentation. The first is certainly not original to me. The American educationist Charlotte Mason suggests in Parents and Children that a mother keep a diary in which she notes “the successive phases of her child’s physical, mental, and moral growth, with particular attention to the moral.” Likewise, Magda Gerber (no relation to the baby food company) encourages parents to use “sensitive observation” to understand a baby and his needs. Of course, Mason and Gerber also give extensive advice on what to do with those observations. You can follow that advice or not. But what I find most useful is the practice of observation itself. When you pay careful, consistent attention to your child, you begin to see him for who he actually is, not who you might wish him to be.

You must also understand yourself. “Gentle parents” are supposed to avoid saying no to their children. (As a practical matter, this means the use of countless circumlocutions: I know of a mom who once told her three-year-old as he demanded candy, “Yes, darling, you can have other healthy choices.”) I know I can’t be a gentle parent; to be a patient and loving mom, I must hold a firm line on family standards of discipline and politeness. Badly behaved children who say nasty things about dinner and refuse to help out around the house inevitably make me badly behaved in return. Sometimes my preschooler needs to sit on the Naughty Step for a minute to cool down. Sometimes I do too. Without the Naughty Step, we’d both be in serious trouble.

Observation is reciprocal. In observing, you give your child the gift of attention. We often hear Simone Weil’s famous phrase that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” This could be my mothering motto. On this view, observation is not the result of anxious attention. (That’s the helicopter parent.) Rather, observation is a way of seeing more truly. When we observe our children, it is not to look for their faults or to improve them. It is simply to understand them. As Weil tells us, that observation can be understood as a kind of prayer. Indeed, Scripture is full of references to prayers for this kind of seeing. “Lord,” Eliseus prays, “open his eyes, that he may see.” Likewise in the Psalms we read, “Open thou my eyes: and I will consider the wondrous things of thy law.” The wise mother might pray similarly.

It is less easy to say what should be done with our observations. In certain online spaces we are often told to trust our instincts—to tell ourselves things like “You’ve got this, mama, listen to your intuition.” But for these serial invitations to “use the Force,” context matters. A mom trying to decide whether to “unschool,” or let her child self-direct home education, might be urged to follow her “mama instincts” by other unschooling families. Ditto the mom declining a course of antibiotics in holistic health groups.

I agree that mothers should rely upon intuition, but not when it is really a code word for crowd pressure. The intuition I have in mind is simply the ability of our minds to process and analyze large amounts of information at a largely subconscious level. Science bears out the key role of intuition in parenting. Abigail Tucker writes that a mother’s brain is dramatically rewired during pregnancy and labor: “As moms’ neurons sop up the trippy chemicals of childbirth, the genes inside the cells turn off and on, causing change and brain growth,” she reports in Mom Genes. A mother will become more sensitive and reactive to her baby. This helps to explain why sometimes a mother will hear her baby crying when others do not or intuit that an infant is getting sick based on something she can’t quite put her finger on. Scientists have also learned that the intuitive capabilities of the brain in general are both significant and not yet fully understood. The mathematician David Bessis notes that new discoveries in mathematics rely heavily on intuition. After years of devotion to math, a scholar develops an intuitive sense for solving puzzles that is hard to explain but very real. “What mathematicians do on a daily basis is to develop their intuition, to make it richer, clearer, more powerful,” he writes in Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity. “Even more so than the publications and official works, mathematicians’ intuition is their masterpiece, their lifetime accomplishment.”

What does this mean for a mother doing her best to cope with a young child, or multiple young children? It means, I believe, that mothers should be encouraged to trust their intuition, which they should test against their own good sense and reasoning abilities. When I homeschool my two older children, their two younger siblings are present. This is a challenge. Toddlers and pre-algebra are a difficult mix. The total work I do in a day is extensive and always shifting: changing diapers, teaching a history lesson, editing an essay for my own paid work, getting dinner on the table, going grocery shopping, folding laundry, etc. The more I do it, the more I achieve an intuitive understanding of the work in my domain. I cook from the hip instead of referring to recipes. I do less meal planning because I better understand the combined tasks of shopping, batch cooking, and eating that works for my family. I use fewer chore charts because I have a better intuitive sense of what has to be done to keep the household functioning. Just as the mathematician solves her daily math puzzles to extend her mathematical intuition, I solve my own household puzzles and increase my intuitive sense of running the household.

Following intuition naturally requires a willingness to try different things in different circumstances. If you carefully observe children, you find that each one is different. A wise mother quickly realizes that the parenting book that worked so well for her friend simply may not work for her family—not because it’s wrongheaded but because for any number of possible reasons the advice it contains is not applicable to her situation. Rather than spending extensive time trying to smush a child into a mold not shaped for him, which will be both painful and pointless, I suggest a different solution. Experiment. Use your observation skills and reasoned intuition to make some guesses about what kinds of parenting will work for that specific child and then try out your ideas. Not all of them will work. That’s fine. Any mother will have to tell her child something like “practice makes progress” at some point, whether it’s baseball, the violin, or prose composition. It’s worth repeating that to yourself sometimes too. Practice: Try out some different things, and you’ll start making progress.

Here, although I am not a theologian or a professional religious instructor, I will venture a few thoughts on the religious formation of children. I gently caution mothers against hewing too closely to the “Catholic success sequence,” or the idea that if you only educate your children this way, attend that Mass, and send them to the right Catholic university, you will turn them into faithful Catholics. I was baptized Catholic as an infant at Saints Cyril and Methodius Croatian Catholic Church, right by the Lincoln Tunnel as you exit Manhattan. After some detours as a young adult through other Christian sects, I am Catholic today. I have noticed in the approximately forty years I have been a Christian that while Jesus certainly calls each of His sheep by name, He also calls them all a little differently. There is no perfect formula a mother can use to raise a faithful Catholic. This makes perfect sense. After all, a child’s religious relationship is not with his mother; it is with the great I AM, Who paradoxically often manifests as a still, small voice. I’ve always seen my role as a mother as bringing my child to meet God and then trying to get out of the way. After all, our job is not to create star athletes or Harvard graduates. In fact, it’s not to create anything at all; it’s to love and care for what God has created.

I think it is crucial that mothers encourage their children to find their own source of connection to God, which will be personal and specific to each child. As a child, although I certainly felt God’s presence at Mass, I found Him most reliably outside, especially sitting on the roof of my house and watching the skies. It was in admiring the clouds, the stars, and the sunlight that I first became deeply aware of God’s majestic love for His creation. The faith of one of my children is especially strengthened by music; another finds simple bedtime prayers comforting.

When we scrap the prescriptive models and pay attention to the souls God gave us care over, we can love them and help them face their own trials. We can be sure that our children will encounter devastating illness, profound loss, and the finality of death in their lives. We can be equally sure that God will go seeking them in those times. What we cannot know is the means He’ll use to do so. Indeed, the Bible tells us that the Lord sometimes has very peculiar ways of contacting His people. Moses found God in a burning bush. Jacob wrestled Him all night. Of course it’s an important duty to take a child to Mass, to prepare him to make his first Communion, and so forth. Yet, it would be terrible if a mother, out of her own pride, prevented a child from developing his own relationship with God.

In one of the darkest periods of my adult life, I would put my babies to bed, pour one shot of Jack Daniels into a cup of Coca-Cola, and take one Parliament cigarette from the pack I had hidden in a teapot on top of the refrigerator. Thus equipped, I would go out into the backyard and sit on a lawn chair. I’d drink my Jack and Coke, smoke my single cigarette, look up at the sky, and talk to God. I’m not ordinarily a drinker or a smoker (although I do think of myself as a pray-er), but the Creator of the Universe carried me through in the only way I was capable of meeting Him at that time in my life. For about a month I went out looking for God in the backyard, and found Him indeed. It still brings tears to my eyes to think of the many consolations I received in that lawn chair under the nighttime Connecticut sky.

Our children are not really ours, in the sense of being possessions. There is no book or Instagram influencer that can truly tell us what to do with them. Instead, I pay attention. I try to use my reasoned intuition and practice at becoming a better mother. And when I come up short, over and over again, I rely on the same prayer each morning: Lord, teach me how to love better today. I have to trust that will be enough.