By Joanna Moorhead
London - She's a dab hand at sorting out toddler tantrums, and when it comes to advising parents on how to stop a new arrival ruling the roost, hers is the name on everyone's lips. But now babycare guru Gina Ford has her own showdown to deal with. If it all goes wrong, the next step is a date in court.
Ford is the parenting adviser who, eight years ago, lobbed a hand grenade into the quiet backwater of liberal childrearing. Since the 1970s, a revolution in the country's nurseries and playrooms had been giving babies and children a greater role in their own care. Before then, babies had been "controlled" on the edge of family life; afterwards they were centre stage, "listened to" and "understood".
The changes crept in almost unnoticed. But alongside them were othersputting mothers back into the workplace. So that as well as suddenly having to cope with babies who needed feeding through the night and placating through the day, women had jobs to do as well. Mothers were exhausted; something had to be done. Ford was the woman who did it.
What she did, with her 1999 The Contented Little Baby Book, was to re-introduce routine, a philosophy so old-fashioned it existed only in grandparents' memories. According to Ford, babies should be fed at regular intervals, rather than whenever they cried, and put down for their naps at the same time each day. They should be woken if they overslept. They should be left to cry (for controlled periods of time) to teach them to fall asleep on their own. The Contented Little Baby Book was, and continues to be, a bestseller. Hard-pushed parents loved her for it. There were celebrity endorsements from people such as Kate Winslet and Heather Mills McCartney.
But critics say Ford stifles babies' personalities and puts the needs of mothers first. For every mother who said Ford had made her life worth living again, there were others who loathed every word.
That's where this week's battle comes in. For some of this criticism has spilled on to Mums-net.com, one of the country's most successful community-based websites. One writer said Ford "straps babies to rockets and fires them into Lebanon". Ford demanded apologies, redress and a guarantee of no further attacks. Mumsnet stopped discussions mentioning Ford, but the feud rumbles on. On Tuesday, lawyers for both sides will attempt to mediate in this "mother of all battles", as the tabloids have called it, but a quick resolution looks unlikely, and it's quite possible Ford vs Mumsnet will end up in court.
Mumsnet's founders - Oxbridge-educated, north London mothers in their thirties - could hardly be more different from Ford, a 52-year-old self-taught maternity nurse with no children of her own who left school at 16. Ford grew up on a farm in south-eastern Scotland. Her mother, Helen, who gave birth to her aged just 20, brought Gina up alone after her father walked out soon after her birth. Helen battled with postnatal depression. By Gina's account, it sounds a chaotic childhood, with nights spent singing Mario Lanzo and Tom Jones hits and dancing around the kitchen. Until she was 11, when her mother remarried, Ford shared her bed.
Critical psychologists have had a field day with this. Children with depressed mothers, they say, may be extremely sensitive to the needs of other people - particularly mothers - ever after, hence her emphasis on them in her books, ones that now corner 25 percent of the market.
What could be more natural than that Ford would become the guru who espoused the merits of routine? And what about that sleeping in her mother's bed until she was 11? No surprise, surely, that Ford wanted to make very clear the importance of space from the child for the mother, and space from the mother for the child.
At 19, Ford married. She hoped for children - six, she once said - and she has confessed that for many years she would buy baby clothes in the Harrods sale. But somehow the time was never right, and there were no babies. Ford and her husband divorced after 10 years and she moved into the career that was to lead to fame and fortune. She became a maternity nurse to wealthy families across the world, spending the next 12 years looking after babies in about 300 families.
She clearly loves babies - she can't understand, she says, how people think they're boring. But it's the mothers she's always been especially concerned with. Ford's critics make much of the fact that she has never actually given birth or raised a child of her own. But she maintains it makes no difference to her ability to care for children: how many other parenting gurus can draw on hands-on experience of hundreds of babies?
It was the death of her mother from cancer in 1998, at the age of 59, that put Ford on to her new career as a writer. She has said that her mother's dying words were: "I love you: go and write the book." The Contented Little Baby Book was the result.
Meet Ford today and you're struck by a mix of maternal concern and steely conviction. Stocky, and with a blonde bob, she'll tell you self-deprecatingly in her lilting Scottish accent that she's just someone who wrote a little book about how to look after babies. It's almost as though she refuses to be drawn into debate on how controversial her arguments are.
"You'd think... my mother brought me into the world to boil babies and eat them for dinner," she has said. And there is a tinge of hurt bemusement: "I've devoted my life to helping mothers and I'm thrashed left, right and centre."
Those who know her say she has the ability to be over-impressed by her well-heeled clients. "She'll drop things into the conversation about what 'nice' people they all are," says one. And while Ford doesn't often give interviews, she has hinted that there have been many more celebrity clients than she lets on.
Today Ford divides her time between homes in Edinburgh, London and Switzerland, but while her books have made her comfortably off, there's little to suggest she has changed her lifestyle: she has said she still gets her leggings from Matalan for 4.50 pounds. Though she no longer does hands-on maternity nursing, her passion is still that one-to-one advice to desperate mothers. She spends up to 18 hours a day at her computer answering questions from users of her website tearing their hair out over feeding, weaning, potty-training and the other issues that conspire to throw a new mother into despair. She is a self-confessed workaholic.
Perhaps it is this side of her character that has fuelled her row with Mumsnet: this really is her life's work, and she cares - and how - about being vilified.