Parenting science is understanding the cause and effect of various influences on a child's development.  Luckily there is an enormous amount of information that is evidence-based — it's just a matter of translating it and making it more accessible.  Armed with the information, parents can apply their own analysis and reason to issues that arise. 

Thinking of things in a scientific way sometimes helps take any excess emotion out. By providing the hard facts and using "if, then, because" statements instead of "dos" and "don'ts", parents can apply their own objective insight to any situation that arises. This is not revolutionary stuff ― it's just reminding us:

(a) how amazing and complex human development is, and
(b) how we can learn new things to improve our lives.

Here are some examples:

1. Understanding children's developmental needs

Understanding a child's biological and psychological development can help parents and carers prioritise their needs. The pyramid below shows the hierarchical relationship between a child's fundamental needs and other highly desirable ones.

This pyramid recognises that sometimes parents just do not have the time and resources available to satisfy all of a child's needs all the time. It is absolutely essential, however, as a guideline, that, after Tier 1 is satisfied, each parent or core family member can completely invest, at a minimum, 1 hour per day, on a combination of Tier 2 and 3. That assumes that the primary carer is investing a lot more, namely at least 75% of a child's waking moments. If that is not possible for whatever reason, then help is available and it should be sought immediately.

But remember, raising children is not easy - it is harder work and requires more long-term self-discipline than anything else in the world. Nevertheless, making mistakes is part of the learning process for both parent and child - neither should be made to fear failure so much that they end up frozen.

2. Experiment with some of the psychology behind parenting to prove it to yourself. Being aware of how our minds play tricks on us can help.

Be aware that children as well as adults remember almost 100% of the negative experiences but only about 20% of the positive experiences. That is so we can learn to protect ourselves from things that hurt us. As a result, we have to overcompensate with children — for every episode of negative feedback you give a child, you have to balance that with about five episodes of positive feedback to maintain a child's confidence and desire to cooperate.

• Prove it to yourself - name five good and five bad experiences from your childhood.

• Do this experiment at home: Count how many times you say "no" or "stop" to your child or frown at your child during a day. Then count how many times you say "thank you" or "well done" or catch them doing something good during the day. How's your ratio?

3. Understanding evolution basics helps put things into perspective

A lot of making sense of ourselves and how we tick is based on stuff mother nature set up for us through millions of years of practice - our evolution.

In our human genetic blueprint is the capacity to learn language (that highly complex skill most of us have to communicate with each other in words, sentences, intonation, writing, etc). But a child that is not exposed to language for the first years of its life will never be able to learn language of any kind. Without the experience of the environment of language during the first three years, the brain will never be able to grow those connections required to communicate through language. There are rare cases where children have been found to have never been exposed to language, for example a girl whose mother locked her in a room for years only giving her food through a slot. She was never able to learn language thereafter.

So what makes us so powerful as humans - the ability to adapt in a permanent physiological way, during that first five year window, specifically to better suit our immediate environment - is also what makes us so vulnerable to our immediate environment, our very important parents/carers.

Because our basic genetic blueprint has not changed, not evolved since the stone age, it follows that everything that we are capable of now is based on what we learn in our own lifetime, and the building blocks for that capacity to learn are set in stone in the first five years.

(Robert Winston's book, "Human Instinct" is a good exploration of our (pre-)historic motivations.)