Where do you go for parenting advice?

I was watching a documentary about Steinway pianos awhile back, and there are several parts where the piano comes off the line and then has to be extensively hand-fitted for some part or other; that is to say that each one takes a lot of individual attention in spite of using some mass production technique (they're about as high-end a piano as there is).

Children are semi-random genetic combinations of their parents and aren't amenable to mass production; I've long suspected that generic advice is close to worthless and once you mix in the replication crisis, all the science seems close to worthless. I think you just have to take the time and figure out what works for each kid.

I did parenting courses, multiple times over the years. The best parenting course I ever did was one that was taught by a team of psychologists who specialised in child psychology, and also maternal mental health. I had to do the course as part of my treatment and recovery for postnatal OCD. The course itself was based on attachment theory. The stuff I learned from it, I’ve carried with me through the years. Then… when my kid was struggling in school, I got an educational psychologist who did some assessments and created a individualised report and learning plan for his specific needs, I give the report and plan to teachers.

I rate attachment theory pretty highly and would say, if you can’t access parenting courses based on this stuff, you still might find some good books in the library for parenting strategies based on attachment theory, and also Google scholar if you’re feeling super academic and wanting to get nerdy about it.

In contrast, the worst parenting course I ever did was one that was hosted by community do-gooders which based their techniques on ideologies around what they believed were the socially accepted family values that all people should adopt. It was not culturally appropriate for a lot of reasons and just awful, so when it comes to parenting courses do your research before jumping in… And when parenting gets hard, which if often does, or you feel like you’re out of your depth, getting advice from experts is fine, it doesn’t mean you need some fancy label or clinical diagnosis, sometimes an outsider perspective on family dynamics in general can be pretty helpful.

What kind of advice are you looking for? What age(s)? On what topic(s) would peer-reviewed papers with a decent p-value really matter as a parent?

As a father of three, the only "advice" I would share with new parents is to consider cotton diapers.

https://priceonomics.com/the-evolution-of-potty-training