Most parents know what a stranded tourist would feel like: lost, alone and without a phrasebook in the middle of a foreign country. A language barrier also looms between you and your kids. Why is my baby crying? What does it mean when my infant grizzles like that? Why is my toddler flipping out into a full-blown tantrum and what can I do about it? Why is my teenager rolling her eyes at me, locking herself in her room for hours — and how can I help?

Helpless, confused, frustrated, not knowing what to do — these are all regular stops on the journey of parenting. This is despite today’s parents having access to a bewildering and unprecedented array of scientific information about child development. The problem is there is so much to sift through it can be overwhelming. To make matters worse, sometimes we are given conflicting information.

Have you noticed that experts are often at loggerheads, polarised into opposing camps? So, although it is valid and important to have a gander at what the experts advise, how do you avoid giving your power over to them? How much inner wisdom is each parent equipped with and how can you use your own intuition to weigh up and filter the advice you are given?

You’ve been there

You were once an unborn child, then a helpless infant, a babbling baby, an uncontainable toddler, a child and then ... an adolescent with all the angst and smugness that a deluge of hormones can bring on. Not so long ago, you sounded, behaved and felt a lot like your child does now. You actually know a lot more about how your child feels than you might be consciously aware of — and this understanding can be the master key to your effectiveness.

All parents have parenting intuition; there’s nothing magical about it. It’s just a case of knowing how to hear its voice inside you and is as simple as learning to listen to the voice of your heart. But can you trust that voice? Doesn’t our culture tell us over and over not to let the heart lead? Don’t we prize rationality and efficiency over the mushy, gooey quagmire of the world of feeling?

Could it be that intuition and the voice of the heart are romantic confabulations, the stuff of fairy tales? Probably not: modern science has rescued intuition from the realm of sentimentality and located its biological base.

Your heart is a brain

In every culture around the word, people point to the centre of their chest when they talk about love. Have you ever felt a warm glow, a melting feeling, some tingling or buzzy sensations in the centre of your chest when you are filled with love for your child, or for any other person? Do you know why that happens?

In a revolutionary discovery that’s sure to transform how we understand ourselves, it was recently found that the human heart is far more than a muscle that pumps blood around. The heart contains at least 40,000 of its own brain cells, much like the ones in your head. Just like the “head-brain”, this “heart-brain” makes its own brain chemicals in copious amounts, one of the main ones being oxytocin, the hormone of love.

When neuroscientists have looked at the connections that join the head-brain and the heart-brain, they have found that more information travels upwards; in other words, the heart is wired up to tell the head how to think.