My daughter Robin is 28 months old and her favourite question is: "Mummy, what are you doing?" She repeats it with a frequency that gets to me if I'm tired.

Like most parents of young children I'm doing a lot. I'm holding down a full-time job and feeling insecure about my performance because I'm knackered all the time. I have to shoot out the door bang on 5pm every day on the nursery run whether I've finished my work or not. I'm worrying about the money I pay for childcare from a salary that isn't rising in line with inflation. I'm also worrying about whether I should be working at all. Is it emotionally bad for her, for me?

Obviously I'm also doing amazing, ridiculous things. I am singing for so long to make a car journey pass that I lose my voice. I'm looking for a poo that has dematerialised during a surreptitious nappy change while we're on a tour of a cave that's part of a World Heritage site. I am seeing snow for the first time. I am being kissed with a ferocity that has not yet been muted by embarrassment. But mostly, Robin, what am I doing? The truth is I'm not really sure.

It's an odd time to be a new parent. Families seem inescapable at the moment, whether you have one or not. We hog the political agenda with debate about parental leave and benefits. We clog up magazine lifestyle pages with our post-baby figures and our Aden + Anais swaddle wraps, with our toddlers whose clothes cost more than ours. We ruin your weekend brunch with our howls and our scattered raisins and the buggy bumping your table, spilling your flat white.

Part of this is unavoidable: there are more of us. In 2011-12, more babies were born in the UK than in any other year since 1972. There were 813,200 births, according to the Office of National Statistics. It was the most bountiful year of a decade of ever-increasing fecundity. Since 2001 the birth rate has risen – we're in a baby boom which will have major repercussions on healthcare, housing and education.

Boom town: in 2011-12 there were 813,200 UK births. Photograph: Camille Tokerud/Getty Images

There aren't enough midwives: more than half of birthing units do not meet staffing guidelines and 28% have had to turn expectant mothers away because of a lack of space or staff in the past year. By 2015 we'll need 450,000 more school places. And as demand grows for places, in the private sector nursery fees are growing faster than a landfill mountain of nappies. Full-time care costs are close to £200 a week, a rise of 30% in just three years. Meanwhile, more mothers work now than a decade ago: 29% of households had two full-time earners in 2011 and those who work part-time work more hours.

There is a lot of pressure on a finite pool of resources. There's not enough money or stirrups or school desks or professionals who know what they're doing: if parents now seem pushier maybe it's because they feel pushed.

That is the overwhelming reputation of the modern parent – pushy. And let's be honest, when we say parent we still really mean mother, with all the exasperatingly traditional, sexist connotations that word now holds. We are tiger moms, we are slummy mummies. If we want to lean in like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg we are deluded. If we stay at home we're making a "lifestyle choice". We are breastfeeding, co-sleeping fanatics like Time cover-star Jamie Lynne Grumet. We are Lily Allen with her "baggy pussy". We are the Duchess of Cambridge. We are Gwyneth bloody Paltrow. Mumsnet isn't just a website but shorthand for a particular type of over-bearing parent. Though there are sound economic reasons for parents to be a national focus, disliking or judging them has become a national pastime.

"It's ironic," says Justine Roberts, CEO and co-founder of Mumsnet, "because the underlying common philosophy seems to be much more laissez-faire than tiger mum. It's true that Mumsnet users are opinionated, and when they see things that they want to change, we try to use our collective muscle to help achieve those changes. I think there is a strand of thought out there which brands opinionated women as pushy or shouty."

Paper work: Alice Fisher with Robin at home. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

Jo Swinson, junior equalities minister and under-secretary for employment relations, is expecting her first child, but has already experienced a change in the way people view her. "There's a gender difference in the way the media approaches these stories," she says. "I'm currently the only minister in the department for business who does not have a child, but the interest in how I'm going to manage my job while being a parent is already there. To my knowledge, that isn't a question that gets asked of my male colleagues."

When Dr Aric Sigman spoke at a conference for the campaigning parent group Mothers at Home Matter in October and coined the word "motherism" to describe the prejudice full-time mothers encounter, he was amazed by the international media interest. "It was just a euphemism to encapsulate how they felt as educated women who, because they had stayed home with their children, had been relegated socially and economically – but there was a huge response."

For new parents this raising of eyebrows, this pursing of lips is a mean kick in the teeth. The average age of British women having babies is 30. So you've had roughly three decades to get used to the prejudice you typically face as a female – you've worked out in your head how you feel about being called stupid, fat, ugly and slutty. Then you're given a whole new negative identity to untangle at the point when you feel most vulnerable. Nothing can prepare you for becoming a parent. One minute you are not and the next you utterly, brilliantly and terrifyingly are. Every action feels earth changing and you do it all on very little sleep, very little food and in a state of panic. It's akin to trying to fill in your mortgage application in your tent during the closing night of Glastonbury or assemble flat-pack furniture wearing mittens and a blindfold. Every new parent feels they're doing it wrong. They really don't need society to tell them that they are.

Government legislation on shared parental leave comes into effect in 2015 and it could genuinely shake things up, not just giving men the chance to stay home but allowing women to leave it sooner. It will be interesting to see how the reputation of parenting changes when it is less exclusively women's work. "I'm, sadly, not expecting that suddenly men will do 50% of the childcare," says Swinson, "but I do think this is part of a wider cultural change that will take time in the same way as when paternity leave came in. I hope that change will continue, and with this legislation more men will decide to take time in those early weeks and months. There are a lot of couples who would structure their lives differently; parents should be able to make those choices for themselves."

Until the revolution comes, though, it's understandable that most parents fall back on the coping methods they've used throughout their adult lives. They search for meaning and expert guidance. They chuck money at the problem. There is a line of argument that there are currently so many gurus in circulation and parenting has become such an intensive occupation because this is how women are used to approaching life now. Last year in a piece about feminism and mothering, Time magazine journalist Belinda Luscombe wrote that "women's rising social and economic power… has enabled them to mother with ferocity. They research; they seek out best practices; they join a group, form a committee and agitate for their version of feeding/disciplining/sleeping." It's funny that after all that analysis, most women decide the best solution is cuddles. Attachment guru Dr Bill Sears and Dr Harvey Karp (who suggests you show empathy by talking toddlerese to your child) are two of our most popular experts. We are parents of skin-to-skin contact, of slings and breast is best. We do not leave our children to cry it out. They do throw food.

This professed love of back-to-nature doesn't stop us spending a lot of hard cash, though. According to a 2013 survey the first year of your child's life will typically set you back £10,526. A lot of this is spent panic buying nonsense: baby tea, intricate bands to keep socks on, reusable nappies you'll never use at all, that stupid, pointless French giraffe. My personal low point was forking out for a homeopathic teething remedy even though I knew it was hokum. My only excuse is that sleep deprivation does funny things to the brain.

One thing you can waste an awful of money on is clothes. The blue/pink gender debate is another way that today's parents use up a lot of words and thought trying to control, but that stereotypical girl-boy divide is already blurring. Blue v pink first dominated in the 40s and 50s and dissipated during the last great wave of feminism in the 70s before reemerging in the 90s. It's interesting that colour coding is fading as the tide turns back to feminism, but this time it's happening in a culture awash with fashion and in particular designer clothing.

Now it seems to be not so much a question of whether you let your daughter wear pink, but what style of pink you go for. Do you want to go for a vivid sangria shade in a utilitarian Scandi style or sprinkle ditsy roses over a frill-collar blouse, a look favoured by the French? What about a coral-coloured tee with an ironic slogan? Children are no longer simply colour coded but styled, and the designer labels have not been slow to notice. The British children's clothing industry is worth £6.5bn and one of the strong growth sectors is designerwear – global sales of luxury childrenswear went up by 7.4% in 2012. Up until five years ago, only a handful of labels produced babywear: Burberry, Dior and Ralph Lauren. Now pretty much every label has a junior line. There's Little Marc, Chloé, even Marni and Roksanda Ilincic. In October, Jean Paul Gaultier announced he's launching couture for kids. This year London hosted the first children's fashion week. I sat front row and felt uncomfortable, staring at these little boys and girls, making notes on their outfits.

These clothes are aimed at parents, obviously. No child screams for a Gucci little black dress (£455, if you're interested, for ages 4-12). Everyone wants their baby to look nice, but if you've given your child their look, when will they get a chance to find their own? My rule is that until Robin achieves bladder control, I'm not getting anything that costs more than £40. My advice: if you can't scrape crusted spaghetti off it with your thumbnail, then don't buy it.

And that never changes. Advice. Everyone has an opinion on what you're doing and how you're doing it. Some of it will actually be helpful. Justine Roberts's favourite advice was: "It's just a phase." Dr Sigman liked: "Be warm, loving and caring, but be their parent – not their best friend." Jo Swinson has been told to do only one thing in a day, and is looking forward to taking that tip.

We held a naming ceremony for Robin on her first birthday. It fell at a point when the flicker of recognition had faded from my mother's eyes as she descended into Alzheimer's and my husband's father was in the final stages of terminal illness. Our sense of family and parents felt fragile. We needed something good to happen. One piece of good advice I had been given was that you can never have too many hands to hold a baby, so Robin got five godparents: a psychotherapist, a feminist writer, a banker, an editor and a mature student who works for our local council's children's services. We thought that covered most bases. At the end of the ceremony, each guest wrote their wish for Robin on a tagged balloon and we released them into the sky.

One of her godparents read Philip Larkin's Born Yesterday, written for Kingsley Amis's daughter Sally, which hopes for a realistic future of contentedness for a newborn instead of the overvalued beauty, innocence and love. Its final lines: "In fact, may you be dull/ if that is what a skilled/vigilant, flexible/ unemphasised, enthralled/catching of happiness is called."

That thought has stayed with me ever since. Who'd have thought it, excellent parenting advice from miserable old Larkin? When I wrote on my balloon tag, I wished for Robin to be happy. Expectations may be complicated for parents right now, a bewildering jungle of advice, products and preconceptions, but it's up to us to try to keep it simple, to keep it in perspective. What am I doing, Robin? I'm trying to make you happy.