A recent study has shown that if American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go fucking ape shit.
Article can be found here (by Sarah Miller).
Just browsing through the online edition of the New Yorker and saw a headline 'New Parenting Study Released'. Immediately thought back on the countless 'parenting studies' I've read over the past couple years (Helicoptor Parents, Tiger Moms, blah blah). Still I proceeded to click it anyway because for some reason I'm completely addicted to reading about how people are parenting right or wrong based on shoddy sample sizes, poor methodology and anecdotal evidence. No matter how suspect the science is behind it I always end up comparing how these proposed parenting philosophies compare to how I was raised, usually ending up either vilifying or canonizing my parents.The comments sections are usually pretty entertaining as well. When will people learn that it's practically impossible to have a reasonable discussion about parenting on in a comments section? There's too much personal stuff involved. Any attack on a particular style of parenting constitutes an attack on a particular subset of parents that use those techniques. It's really difficult to not be sensitive when people challenge you on how you're raising your kids (I imagine it is at least).
This article was great though. Immediately called out the whole trend of these sites indirectly doling out parenting advice and the culture of people like me who lap it all it. It's probably worth reading for just the first line alone which I put on the top of the post. It really crystallised how overreported these studies are. I mean seriously, it's going the way of nutrition studies in terms of the sheer volume of contradictory information flooding through otherwise fairly reasonable news media. Are eggs good for you? Vitamins don't work now apparently? Omega-3 isn't that good for heart health now? I've already eaten so much salmon dammit. Eating well can't possibly be that difficult right? As a species we've been doing it for a good long while. Same thing with parenting. I'm not sure if its part of a wider culture where we feel that everything is so fragile that we strive to be completely perfect. Might have to do with our societal obsession with managing risk by ironing out volatility (highly problematic). Maybe we've become addicted to expert advice to the extent that we're willing to withhold critical examination of where these experts actually come from and whether they are experts in the first place. I really don't have the grounds to analyse whether this is indicative of any larger pattern so I'm just throwing out completely groundless speculations for the sake of seeming thought-provoking.
Don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy some quotes from a piece far wittier than anything I've written here:
Just browsing through the online edition of the New Yorker and saw a headline 'New Parenting Study Released'. Immediately thought back on the countless 'parenting studies' I've read over the past couple years (Helicoptor Parents, Tiger Moms, blah blah). Still I proceeded to click it anyway because for some reason I'm completely addicted to reading about how people are parenting right or wrong based on shoddy sample sizes, poor methodology and anecdotal evidence. No matter how suspect the science is behind it I always end up comparing how these proposed parenting philosophies compare to how I was raised, usually ending up either vilifying or canonizing my parents.The comments sections are usually pretty entertaining as well. When will people learn that it's practically impossible to have a reasonable discussion about parenting on in a comments section? There's too much personal stuff involved. Any attack on a particular style of parenting constitutes an attack on a particular subset of parents that use those techniques. It's really difficult to not be sensitive when people challenge you on how you're raising your kids (I imagine it is at least).
This article was great though. Immediately called out the whole trend of these sites indirectly doling out parenting advice and the culture of people like me who lap it all it. It's probably worth reading for just the first line alone which I put on the top of the post. It really crystallised how overreported these studies are. I mean seriously, it's going the way of nutrition studies in terms of the sheer volume of contradictory information flooding through otherwise fairly reasonable news media. Are eggs good for you? Vitamins don't work now apparently? Omega-3 isn't that good for heart health now? I've already eaten so much salmon dammit. Eating well can't possibly be that difficult right? As a species we've been doing it for a good long while. Same thing with parenting. I'm not sure if its part of a wider culture where we feel that everything is so fragile that we strive to be completely perfect. Might have to do with our societal obsession with managing risk by ironing out volatility (highly problematic). Maybe we've become addicted to expert advice to the extent that we're willing to withhold critical examination of where these experts actually come from and whether they are experts in the first place. I really don't have the grounds to analyse whether this is indicative of any larger pattern so I'm just throwing out completely groundless speculations for the sake of seeming thought-provoking.
Don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy some quotes from a piece far wittier than anything I've written here:
Frieda Duntmore, a thirty-nine-year-old Baltimore-high-school teacher and the mother of twin six-year-old girls, recounted standing in line at a supermarket, reading a magazine article about how being a parent sucked, and then recalling that, that very morning, she’d read another article, which said that being a parent was awesome, and that anyone who didn’t have kids might as well just take their own life. “All of a sudden, I felt my skull start to split right down the middle. I put my hand up, and there was literally blood there.”
“They mentioned this thing called grit, and I was like, ‘O.K, great. Grit.’ Then I started to think about how, last year, I’d read that parents were making kids do too much and strive too hard, and ever since then we’ve basically been letting our kids, who are ten and six, sit around and stare into space.”
Nickman called his wife and started to shout, “Make the kids go outside and get them to build a giant wall out of dirt and lawn furniture and frozen peas!” He added, “Get them to scale it, and then make them go to the town zoning board to get it permitted, but don’t let them know it was your idea!”
Nickman has no idea how many minutes passed before he realized he was standing in a fountain outside a European Waxing Center, rending his clothes.