NanaKim

For many mothers to be, being pregnant is a time to worry about everything that could go wrong with the pregnancy, the birth and THEN keeping a tiny living being alive without any training. We beat ourselves up with guilt trips and second guessing ourselves.

Fortunately there is a universe of research out there that could help us make better informed decisions and so possibly lower our stress levels. However, all research is not good quality research, nor is it particularly easy to find, nor to know if the answer to our question even exists. We definitely need someone to curate the data and present it to us in a clear and balanced way.

In the 1940s Dr. Spock recommended putting babies to sleep on their front. Research into premature babies at the time showed that they had better outcomes in that position. It turned out that front sleeping wasn’t ideal in the general population. This began to change in the 70s with new research studies and it became public health policy to have babies sleep on their backs in the 90s. The Guardian

So my grandmothers didn’t have to be concerned with a baby’s sleep position. In her day, my mother was told to put the baby face down, but instinctively, she preferred to lay her babies to sleep on their side with something placed at their back for support. I was told to put my babies on their back to sleep, which is the standard my daughter is learning today. The main difference for today’s parents is that they can’t use any bumper pads, quilts or pillows, or even have a sweet soft toy in the crib. All of these beautiful and sometimes heirloom items are banned from my future grandchild’s crib for safety reasons.

Changes like this, driven by the latest research and data, cause people to complain that the experts keep changing their minds so how are we supposed to know what’s right?

Well sometimes the research is overwhelmingly united in its results, as in the case of back sleeping, and so we can ultimately have confidence that this is the safest way to go. We don’t fully understand SIDS but we can see how the numbers of fatalities have fallen dramatically with back sleeping.

The stress remains for parents that putting your infant on their back to sleep isn’t a guarantee against SIDS, but it does reduce the chances. That is our job as parents, grandparents and caregivers, to reduce the odds of something bad happening. We rarely get to make a decision without an element of risk, and so there remains a level of guilt that we can’t be perfect protectors. Nevertheless, the guilt can be reduced if we beat our decisions into submission with data.

So where do we find the data? We can get a lot of answers from doctor visits, family and friends, and then there’s the internet. The best quality information is going to be on well researched, well qualified web sites such as the American Academy of Pediatrics ; the Centers for Disease Control ; and PBS Kids etc. These provide excellent materials.

We can also find people who love number crunching. There are scientists, software engineers and critical thinkers in my family who relish sound data. I love Freakonomics and its approach of curating and presenting data to informa and delight.

My daughter passed me a wonderful book that she read as part of preparing for parenthood, Cribsheet by Emily Oster, an economist. Emily Oster also wrote Expecting Better for the pregnancy months and The Family Firm to help navigate the K-12 years. All her books help defeat the guilt with perspective and balance. I loved Cribsheet. I was especially struck with the chapter on breastfeeding. I was all about breastfeeding as a mother, as was my mother before me and her mother, It’s natural and it’s expected that mothers fulfill this role. When I was breastfeeding, there were studies to assure me that this was developing a higher IQ in my babies. Oster however points out that those studies ignored many other contributing factors to high IQ and that correlation is not causation, an important caveat for interpreting data results. Many women will find themselves unable to breastfeed for a myriad of very valid reasons. Oster crushes these opportunities for guilt with her knowledge of research data and how to interpret the findings. There is no need for guilt. Bottle fed babies can still feed skin to skin as their parent gazes lovingly into their eyes. My daughter hopes to breastfeed her baby but we know that it may not work out and that everything will be just fine anyway. This book is full of great information to update my knowledge on many topics on baby’s first year of life. It’s important to me to be on the same page as my daughter and her husband as part of the caregiving team.

Cribsheet reminded me of NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, which came out 14 years ago. At that time I was a preschool director and one of my wonderful parents lent me a copy. It was a revelation, again based on data, showing how our beliefs about raising children can be so at odds with reality. I am so grateful to these curators of research. One motivating factor for the authors, who are journalists, was the fact that they were reading so many important new research articles on child health and development that was not gaining enough visibility to change policy or practice. They just had to help us all out by putting the information together by subject. For example, sleep: children are not getting enough hours of sleep for healthy growth and functioning. This is vital information for parents. To my eyes Bronson and Merryman wrote in the style of Freakonomics, which makes their book fun and accessible. It really did turn some of my beliefs around and changed my understanding.

When we know better, we can do better. I did the best I could as a parent, as did my mother and grandmothers. I want to do my best as a grandmother too and some of that means keeping up to date with the research. One way I do that is by being a member of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, NAEYC. When I was working in early childhood, I had a professional membership. Now I have a family membership so I can access their curated resources on best practices for today’s babies and children. Enjoy your data crunching guilt free!