Free-Range Kids. Lenore Skenazy
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when an author starts telling you not only to read potty books aloud to your child but to “extend your child's favorite potty stories and songs into everyday play situations” and to “use hand puppets, finger puppets or spoon puppets to have a conversation about potty training” and also to “retell stories from books and videos while you are driving in the car or walking to the store” and then to make your kid his own “personal potty book” complete with photos Of Him to “increase his self-awareness” so he can “reflect on the images,” and on and on, and this whole one-hundred-plus-page volume is considered a sane and helpful reference book rather than the feverish ravings of a bibliophilic, paid-by-the-word, bathroom-crazed, puppet-pushing potty brain—clearly, we are depending way too much on experts who make us think we have to do way more than necessary to help and understand and ultimately save our kids.
Where did this bizarre reliance on these folks come from? And can we wean ourselves off it?
Jillian Swartz, co-founder of the online magazine Family Groove, believes it all started the same way the Food Network did, sort of.
“Every ten years or so,” says Swartz, “a new, once-mundane job becomes deified. Think: Chefs in the nineties and handymen and home decorators in the two thousands.” About twenty or thirty years or so ago, another lowly job suddenly became chic: motherhood. (And, to a lesser extent, fatherhood.) “With this,” says Swartz, “came the fetishization of every last mother-loving detail of parenthood, and an ever-burgeoning breed of experts to propagate this often mind-numbing minutiae. Pile on top of that the rise of Citizen Media and all the (mis)information online and we're all just swimming aimlessly in the murky waters of child-rearing do's, don'ts, who's, what's, how's, when's, and why's.”
The avalanche of expert advice—and non-expert advice with nonetheless very enticing headlines—undermines our belief that we are equipped with enough common sense to deal with most child-rearing issues. That battered confidence, in turn, leads us to look ever more desperately to the experts wherever we find them. At the library. In parenting magazines. On our phones. But a lot of those experts give advice so daunting and detailed and frankly non-doable (does anyone really want to spend the day retelling potty stories with the aid of a spoon puppet?) that we feel like failures.
Then when—surprise—our kids turn out not to be perfect, we know who's to blame. Us! If only we'd made one more pretend forest out of broccoli spears, our kid would be a veggie fiend. If only we'd put aside that deep-fried Oreo in our second trimester, she'd be in the gifted program at school. And if our child is cranky? Uncommunicative? Headed for five to ten years’ hard labor? That just might be because we told her, “Look, sweetie, a broken cracker is not the end of the world!” instead of saying, “Oooh, your cracker broke. Sad sad sad sad sad!” and respectfully relating.
The experts told us what to do, and we screwed up.
So what's the alternative? Reading every book and article and trying to do absolutely all the stuff they recommend? (She asked rhetorically.) Or avoiding the experts entirely and perhaps missing out on some good advice?
Well, it's obviously somewhere in the middle, according to a bona fide expert on experts, Dr. Stephen Barrett. Barrett is board chairman at Quackwatch, a non-profit group that examines the health advice being given to the public and flags the information that is scientifically unproven—or just plain wrong.
If you're looking for answers and don't know where to turn, Barrett says, “Look for credentials.” A book by the American College of Obstetricians, for instance, or a site run by the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don't recommend that people use Google to search for health advice,” Barrett adds, because so much of what pops up is wacky. “The Internet has made many people more visible. I'm not sure that when it comes to advice, this is helpful.”
I'm not sure, either. That's why Barrett's other suggestion—“Ask your doctor”—seems obvious, but smart. If you have a whole lot of questions, then ask your doctor to recommend a reliable book.
But of course, plenty of parents don't trust any of the old “reliable” sources anymore. They're more ready to believe the ones who say, “Whatever you've heard is fine, isn't.” So sometimes, even if there's reassuring news—such as that the FDA has determined that the chemicals in plastic baby bottles are not going to change your child's sex—it's hard to hear that message because it's the nay-saying “experts” who get the attention and airtime. (Did I mention in the media chapter preceding this one that fear sells?)
Every generation since the 1960s has grown up distrustful of any company or institution that says, “Trust us—you can trust us.” Thanks to Ralph Nader and his cadre of consumer advocates, America learned that car companies were aware of brake problems but hid them from the public, even as cigarette manufacturers knew they were giving us cancer but pretended that they didn't. Thus was automatic skepticism-bordering-on-cynicism born.
But over the years, as we stopped trusting additives and preservatives and pesticides and food coloring and Western medicine and unfiltered tap water and pretty much anything that wasn't an organic turnip in a recycled tote bag from Whole Foods, some of us just threw up our hands and decided it was impossible to trust anything or anyone. (Except Tom Hanks. He tops every trustworthiness poll.) The minute we heard something new and nefarious about a time-honored product or practice, a whole lot of us were ready to embrace it. Shampoo gives you cancer? We knew it!
The Web can confirm these fears—and spawn new ones. Is your water safe? Your cereal? Your sandbox? But as Barrett points out (knowing full well he will sound like just another “establishment” source not to be trusted): most companies really do not try to sell us deadly or defective products. Even if they have no corporate conscience whatsoever, doing wrong is still not worth it to them, because if they harm a single child, they'll have to recall millions of products. Or millions of us will join a class-action suit. Either way, that will hurt their bottom line.
So we have a choice: we can trust the self-proclaimed experts warning us that our body wash is toxic—and by the way, so is everything else—or we can just be glad we're living in a hygienic, regulated society that truly isn't teeming with killer products.
In 1946, Dr. Spock famously began his baby care book with these reassuring words: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” The mantra of today's experts—“Trust us. There is so much you don't know”—seems designed to drive us mad.
To calm down, remember that the best child-rearing advice boils down to the old basics. Listen to your kids. Love them. Keep them out of oncoming traffic.
And when you're pregnant, don't eat a baloney sandwich in oncoming traffic, either.
REAL WORLD
Baby Magazine Madness
A Free-Ranger who signs herself, “Living in Fear” writes:
I read some “advice” from a baby magazine saying that you should not leave the baby in the house and run out to get the mail—you never know when a fire may start. It's making me crazy.
Going Free Range
Free-Range Baby Step: Don't buy any new parenting books unless they have the words “Range” or “Free” somewhere in the title.
Free-Range Brave Step: Immediately stop Googling any and all combinations of the words “toxic,” “childhood,” “should,” “esteem,” “whole grain,” “cover-up,” and “guilt.”
One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Free yourself from advice overload by remembering that we got to this point in human history without the benefit of child-rearing manuals, pregnancy diet books, or potty training treatises. If you seek parenting advice, first try asking an older parent you admire. She'll be thrilled, and her advice won't last 378 pages.