How to Be A Good Parent

Congratulations!  You're as big as a house and you're expecting a bouncing, baby potato in no time now!  

 

(I say this because, until I had one, I believed all newborns looked like potatoes.  I still think there is a certain spud-like quality to those first few weeks, but now I know just how cute a potato can really be.)

Anyway, you're in the phase of pregnancy where people start asking you if you're going into labor every time you wince.  You have nothing but baby on the brain, so you decide to take a parenting class.  (If you're going to have this thing, you might as well learn how not to accidentally kill it, right?)

This was me when I was pregnant with my first daughter.  However, when I got to the class, I was shocked and disappointed to realize that these classes are to parenting what a class on car maintenance would be to being a safe driver.  

Yes, these classes teach you how to feed, bathe, and swaddle the baby.  However, I was literally floored that they said not one word about emotionally bonding with your new tiny human, how to foster its mental growth, how to play with it, and (once it gets a bit more physically capable) how to control the little beast so its behavior doesn't  elicit quite so many "wayward accident with gamma radiation" jokes from the waitstaff at your local Chili's.  (Only moms of toddlers will get that last joke.)

So, I left the pregnancy class knowing that the type of poop a newborn makes for the first few days is called meconium, but no idea how to actually be a parent.  Awesome.  No way this could go wrong.

With this gaping problem in mind, I went home and did what I do best:

I went on a historically-long Google binge session.  I was kind of in the zone, so I'm not exactly sure how long is "historically long", but I do know it was long enough that my husband started bringing food to my desk.

I wanted to know the answers to all the things a so-called "parenting" class should have told me about turning my future potato into a functioning human being instead of a serial killer.  

(You'd be shocked how many of my parenting moves are made out of the desire not to accidentally raise a serial killer.  I blame my Masters in Criminology.)

For those of you who have any significant experience with the internet, you've probably encountered the problem I'm about to describe.

You type in a simple search query like "how to develop a healthy bond with your baby" expecting to receive some type of answer from the almighty internet gods.  You tentatively click on the first link Google gives you, hope and excitement in your heart.

Nine hours and several bags of potato chips later, you're on your seventh parenting discussion board, reading a very angry mom prolifically (and quite convincingly) state her vehement opposition to what you just read in boards four through six, which had been equally passionate and just as convincing.

Almost no matter what you Google, there are crazy-rabid-nutjob-fanatics (trademark pending) ready to convince you of every side of every issue.  Breastfeed your baby as long as you can, never breastfeed longer than a year.  Pacifiers are the devil.  If you don't use a pacifier your baby will be an insecure adult.  Cosleeping will make your kid clingy.  If you don't cosleep you're depriving your child of warmth and affection, you monster!

Yeah, sometimes the internet is a scary place.

I did finally get past the crazy people to an actual answer.  (Spoiler alert.)  There is no "right" answer.

What there is, if you're willing to dig for it, is a great deal of parenting research that was done by actual scientists and psychologists, instead of internet-rabid moms on their nineteenth cup of coffee.

This research doesn't give you one single "right" answer to every problem, but it does give you empirically-tested facts (i.e. not opinion-based, but derived from actual data collection and analysis) on the question you're asking.

The one problem is that there is A LOT of this research.  It probably won't surprise you that parenting is a pretty well-studied area of psychology.  It would take decades to read it all.  Seriously, your kid would have graduated from medical school before you finally finished reading about year one.

Given the abundance of research, and assuming you don't have a few hundred hours to spare, you need a quicker way to get real answers about parenting questions.  That's what this series of posts is going to give you.  

I've done the research on a variety of parenting topics and am going to go through them, one by one, to give you a basic idea of three things about each one:

For every question a parent might have, there is a crazy amount of research that has been done.  This research sometimes is in agreement, but usually provides differing (sometimes outright contradictory) answers to the question.

With this series of articles, I'm going to tackle some basic parenting questions (the ones I think should have been in my parenting for preggos class).  For each one, I'll give you a layout of the research, my personal take on it (as a PhD student in psychology and a mom of two), and the best I can come to an "answer" to the question.

Here are the topics/questions I plan to cover in this series:

Please help me add to this list if there's something you think should be covered.  I'll go back and edit this post to include any more topics I think of (or you suggest) and add hyperlinks to the articles themselves so you can find the whole series in one place.

Maybe when we're finished we can print them all out, drive to the hospital where I took my terrible parenting class, and leave them on the desk of the ancient nurse/teacher who thought it was so important that the word meconium be so permanently lodged in my mom-brain.