The following was originally posted over at The Mother Geek (RIP) in January of this year. The guest author is Alice Callahan, who is a research scientist turned stay-at-home mom. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband and 14-month-old daughter. Alice writes about the science of parenting, as well as her adventures in mothering, at scienceofmom.com. You can also find Alice on Twitter.
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Via Creative Commons |
Having a PhD in science makes my job as a mother easier - but maybe not in the ways that you might expect.
My PhD is in Nutrition, so you would think that getting my
kid to eat well would come easy for me. Unfortunately, that has not been the
case. I’ve logged more than two years of postdoc research on fetal
programming – how the uterine environment affects outcomes in babies. You might
think that this helped me to do everything right during my pregnancy. Instead,
I think it just led to more worry about all of the ways I might be damaging my
unborn child. Stress! Sugar! BPA! Lab chemical exposure! OMG! More stress!
Sure, I have more knowledge than the average mother.
Sometimes that is helpful. And
sometimes it is not. And knowing how to do a literature search to try to answer
my parenting questions often leads to further sleep deprivation as I slog
through Pubmed hits and come out on the other side with more confusion.
Sometimes my drive to find scientific
answers for my parenting questions just distracts me from my
instinct – not that my maternal instinct is all that amazing, but I do know
my baby better than anyone else in the world.
So how does being a scientist make parenting easier for me? As
a scientist mother, I trust other scientists.
And I trust doctors. I even trust government agencies, which bring together
the best scientists and doctors in a field to review the research and make
recommendations for the good of public health.
I trust scientists and doctors, because I have worked
side-by-side with them for a decade, and
I know that they are not only knowledgeable,
but by and large, they are overwhelmingly good people. At some point, you have
to trust someone.
I trust scientists
and doctors.
I trust scientists, because I know that the vast majority of
them are just underpaid nerds who are really passionate about what they do. They
are driven by the desire to find the truth about a question and they work, day
in and day out, in that pursuit. In addition, I know that scientists don’t always agree, so
when there is a general consensus among the majority of scientists about something,
such as vaccine safety or global warming, I feel confident in that conclusion.
Contrary to many claims on the Internet, scientists are not
in bed with Big Pharma, conspiring make millions at the expense of your child’s
health. They are in bed with their husbands and wives, probably chatting about
their latest failed cell culture experiment.
I also trust science because I understand the peer review
process all too well. Although it has its flaws and as maddening as it is when
I am the one being reviewed, I have confidence that the peer review process is
highly effective at weeding out the kooks and pseudoscientists and the
conflicts of interest. (Unfortunately, there are a few kooky psuedoscientists
out there with serious conflicts of interest, and it just so happens that one of them managed to
publish fraudulent research linking
the MMR vaccine and autism. Many studies have since shown that such a link
does not exist, but it took 12 years for Andrew Wakefield’s Lancet paper to
be retracted. How many dollars have been spent and how many people made sick or
worse in the continuing fallout and confusion about this public health scare?
When the peer review system fails, it can be truly devastating.)
I trust doctors because I know that most of them are, first
and foremost, humanitarians at heart, especially those that have chosen to work
in primary care. I know how hard doctors work to become competent in the vast
ocean of information about pathologies of the human body. I know how seriously
they take their responsibility of our health.
I especially trust pediatricians. They have chosen one of
the lowest-paid specialties simply because they love working with kids. I know
that every pediatrician, at some point during her training or career, has likely
cared for a child who was dying of a disease that could have been prevented by
vaccination, and that memory haunts her as she faces parents afraid of vaccinating
their children. Doctors are not conspiring against us. They want to help us
make the best choices for our children, more than anything in the world.
Because I trust scientists and doctors, I didn’t question
the CDC’s vaccination schedule. I didn’t pore over vaccine research or agonize
about the decision to vaccinate my child. Instead, I trusted that the
committees of experts at the CDC and AAP carefully make the best
recommendations possible based on the data available.
Maybe that is naïve. Maybe I am a lazy mother for not trying
to become a vaccine expert before I allowed those first needles to enter my
daughter’s thigh. Maybe. But I also think it would be naïve for me to think
that I could become an expert on vaccinations, that I could know and understand
the field better than the committees of scientists and doctors who have made
this their life’s work.
I know how much work it took me to become an expert on one or
two corners of nutrition and fetal physiology. It took thousands of hours of reading
textbooks and journal articles, sitting in lectures, attending conferences, and
struggling at the lab bench before I started to feel even a little bit
comfortable calling myself an expert in any field. So I think it is naïve for a
parent to think that she can become an expert on vaccines by spending some time
on the Internet, reading questionable sources, almost all of which have some
agenda. I accept that I can’t know
everything, and I have enough faith in humanity that I trust others who know
more than me.
It is not that I don’t question scientists and doctors. I
do. For example, I recognize that government agencies and medical organizations
often have a lag time for adopting the latest science into their
recommendations. I recognize that tradition, culture, politics, and economics
all influence those recommendations, and they are not without fault.
I certainly question my doctors, because I know they are
each fallible human beings, and they can’t know everything. I brought a stack
of journal articles to my OB to convince her to delay cord clamping at my
delivery. I did so much research on infant iron nutrition and came to my
daughter’s 9-month checkup with so many questions that my pediatrician looked
me in the eye and said, “You’re worried enough for both of us about BabyC’s
iron.” Although I question my doctors, I also trust that they are adept at discerning
fake science from real science. If I bring my doctor the sources I am using
to inform my questions or concerns, she should be able to judge whether or not they
are trustworthy and have a real discussion with me about factors that I may not
have considered.
In truth, I do follow the vaccine debate closely, but not
because I wonder if I am doing the right thing by vaccinating my child. I
follow the vaccine debate out of interest for how misinformation can explode in
a way that creates a public health crisis. I find myself increasingly concerned
about the low rate of vaccination in my own community. I worry for the newborns
in our town who have not yet had a chance to be vaccinated and for the
individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to health conditions. I am starting to
feel like I have a responsibility to share accurate information with mothers
and fathers struggling with the decision of whether or not to vaccinate,
because misinformation is
doing real harm.
It is good to question our parenting decisions and in doing
so, become more educated about them. However, as a scientist, I’m happy to
defer to other scientists about some of the biggest parenting decisions I have
faced. I am grateful for their decades of research forming the foundation of
our understanding of child health and for the good-hearted doctors who care for
my family. They have made my job as a mother a lot easier. I can spend less
time worrying and more time playing with my daughter and soaking up the time
with her as she grows up way too fast.
Thanks, science, for
making it easier to be a mom.
These views are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect or disagree with those of the DXS editorial team.
I'm not a mom yet, but I think every mom of a newborn needs to read this blog post. I could not agree more, and also trust scientists since I used to be one :-)
ReplyDeleteOh good lord I needed to hear this right now! Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I, too, understand that there is a difference in a claim to research(usually anecdotal)and verifiable peer reviewed research. I'm a doula who is very connected the the "Natural Birth" community. Most all of my peers are either delayed vax or anti vax in their stance, and are militant about it. I will be sharing this with my clients.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I totally disagree, I appreciate the fact that you didn't resort to bringing those that you disagree with down. You have an interesting perspective and I enjoyed reading it. One thing I thought of though while I was reading was that so many scientific findings are extremely unpopular at some point. Food for thought. scientists that said the world was round were in the minority and highly ridiculed, even though time proved them right. Thanks for letting me put my 2 cents in!
ReplyDeleteExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This isn't a matter of popularity; it's a matter of evidence and respect for expertise and the scientific process. The specific scientific claim you mention as being unpopular was viewed as such for religious reasons. Not exactly a scientific counterpoint to evidence-based discovery.
DeleteThank you for this excellent post, and the humility and respect for expertise you demonstrate. A bit different than claiming a "Google U" degree. I find posts like this so helpful when coming across earnest, heartfelt, and badly misinformed anti-vax posts such as http://melissajill.com//blog.cfm?postID=781. I was glad to be able to quote your thoughtful words in that post's comments (if they pass moderation, new site to me, so).
ReplyDelete