The Un-Science of Parenting

As a new parent of a new (well, four and half month old) baby, it's surprising the number of topics I suddenly feel qualified to comment on. Pregnancy, for example. I've done it exactly once, but I was paying attention most of the time. Ditto for vaginal childbirth, and the various degrees of sleep deprivation that follow. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert on these things in general, or that I could speak for every woman's experience. But I do know myself, and I know my baby.

Back when I was a research scientist, I was an expert on a very, very narrow body of knowledge. So narrow, in fact, that maybe only a few dozen people in the world had any substantial interest in my findings for their own sake. That's how it is in science, and people still publish papers and discuss their findings and manage to hobnob with the other aficionados.

When it comes to parenting, yes I'm the expert on my little kid. But the discoveries I make about him probably don't apply to anyone else at all.

Take, for example, this marvelous little high-pitched cough he does. It started as a waking-up sound, but he has begun using it when awake as a "Give me attention" signal.

I get up and go to the kitchen. "Cough!"--as in, "Ahem, mama, I need you to watch me while I chew on this little toy."

I fix some lunch. "Cough! Cough!" ("You should be out here by now.")

It's cute; it's fun to talk about, but how useful is it to anyone else? This is probably the only baby in the world that makes this particular sound to mean this particular thing. It's incredible that a person this young has come up with his own signal for something. But you couldn't hope to write a research article called "A sound produced by young humans to attract parental attention".

Not only is the truth not universal, what is true for a particular kid also changes. Extremely unscientific, that. Sometime last week, around the time he started sitting, and probably getting all full of himself, the carefully-engineered nap time routine that once knocked my son cold every time suddenly ceased to be effective. I'm still looking for a new routine, but I suspect that the kid just doesn't need as much sleep as he used to. Gone are the days of multiple two-hour naps. I should have enjoyed them more.

When you're a scientist, being an expert on something confers prestige. Now, it brings a different kind of satisfaction. When I know how to respond to my son's needs, when it seems that we are actually understanding one another--even if he's in pain and there's nothing I can do--that's more real to me than a paper in Nature.

A mother navigates by intuition and the expertise born of long hours of patient study. What we do is certainly not a science. But it is an Art.