You know this isn’t new, right?
When big publications run brand new information that isn’t
I have a pet peeve. Unfortunately, the peeving happens often and there isn’t anything I can do to solve it. I can write about it — alright, vent about it — after the fact, but I don’t see a way to stop it.
It happened again this week. The Atlantic did it this time, although it can be any other big publication.
On Monday The Atlantic ran “Parents’ Screen Time Is Hurting Kids,” which argues that “emerging research suggests” that parents should worry more about their own screen time and the example they set than their children’s screen time.
Social media buzzed with “thanks for pointing this out this new information” type reactions. But this isn’t new information. It is old information. The only thing that might be new is that researchers are studying it, but honestly that falls into the category of “we need research to confirm this?” Are there not libraries worth of research on how kids imitate their parents? In fact, the first I recall of reading about this particular connection was when child development researchers stumbled upon the discovery that babes in Bumbos had started using their thumbs to point and press rather than their index fingers. I can’t remember which book I read it in, but it was a hardcover book in the mid to late 90’s, as the internet boomed and cell phones had become ubiquitous. As in, it happened rapidly so that by 2002 researchers saw it in older children.
Months ago Ramona Saridakis Bean published on this exact topic for us, and that was off a treasure trove of voice-of-experience blog posts she has written since 2008 for her CEO of the Home blog. The Iron Ladies article even comes with a great little original sketch for the image anchor.
Part of the problem is the death of common sense. Society at large, and mothers in particular, are truly frozen if there isn’t some stamp of authority for any given idea. I suppose that is another pet peeve of mine. From a summer of 2015 article of mine about ending the Mommy Wars:
The fashionable philosophy of the era tells us there are no standards. We only can do what is best for us. This supposedly comforting sentiment has two major shortcomings. First, it cuts us off from the wisdom of experience. No single motherhood situation is exactly like any other. A modern mother can easily distinguish any been-there-done-that fact pattern from her own truth. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the second problem. The sentiment does not account for the fact that we have very little experience with children before our own arrive.
We aren’t supposed to think of motherhood until we have deemed ourselves ready, found a source of sperm, and then seen the double blue line. Even then, we are supposed to focus on our pregnant bodies first, while avoiding any negative facts or stories. Negative energy is not healthy and pregnancy is supposed to be a blissful time of blooming and life.
Thus, it is often when we find ourselves with an unexpectedly fascinating and helpless newborn in our arms, healing cesarean scars or vaginal tears, and bleeding nipples that our meticulous positive pregnancy planning first encounters unyielding reality. We have no idea what to do next.
We reach for books because studying hard is supposed to get us through everything else. Good girls — smart girls — excel at formal education and get advanced degrees, right? (Many of those mindset problems Mike Rowe sees apply to more than blue collar work.) Surely book learning will work for motherhood, we think. We talk about motherhood the way we once spoke of exams. Just a sample from the popular Scary Mommy site: [profanity edited]
Of course people warned me. Told me their horror stories. I read everything I could get my hands on, downloaded every pregnancy app on my phone, signed up for every class our hospital offered. I was going to study the sh*t out of motherhood and totally ace this. I even got my placenta encapsulated in hopes that I would replenish my body with the hormones I would so suddenly lose. I was prepared to look postpartum in the eye and say, F#@k off. I’ve got this.
The author admits this preparation was naive. She blames culture’s lack of support and understanding, but I see our lack of knowledge as an ignorance encouraged by culture and aggravated by the overwhelming amount of often contradictory information available.
Our obession with expert endorsement of every little thing threatens our ability to think for ourselves.
But back to the pet peeve I started with, the presentation of brand-new-information-that-isn’t occurs with annoying frequency, and admitting some bias here both of the cohort and confirmation variety, often it is conservative women — the people the media loves to ignore — who tried to talk about the problem long before the researchers got to it. We are often mothers and thus in a daily encounter with life’s practical realities, the kind that don’t need research to confirm they exist.
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