Friday, July 19, 2013

quick link, and happy weekend!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I'm looking forward to a fairly low-key weekend before a very busy next month or so starts for us. I hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you too.

But anyways, I just found an article on the New York Times, Dear Parents: Please Ignore the Latest Research, and thought the message was timely and that you might enjoy the read.

Nicholas Day does a good job of highlighting the ridiculousness of letting our parenting decisions be too heavily influenced by what new research finds and what the media reports:
"Science works in small, boring ways. Findings have to accumulate, and they take their time to do so. They rarely arrive in a baby-manual-ready bundle, already replicated, with a massive data set backing up the conclusions. Unless you are a scientist doing infancy research yourself, a single study means very little. It has meaning inside the discipline; it has far less meaning inside the home."
One of the examples he uses is a recent psychology study that suggested that baby boys who used pacifiers were likely to have difficultly expressing emotion later in life.  Regarding this, Day says:
"This sort of study is almost always tentative and highly contingent. It’s a single data point in a very complicated matrix. Parents rarely recognize this. And you don’t have to wonder why. Here’s how the pacifier study was covered: “Parents who don’t want their baby boys to grow up emotionally stunted may want to pocket their pacifiers during the daytime.” Your call! If you want your boy to be emotionally stunted, feel free to keep using it! "
Basically, Day concludes that science is important and useful, but that we shouldn't let new sensational studies influence our day-to-day parenting (you should just read the article though, it's not that long).

To me, this article perfectly highlights the great need for God's wisdom and the Bible in parenting and decision making.  Science will continuously publish and discover new things about babies and children; however, in years to come, some of this research will be forgotten, some likely reversed,  and some confirmed as true. However, God's wisdom is timeless-- it's not new or sensational, but it is true.

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