Parenting, the scientific experiments and complexity
The scientific experiment is useful for understanding general trends for the type of people studied, but it usually doesn’t apply to everyone (unless you are studying the effects of highly toxic substances that kill all). Hypothesis testing, the usual method for determining significant effects, tests group difference. All that is needed is to find a significant difference between the mean (average effect) of the treated group and the mean for the untreated group (the “treated” group receives the experimental intervention—e.g., a new medication)
…experiments that show the “success” of cry-it-out parenting might be interesting but they have several flaws.
Science cannot recommend particular parenting practices at particular times for a particular child in a particular context.
Why not? Because parenting is like white-water rafting (but much harder)—there is too much unpredictability and changing circumstances.
Each parenting situation is unique because of shifting conditions—what happened earlier in the day, the uniqueness of the child’s personality, the point of growth in various systems in the child, the relationship of the parent to the child, the context, the history of behavior in that context, the moods of the parent and child, and so on and on.
Further, studies related to parenting often don’t look at all the variables of importance. For example, studies often look at outcomes over a short time period, when the real effects occur later (as with tobacco use or cell phone use—effects come decades later). This is what happens with studies of infant formula and for cry-it-out parenting. How many studies look at the effects on child learning in school, or on psychological wellbeing or health a decade or more later?
Science cannot do randomized controlled trials—the type of experiments preferred today—with children because they are unethical (e.g., randomly assign individual babies to groups, one group is touched in some regular fashion and the other group is never touched; then measure effects on some predicted outcome from no touch—this can’t be done; but accidental studies of non-touch with babies and intentional studies with monkeys show detrimental effects of minimal touch).
Even if scientists could ethically set up an experiment with parents and young kids, it would not work, because it’s your unique relationship that matters and that’s uncontrollable by a researcher—and should be. Good parenting is about a good fit between the needs of the young child and the parent’s responsivness at any given moment.
- Darcia Narvaez
Related
The problem of randomized control trials on studying humans
(Source: psychologytoday.com)
