Right. Because high school drop-outs always have the best parenting advice.:dubious:
There seems to be a lot of bias regarding someone of relatively low level or ability being a more credible resource than a lerned expert because they “did it”.
OTOH, I’ve seen the reverse where the experts might not have considered the practical consequences of how something is done or made in the real world.
In my experience, a lot of parents have a hard time understanding that the specific stuff that worked for their specific kids might not work for others, and in fact can be a little smug about it. I pick the experts.
This is close to my opinion. Granting that all else is equal - the parents and the expert are equally “good”, I would say:
Issues common to raising children in general - parents
Issues less commonly seen/dealt with - expert
Expert, absolutely.
The metric for parenting “success” is all in the flawed eye of the beholder/parent.
The expert, by definition, is going to at least have some quantifiable measurements to support what they say, which will enable me to evaluate their advice. And, their knowledge is based on an aggregation and methodical study of multitudes of individual experiences.
The parent can just point to their kid and say, “well, I made some choices, and here’s a human who’s still alive. Follow me to success!”
Which isn’t to say that parents don’t have knowledge and skill that they can impart. Only that if I had to choose between taking the advice of the person who performed an uncontrolled experiment once vs that of the person who looked at a lot of those uncontrolled experiments and drew some conclusions about them, I’d choose the second person every time.
Agreed. Consult the parent for day-to-day matters and the expert for big issues.
Parents are familiar with what works in one set of circumstances on one set of kids. An expert should have a much broader perspective.
It might be easier to accept advice from somebody who’s been there. When the kid has you up all night crying for the third night running, “been there done that - he isn’t doing it to be mean, kids just cry sometimes and they grow out of it” is marginally more comforting than “Billings and Funk did a series of seminal studies in the 70s that examined that issue, and they concluded that ten years later there was no clinically difference in outcomes”. Often reassurance and sympathy are better than the best advice. And sympathy means more coming from another mother with dark circles under her eyes and barf stains on her best blouse than from a Ph.D.
I’ve told this anecdote before - my cousin the neonatologist, former head of the NICU in her hospital, and mother of five, arrived at her daughter-in-law’s house to baby sit her newest granddaughter. Her daughter-in-law had a written list of instructions on how to care for the new baby. My cousin, a woman of almost heroic tact, let it pass, and her son and daughter-in-law went out for a nice evening and my cousin managed, somehow, to muddle thru.
Everyone thinks their child is unique. No baby has ever cried this much, grew this fast, was so slow/fast to do X. Ask an expert why, and the expert will tell you it could be normal, or it could be Piddawumper’s Syndrome, or the formula is too cold, or too hot, or too lukewarm, or early onset autism, or it never happens in cultures that breast-feed to the age of fourteen. The experienced parent says “she’s fine, don’t worry.” Unfortunately the new parent never takes the second half of that advice.
According to most studies, none of us should have survived childhood. Yet here we are.
To be fair, there is also a lot of “just rub Vick’s Vapo-rub on the soles of her feet and she will be better in no time”. As well as less innocuous nonsense that an expert wouldn’t peddle.
Reassurance leads to confidence, and confidence leads to consistency, and consistency is good for babies - possibly as good as alternating among six different strategies chosen based on whatever is published in the latest edition of “Raising Children - How Everything Your Mother Did Was Wrong”.
Babies are simple. Not easy, simple. Feed one end, clean the other, hug the middle.
And the other advice that every new parent hears, no new parent believes, and is true nevertheless. You will miss these days when they are gone. Then you have to wait for grandchildren, so you can spoil them rotten.
Regards,
Shodan
Not enough information. You propose two sources without the data to help pick. If the parent raised a bunch of juvenile delinquents and child criminals, not a good source. If the expert never provided personalized advice on raising individual kids, not a good source.
We need more info.
Not fighting the hypothetical, I would choose both. But recognize that the advice from either might be useless/bad.
The world is filled with plenty of bad parents. Having children doesn’t make you a good expert on children.
Hell, and I’ll tell this story again… Nearly 20 years ago some friends had some kids. Midnight one night when I was over there one time, their 2.5 year old was up throwing tantrums, throwing objects, punching his dad, hitting me.
I simply and innocently asked “Why don’t you put him to bed?”
Mom snorts, rolls her eyes and her whole head and says “He’ll just get back up”
I said “So?”
KABOOM
Mom goes ballistic. Tells me that I’m a single male with no children while she’s the parent of a small child and she knows everything she needs to know about raising children while I do not. Therefore she doesn’t EVER want to hear another word out of me about how to raise her child.
Yup, she knew everything except how to put a toddler to bed. :rolleyes:
We were not friends for long after that because I got tired of having their children and their dogs injure me followed by being screamed at by crazy lady who accused ME of hitting her kids and dogs. :smack:
Yeah, even this many years later, I’ll take the educated expert over those two.
Nothing?
You should know better than to post this kind of absolutism around here…
As a non-parent: abusing your kid is wrong.
Absolutely the expert. Below the expert I’d trust the parent. Below the parent I’d trust the “expert.”
Most of the idiots who claim to be experts on parenting aren’t so much scientists as they are demagogues, promoting parenting strategies the way someone less promotes a fad diet. I have no time for that.
But if someone tells me that they’ve conducted research on the long-term effects of corporal punishment, and that controlling for all other factors including correlative or reverse-cause-effect factors they’ve found that children who undergo corporal punishment experience “increased child aggression, antisocial behaviour, lower intellectual achievement, poorer quality of parent–child relationships, mental health problems (such as depression), and diminished moral internalisation,” (cite), I pay that a lot more mind than I pay some other idiot who says, “I spanked all my kids and they turned out well, derp derp.”
Also, I’ll trust the advice I seek over the advice that was volunteered, nearly 100% of the time.
Never speak in absolutisms.
mmm
The “parent” thing is irrelevent, in any situation the expert knows more than the ordinary person, that’s the defintion of “expert”. However, it’s important to confirm that someone is an expert, not just an idiot who claims to be one.
I would trust the expert more with issues that have a clear “best practice”. Like, it is very well-established that it is unwise to give a newborn 2% lowfat milk. But some rando parent might think it’s perfectly fine because, hey, their babies did okay. However, when it comes to dealing with everyday kinds of family drama, I would be more interested in hearing first-hand accounts rather than hypothesizing and pontificating from an academic.
I wouldn’t trust a rando expert without looking at their credentials first, but I DEFINITELY wouldn’t trust a rando parent. The amount of bad information out there overwhelmingly outweighs the good. And people tend to aim for “let’s just get through this mishap” as opposed to “let’s optimize the outcome of this mishap”. So a parent might conclude that because their kid survived something, they must have done something right. Uh…maybe that kid survived despite their parents. And maybe they would acually be happy and healthy if the parenting had been different.
Those are all completely normal things that are best dealt with, parent to parent. However, if you have something that is NOT normal, like a 2-year-old who absolutely refuses to eat anything, a 5-year-old who regularly steals things, or a teenager who’s sneaking out to meet her 30-year-old boyfriend, that’s best left to the experts, whether they have children or not.
And if they do, they would know what works, or doesn’t, for THEIR children (maybe).
Let’s see, who’s best to trust on the matter of a child health intervention - the pediatrician with 20 years experience (but who has no children of his/her own), or the parent of a couple of young children with personal notions reinforced by a gaggle of Internet supporters?
That doesn’t seem too hard to me.
I’m going to go out on a giant limb here and presume that the question you’re seeking advice about has something to do with child-rearing, as opposed to say particle physics.
Every parent I’ve seen has faked it like crazy the whole time and only knows how to deal with their own kids - not anybody else’s. And that’s if you get lucky and find a parent who knows how to deal with their own kids. If I ever meet a parent like that (who hasn’t also done a ton of reading and studying on the subject) I’ll be quite surprised.
If the expert is really that comprehensively educated, the info might be a little high-level and generalized but at least it wouldn’t be inaccurate garbage delivered with certainty simply because the person’s kids haven’t successfully killed themselves yet.
I’ve had several people (not all of the women) unfriend and block me on Facebook because they were constantly posting memes advocating this, and I replied, “Do you also think men should do that to their wives?” :dubious: Must have hit a little too close to home, I guess.
Even worse are the women who say, “My mother carried a wooden spoon around with her to show me who was boss, and it made me what I am today!” Divorced from 3 or 4 abusive husbands is NOT something to be emulated IMNSHO, and if you have to terrorize smaller people to show them who’s boss, you’re not in charge.
The vast majority of “education” on the subject of child psychology is utter rubbish. If that’s all the expert has, I’d rather have a childless person with no education at all, and certainly rather have the actual parent.
Now, an expert who’s had extensive experience working with children in various capacities, that’s different, but that’s also completely unrelated to formal education.