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No.
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Yes but be prepared to defend your opinions/theories/experience.
There are certain people whose opinions on childcare and development I respect quite a lot. My son had a preschool teacher who was about 28 and had been working in a preschool since her junior year in college, and had been a lead teacher since she got her master’s degree at 24. She really understood toddlers. She understood them better than the parents of toddlers, because she had seen dozens of children for 4-8 hours a day over 8 years. I went to her with questions about my son and got better advice than I would have gotten from parent of two or three children who had seen two or three children through toddlerhood.
I went to high school with someone who has a Ph.D in child development. She has no children of her own, although in her forties, she became a foster parent (she’s never been married). She is extremely dedicated to her field. She is also one of three children, and her mother ran a daycare in their home, which he helped out in when she was older.
There are certain “window dressing” aspects of parenting she may not have first hand experience of, like being pregnant, being berated by a stranger either for bottle feeding a baby, or breast-feeding in public, or that mortification you feel when your kid is the one who messes up during the PTA music show, but no one can talk about the ramifications of various parenting choices the way she can, because she has one the research, the analysis, and meta-analysis. He dissertation, IIRC, was published by a major book label, it was so impressive. Her topic had something to do with whether any parenting fad really did any good, or whether small gains that children showed simply had to do with fad parenting (eg, attachment parenting) leading simply to more time spent with children. Parents can be doing pretty much anything that doesn’t cause actual harm, and as long as it is time spent with the child, it is beneficial, was the conclusion, IIRC.
Anyway, she is a wealth of information and advice on parenting beyond some shmo who had a baby once.
Now, highly educated people are the exception, though. Going through an experience is an education, whether you like it or not. So barring someone who has pursued special knowledge, there is nothing like personal experience.
On the other hand, not everyone learns from an experience. Some people who have been through something learned nothing, and have no wisdom to pass on, so having experienced something is no guarantee that you will be in a position to advise, either.
“If you haven’t been under fire, you can’t know what it’s like.”
“I was under fire in Afghanistan.”
“No! I was in 'Nam! It isn’t the same!”
“Hey, over here, I was in 'Nam, in '72.”
“No! I was there in '68! You can’t know what it was like!”
“Yo! I was in 'Nam in '68, in the Army.”
“No! I was 'Nam in '68, in the Marines! You don’t have any idea!”
By '72 there were rules.
And the search for that elusive True Scotsman continues. And continues. And continues. And continues. [sub]And continues. …[/sub]
It’s Scotsmen all the way down. Truly it is.
It’s a consultant’s 2x2 table, with Experience on one axis and Empathy on the other. A person communicating with empathy but limited experience can be more effective than a person with experience asserting that their earned Truths must be true for everyone.
This board needs a “like” feature.
Some people are like this about parenting as well, although, it more has to do with aspects of parenting, like childbirth.
“If you didn’t have a baby you can’t know what it’s like.”
“Tell me about it. My c-section couldn’t come soon enough.”
“C-sections don’t count. You didn’t really have a baby.”
“My c-section was preceded by 27 hours of labor.”
“Still doesn’t count.”
“My labor was unmedicated. Was yours?”
“I was induced. I needed pain control.”
“If you were induced you didn’t really have a baby.”
“The hell I didn’t. I pushed for three hours.”
“That’s probably because you were in a hospital. Anyone who went to a hospital didn’t really have a baby.”
And so it goes.
And that might be an example of the opposite - where the person with experience actually doesn’t know more. There was a naming custom in an least some parts of Italy of naming the oldest son after the paternal grandfather and the second after the maternal grandfather.* I happen to know a few Italian-Americans who have followed this custom up to the fourth generation born in the US - but it’s entirely possible that the people I know are exceptions and the custom has in fact died out in either Italy or among Italian-Americans or both.
- the source of jokes about yelling “Vinnie” at a family gathering and having ten people answer
And yet in a sense they’re all correct, the experience of someone in the 'Nam in '68 wouldn’t be the same as someone fighting in Baghdad in 2003, similar yes, but also very different. Dealing with the threat of vehicle borne IED’s while manning a checkpoint would be a different experience than conducting a patrol through a jungle area in Vietnam, and that’s just soldiers, pilots and submariners would have a different experience again.
Yes, I do believe you can’t really understand something unless you’ve experienced it at first hand. If nothing else different people can react to and subjectively experience the very same situation in very different ways. I’ve read at least one memoir from a soldier who said the First World War was the best experience of his life for example, for most people it was horrific, but he enjoyed it, was he wrong?