Dr. Megan Eatman’s article, “Boundaries of Science in an Online Parenting Community” was recently published in Issue 8.3 of the RHM journal. In this interview, assistant editor, Amy Reed, interviews Dr. Eatman to learn more about the origins and implications of her work.
AR: You mention that your own parenting experiences and interests led you to discover evidence-based parenting (EBP). Can you talk a little bit more about that? For example, how did you come to recognize EBP as a fruitful research topic? Do you have any advice for pursuing research projects that are connected to personal interests?
ME: I got into EBP the same way many people do, I think—to try to sort through the many conflicting messages about things like breastfeeding and sleep and try to determine workable parenting strategies. My pursuit of parenting-related scientific data really intensified during the early COVID days—I was probably unhealthily obsessed with statistics about outcomes for children who had COVID, largely because I wanted them to be reassuring. On an intellectual level, they should have been, but on a personal level, they weren’t—something I mention in the article—and that gap between what evidence could give me, as a person who comfortably relied on scientific evidence for other parenting choices, and what I wanted/hoped for/needed, started this area of inquiry. Writing about something close to my personal life and experience felt a little bit vulnerable, honestly! But EBP is also connected to issues I’ve always been interested in: what sort of evidence people value, how bodies and embodied experiences fit into institutional language and spaces, and how communities establish and reinforce their shared values and identities. I think my advice would be not to discount research projects because they are connected to your non-academic life. All research is about us—things we care about, things we are interested in—and maybe an issue or problem that is compelling to you could be made compelling to others, too. Sharing work with colleagues and getting great feedback from RHM reviewers was also a big part of helping me better understand my own interest in this topic and what I wanted others to get from my work.
AR: Given the focus of the subreddit on EBP, I was surprised to read your analysis and find so many examples of personal narratives in the comments! You suggest that the personal narratives are positioned in particular ways, so as to privilege science and contextualize (rather than essentialize) personal experience. I’m wondering whether you saw examples of people leveraging personal narratives in other ways, ways that perhaps went against the stated values of the subreddit?
ME: My impression is that people often wanted to share personal experience, at least based on the volume of anecdotal evidence I saw in the subreddit, but that they wanted to do so in an environment where the audience had essentially passed a litmus test. The subreddit’s mechanics allow for this, since, even on posts where users were seeking evidence-based answers, only top-level comments had to include a link to related research, and most of the post categories did not even have that condition attached. But then, there were a lot of questions that didn’t even have that label—lots of space for people to share personal experience and seemingly little oversight for how they were sharing it, particularly if it coincided with the values of the subreddit. My impression was that the subreddit’s rules were much more about establishing a shared allegiance to science (and, correspondingly, a list of forbidden topics/practices—“raising questions” about vaccines, for example) rather than requiring research-based discussion. And to some degree, that makes sense to me, both because of the difficulty of having research-based conversations (since most of us aren’t really qualified to evaluate the relevant research) and because of the attraction of a likeminded community. But I also see a lot of problems with the idea of allegiance to science as a value or identity, and there was a common pattern in the responses in that it seemed like it was fine to cite personal experience as evidence as long as it coincided with scientific best practices.
AR: Early in the article, you write, “Rather than deferring to recommendations from doctors or other parenting authorities, parents are encouraged to gather what evidence they can and determine which recommendations are relevant to their families and how best to apply them” (p. 317). You go on to argue that such appeals to science potentially shut out decision-making processes that are informed by “the complex embodied experience of parenting” (p. 319). I agree that evidence-based parenting is potentially risky in that way, and I’m also wondering if there are other risks that come with nonexperts (even if they are highly educated) becoming responsible for reading and interpreting scientific evidence. I’m thinking, for example, of the ways that science can be weaponized in debates around climate change or public health.
ME: I think about issues around expertise and doing independent, nonexpert research all the time, and I don’t have good answers, but I absolutely see risks. I can see a couple of issues. First, there are very good reasons for people to trust their feelings and privilege their own experiences, especially when those experiences are historically and structurally devalued. And there is great work on why people might choose to make a medical decision, for example, that is not necessarily supported by medical consensus. I found Kelly Pender’s work on contralateral prophylactic mastectomy particularly helpful in thinking about that kind of complexity in medical decision-making. But there’s also consistent mobilizing of flawed, limited, and discredited scientific evidence to support positions that are actively harmful, like the claim that childhood vaccinations cause autism. As Jennifer Bracken Scott describes, many parents who believe in the vaccine-autism connection seem to feel that science will eventually prove them right; they just have to find the “right” science. Like everything else, I also think of this as a multifaceted structural problem. What leads people to feel as if they can and should do their own research, or even that they must do their own research? How do we teach students to recognize expertise in a substantive and nuanced way, especially when they are not experts themselves? Would I have even needed to do obsessive research on infant sleep if the United States had universal paid parental leave? Once you add in a layer of conspiratorial thinking and general suspicion of expertise—for example, the idea that people who are claiming traditional expertise can’t be trusted–things get especially complicated. I’m not sure how to get to a better cultural space around expertise, where we retain spaces for skepticism and multiple sources of knowledge but also acknowledge that some topics are big and complex and require extensive education and experience to understand well.
AR: Your work points to a number of constraints that parents pursuing EBP are faced with—constraints that may leave them feeling unsettled about whether their parenting choices are the right choices or the wrong choices. Is this uncertainty inevitable? Are there other parenting frameworks that might help parents feel more supported or confident? Asking for me—an often-conflicted parent!
ME: I think one of my issues with most parenting advice is the suggestion that certainty is possible. Or maybe, thinking back to the relationship of science and parenting, that a particular kind of certainty is possible—where parents are 100% sure that they made the right decision and nothing could have possibly been better, rather than a preponderance of evidence that this was an appropriate choice. My understanding of most research on parenting issues is that researchers can say “this seems to have the following positive outcomes” or “this seems to have the following negative outcomes,” but there are some kinds of certainty—can you absolutely promise that this will not negatively affect my child, for example—that research just can’t offer because of the variability of human experience. And the pressure to optimize, I think, is especially high with parenting, because why wouldn’t you want to do not just something good for your child, but the best thing for your child? And structurally, again, many parents find that this is all on them, because they have little to no social support or economic safety net. I would like to say that everyone should try to chill out a little more, but I’ve even heard worrying described as the measure of good parenting—if you are worried that you’re not doing enough, then you are probably doing enough. I think there are so many things that we have learned about parenting and how to support parents and children that are so wonderful, but it seems like we still have a long way to go to make this process less stressful and more joyous, even if it can never be worry-free, and for me, structural changes would be a good place to start.
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