Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

1. Take It with a Grain of Salt: How Parents Encounter Experts and Advice

Chapter 1 Take It with a Grain of Salt How Parents Encounter Experts and Advice Everybody wants to give you advice on the new baby. My advice to new moms when they have baby showers [is] “Listen, but take it with a grain of salt. Weed out what you want and what you don’t want and go from there. Everything has to work for you and there is no formula that works the right way.” —Jill It is great to read and to have any other input, but you also have to do it yourself. . . . I mean, I think the pediatricians can obviously know a great amount about children but every child is different and they see a lot of different children as patients. They have an incredible amount of knowledge but they don’t know what is always best for your child. —Doug I make it up as I go along. I probably should read more but everybody says something different, . . . everything has its own philosophy. You really have to be able to trust your own instincts. Even when people are telling you different things, well it makes sense for me and my family. —Denise During the twentieth century, parents relied heavily on professional advice for scientific knowledge about children and the best childrearing practices. A constant undercurrent of tension, however, regarded the scope of such professional authority. Although tension between professional authority and parental autonomy has been evident throughout the modern era, by the 1970s there was a subtle but noticeable shift in the balance as experts became less authoritative. In the earlier part of the century, professional advice-givers were more likely to 13 be regarded (and position themselves) as authorities about childrearing, but by century’s end it was more common for such professionals to be regarded (and position themselves) as experts. Both authorities and experts, sources of specialized scientific or technical knowledge, are recognized as legitimately sharing such information based on their education , training, accomplishments, or credentials. The difference between the two lies in neither the nature of their training nor the content of information presented but in the way that information is offered by the professional and regarded by the lay person. To regard those with specialized or technical knowledge as authorities means that one holds their prescriptions as having authority over the individual in the Weberian sense: the probability exists that commands will be obeyed.1 Authorities offer not just opinions but legitimated commands that ought to be followed. The knowledge and advice of the expert is no less scientific and no less sought-after; contemporary expert advice, however, is more likely to be regarded as an individual (informed) opinion with less authority to dictate a right or correct way to parent. Today’s experts may describe a better way of parenting or may even opine upon the best way to parent, but they no longer tell readers how they ought or must rear their children. To use Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, contemporary experts are more likely to be interpreters instead of legislators.2 Legislators, Bauman explains, make “authoritative statements which arbitrate in controversies of opinions and which select those opinions which, having been selected, become correct and binding.”3 Interpreters, he contends, play a different role as intellectuals, translating statements between competing systems of expert knowledge. As Bauman points out, no clear line in the twentieth century divides these two types of intellectuals; both types can be intermixed, just as modern and postmodern orientations coexist. The tone of parenting advice offered in popular magazines clearly and discernibly shifted the balance between authorities and experts beginning in the 1970s; thus, parents have gained considerable autonomy over many parenting decisions that were once governed more substantially by widespread cultural norms. As illustrated by the epigraphs, the parents I interviewed all professed that there is no one right way to parent and that they follow their intuitions in discerning and deciding what works best for themselves, their families, and their children. Even though they all rely upon information and advice from A d u l t S u p e r v i s i o n R e q u i r e d 14 a variety of sources—including advice books and articles authored by professionals—these contemporary parents exhibit the attitude toward professional advice-givers as experts that became increasingly typical after the 1970s. Although professional advice-givers—as...