Grasshopper New Media Presents...

We have friends who had a lot of trouble conceiving. Months later, finally pregnant, they set about the usual new baby preparations: they set up a nursery, bought a layette, and started to read lots and lots of parenting books. – Too many parenting books, it turns out.

Dad-to-be came home after work one evening and found his wife curled up on the sofa, sobbing because she’d been reading the “problem pages” of a popular parenting book. You know this section, right? It’s where an author details every possible complication and genetic anomaly, and not just those that affect infancy, but a child’s entire life. Could that caffeinated tea you just had be responsible for poor social skills in middle school? If you don’t play Bach to your bulging belly, will your child lack artistic skill?

And, worst of all, what about the things you can’t do anything about — Genetics? Environment? Chance? The books were so full of “What it, what it, what if?” that I’m sure you can understand how a future mom, home alone, became pretty upset.

After consoling his wife, our expectant father friend took every last parenting book, piled them in the outdoor fire ring, and burned them to a crisp.

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Among other things, parenting is a hugely scary endeavor. And sure, it helps to seek out the distilled experience of multiple authorities in the form of how-to books. When is a fever trivial, and when should you see the doctor? Controlling the uncontrollable tantrum: how do you even start? And later, what on earth can you say to your teenager to keep them from using their newfound power to damage themselves?

However, these books don’t answer these questions and leave it at that. A lot of these books are seriously undermined by an unholy combination of aggressive marketing and professional condescension to new parents. Here’s a few things that are just plain wrong with parenting books:

• Excruciating detail. In an effort to attract as many potential customers as possible, these books have swollen beyond all proportion, and now seem to have a page on every possible disorder and malady, no matter how rare.
• Extreme caution. In our lawsuit-prone culture, parenting books are very timid with their advice. One sleep book we have seems to be advocating a “cry-it-out” method for nighttime crying, but gives equal coverage to both “no cry” and something I could call “cry a little, but not too much.”
• Anecdotes. In an effort to remain at the top of the bookshop heap, parenting books go through new editions constantly. These updates usually add a new forward or, the bane of all parenting books: the anecdote. These barely-believable chestnuts consume most of the books’ volume and add little or nothing to the information.

With all these problems, you may think that I’m against the use of parenting books entirely. Nothing could be further from the truth: I love hearing and reading about others’ experiences with their children, and I learn a lot that way. It’s just this: these books are bloated. So I’ve come up with a few techniques for deflating them and extracting the useful bits:

• Dig out the core advice. Parenting experts became experts for a reason, despite their untidy attempts to get their ideas down on paper. Each book I’ve read contains at least one or two really valuable ideas, but they’re buried in meaningless narrative. Use a pen to cross out entire pages — anything with an anecdote, a scare tactic, or a sidebar list — and highlight the few phrases of importance. Better yet — just copy those few good pages and recycle the rest.
• Try out the advice, but disregard what doesn’t work for you. “Advice” is simply the essence of what’s worked for someone else, so take it with a grain of salt. It’s often valuable, but it won’t apply to every situation, and you’re the only one who can decide what works for you. Too many parents turn over their instincts to an “expert” in the form of a book (or even a Web site, or a parent-in-law).
• Rip out the disease pages. Just do it, or if you think you might be tempted to look at them as you destroy them, have a friend do it. If you need this information later, God forbid, you’ll get it, and probably more accurately, from your doctor, or else from support groups for families affected by these conditions.

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One last recommendation: although books can be useful (once the fluff is excised), there is no substitute for advice from people you know. Family members, friends, and even parent bloggers provide true-life first-person accounts that beat any book anecdotes.

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[tags]kids, children, baby, babies, parents, parenting, books, learning, necessary, dialogue, information, usage[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by mrtwism, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved