The second edition of Skeptical Parent Crossing has been posted by Sergeant Skeptic Dad at Science-Based Parenting. There are some great articles this month, including several from some new recruits.

Next month, Kylie at PodBlack Cat is hosting, and if you’d like to submit an article, please do so here.

If you would like to host a future edition, please let me know.

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During my recent site remodel, I changed the tagline to “Parenting with Practical Skepticism.” It more accurately reflects what I’m trying to do. I am trying to use skepticism as a parenting tool.

I am certainly not the first to coin the term “practical skepticism” (the idea goes back to Pyrrho of Elis in the 4th century BCE), but for me it means using the principles of skepticism to practical ends, using them in our everyday lives.

When some people hear me describe myself as a skeptic, they say, “Oh, what, so you don’t believe in Bigfoot?” While I do not believe in Bigfoot, I find the question to be a little irrelevant. There are great learning experiences to be found in discussing these old bugbears of modern skepticism, opportunities to cut our teeth on basic principles, but the actual knowledge gained from these exercises is rarely useful. Practical skepticism is about using these same skills to make informed decisions that are useful to us.

“Question everything, or believe anything.” It is an old adage in the skeptic community, one that I like so much its Latin equivalent is on the wall above my desk. It means that if we are not able to question and evaluate claims, we are apt to believe any or all of them, regardless of their merit.

As parents we face claims every day, people and companies telling us what to do, what to buy, and what to believe. Most of them are easily dispatched, but how do we address those that aren’t, those that are just a little bit more complicated? This is where the tools of skepticism are most useful. They allow us to look objectively at an issue and decide which side has merit.

Skepticism, as I have said before, requires constant vigilance, a constant re-examining of our thought processes. In an attempt to clarify my own process, I will be laying out the basic methods of skepticism and critical thinking I employ when facing real-life decisions. Over the next 2 weeks, I will be posting articles that outline my basic steps of critical thinking.

As I have also said before, I am not an expert. These articles will merely reflect the way I have learned to think over the past few years. Neither comprehensive nor complete, these are a work in progress.

Next Post: Practical Skepticism Part 1-Identify the Claim

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As you can probably see, I’ve been doing some site improvements.

First, I did some long-overdue upgrades, things that you won’t necessarily notice, but make life easier for me.

Second, but probably most obvious, I have updated the design. When I started this site, I gave myself an arbitrary deadline, and that probably rushed the design process. I’ve always wanted a cleaner look, and finally took the time this week to work with my designer (Sally) on tidying it up.

Third, you can now subscribe to comment threads via email. If you wish to be notified when a new comment is posted for an article on which you have commented, simply check the box labeled “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail” before clicking the comment Submit button.

Fourth, if you would like to get in touch with me outside of the comments section, I have added a Contact form to make it a little easier.

Fifth, I have also added an email subscription option, if you want to receive my posts via email. Simply click on the “Email” option under Subscriptions, and you will be directed to Feedburner. Enter your email address in the window on the new screen, and you will receive an email whenever I post a new entry. The email will be from Evenlake Media (my company name).

Finally, I have started to become a little more active at Twitter. My profile is tied to all of my online presence, and is therefore under the name evenlake. What I do there is not always about skeptical parenting, but reflects my personal interests as well. I’ve only been active for a week or two, so I’m still getting my feet wet.

Thanks for your patience, and normal posting will resume next week.

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Two more links related to the baby edutainment phenomenon.

From March, over at Salon.com, Katharine Mieszkowski interviewed Pamela Paul, author of the Time article I linked to yesterday. In the interview, she talks about more than just the DVD’s and takes on the whole “new parenting” model, something she calls “Parenting, Inc.” in her new book of the same name.

An excerpt:

The less the toy does, the better. Everyone thinks: ‘Toys need to be interactive.’ No, toys don’t need to be interactive. Children need to interact with toys. The best toys are 90 percent kid, 10 percent toy, the kind of thing that you can use 20 different ways, not because it has 20 different buttons to press, but because the kid, when they’re 6 months old is going to chew on it, and toss it, but when they’re a year they’re going to start stacking it.

In the current issue of the New Yorker Joan Acocella reviews Hara Estroff Marano’s book, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. The book examines this same trend of New Parenting, the constant hovering over children and stimulating them in the hopes that it will help them later in life. Of the baby DVD’s, Acocella writes,

since these infants have only just learned to focus their eyes, it is hard to know what they will make of the material. (Nothing at all, Susan Linn, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, told the Chicago Tribune: ‘The baby video industry is a scam.’)

If anyone has read either of these books, I’d love to hear what you thought.

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While I do some long-overdue maintenance here and at my personal site, I thought I’d point out some articles on the baby educational product phenomenon. I used these as general background to my posts last week, but did not actually link to them. Leftover links, if you will.

-Sara Mead argues that the idea of creating geniuses during infancy is based around a misinterpretation of how our brains develop. In her article Million Dollar Babies: Why Infants Can’t Be Hardwired for Success, she states,

State and federal governments have poured millions of dollars into programs focused on children from birth through age three, many of which have little evidence of effectiveness.

-Alissa Quart, in an article originally published in The Atlantic in 2006, calls the marketing of this idea “the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex.” She questions whether these products have any real ability to make babies smarter, and asks, “It’s one thing if these products are ineffective. But what if they’re actually damaging?”

-Finally, also from 2006, Pamela Paul of Time asks, “Want A Brainier Baby?” and concludes that there are better ways to do it than these products. She cites a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found

many of those products bear enticing messages on their packages: “stimulate baby’s cognitive development” or “increase baby’s brain capacity.” But… the companies do essentially no research to back up their claims.

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Also: Don’t forget to submit you articles to the next edition of Skeptical Parent Crossing! This month Skeptic Dad is hosting, and articles need to be submitted by this Friday, 11/14.

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Now that the election is over, the TV in our living room is starting to feel neglected. I’m looking forward to having my evenings back, and Sally and I are both glad to reduce the amount of time CJ spends in a room with the TV on.

We knew that extended TV viewing has been linked to a variety of negative consequences in children. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry states, “Children who watch a lot of television are likely to

• Have lower grades in school
• Read fewer books
• Exercise less
• Be overweight

Further, a study in the April 2004 Pediatrics found a link between early TV viewing and attention problems later in life. (This was challenged in November 2004 with another study in which the researchers concluded, “We cannot exclude the possibility that watching television in childhood may cause behavioral problems, but we need better studies to further elucidate this association.”)

A 2006 Cornell University study even found

that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

These are not the reasons, however, that The American of Pediatrics recommends no TV viewing for children under 2. Rather, they state

babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers (eg, child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged.

So, whenever the TV was on, we made certain one of us was interacting with her to take her attention away from the set.

But apparently that wasn’t enough. According to PBS.org, (though they don’t cite the studies)

research has shown that one-, two-, and three-year-olds’ play and attention spans are shorter in length in the presence of background television, and parent-child interactions are also less frequent in the presence of background television.

It would seem no amount of television, even in the background, is “good” for infants. If that’s true, what about those “educational” videos? Aren’t the Baby [insert name of artist/scientist here] videos good for babies, don’t they help developing brains?

A 2007 study by Frederick Zimmerman and Dmitri Christakis of the University of Washington, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, found

that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. [emphasis mine]

Not only do they not appear to help, but they could actually be impeding development. How, then, are these things so ubiquitous, and why would anyone believe they’re beneficial?

Intimidation and misinformation, apparently.

After the University of Washington issued a press release about the study, Disney (who owns Baby Einstein) sent a letter to UW president Mark Emmert, demanding

the immediate retraction and clarification of a misleading, irresponsible and derogatory press statement issued by the University of Washington…. In short, the University’s press release was grossly unfair, extremely damaging, and, to be blunt, just plain wrong in every conceivable sense.

In a letter of his own, Emmert replied,

The researchers find no inconsistencies between the content of the news release and their paper. They believe the release accurately reflects the paper’s conclusions and their commentary. For these reasons, the University of Washington will not retract its news release.

Though I would like to believe this would be an ordinary response in a rational world, I applaud Dr Emmert and the University of Washington for standing up for science in the face of such opposition. It couldn’t have been easy.

And, in keeping with the best spirit of skepticism, Dr Christakis said of the DVD’s,

I believe the onus is on the manufacturers to prove their claims that watching these programs can positively impact children’s cognitive development.

In early 2008 Disney changed the way they market the DVD’s, toning down the “educational” references, instead using terms like “explorative” and “interactive.”

Sometimes skepticism and science can really warm my heart.

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I watch too much TV. It wasn’t always this way. For years all I had was a small black-and-white set that wasn’t connected to cable. When I discovered Netflix, I upgraded to color, but still didn’t hook up to to the cable company.

About the time I moved to New York, cable broadband internet access was becoming commonplace, so Sally and I hooked up. Slowly, TV crept into my life. First it was just watching the shows we recorded on the DVR. Then, when the DVR was empty, I’d watch shows that looked interesting. Then it just kind of became background noise when we got home from work. Some nights, we’d start watching the news, and the TV would stay on until we went to bed.

When CJ was born that changed. We both were a little freaky about the TV being on if she was in the room. We mellowed over time, and started turning it on if she was asleep. Then we’d turn it on if she didn’t have a direct view. I think you know where this is going.

There were a few reasons why we were a little manic about the TV. First, the American Academy of Pediatrics “urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years.” But the main reason was our own completely unscientific survey of children we knew.

Two couples we know each have two children of roughly the same ages. One couple uses the TV as a distraction for their kids, and the other limits their children’s viewing to one half-hour per day. The kids who watch a lot of TV seem unable to entertain themselves, constantly interrupting the adults, and screaming, “Pay attention to me!” The TV-restricted kids will sit and play by themselves for hours.

Though we understand there are a variety of reasons for this, the difference between the children is striking enough that we decided not to use TV as a babysitter or a distraction device.

There are times when it would be so much easier to just let her watch something. When the TV is on, we’ll catch CJ staring at it, completely rapt. I know we could plop her down in front of a kids’ show for an hour and she’d be content while I got some work done. Instead, sometimes the recycling doesn’t get done, or a post doesn’t get written.

But lately, the TV has been on for us. The election has me watching more TV than ever, and most of the time, CJ is in the room. We usually point her away from it, one of us reading to her or playing with her. But, we still catch her staring at it sometimes. Neither of us is overly concerned. After all, if those other videos claim to create baby physicists, maybe all of the news programs are making CJ a Baby Brokaw, or a Baby Cronkite.

Tomorrow, after the election is hopefully over, I’m going on a TV fast and won’t have to worry about the ill effects of too much news on my daughter’s sanity. But, all of this got me wondering, if the AAP recommends against infants watching TV, what about all of those infant genius DVD’s? Are they harmful? Do they work?

Next Post: Television and Infants

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Living on the East Coast, and having all of her grandparents on the West Coast, CJ has already flown more than 10,000 miles. With a cross-atlantic trip planned next month, she will have flown more miles in her first year than I did in my first 18.

Our first trip west, she was 3 months old, and we were worried about how she would handle the flights. Before we left, we looked around for things that might make flying a little easier on her. Almost universally, we heard, “Make sure you feed her during takeoff and landing.” This advice was meant to alleviate the pressure on her eardrums due to cabin pressure changes. Just like chewing gum can move the muscles in our own ears, the sucking action relieves the pressure buildup in her tiny eustachian tubes. Or, more exactly, from Dr Greene.com

During descent, as the air pressure rises, the middle ear space needs extra air to re-equilibrate the pressure. It tries to suck air back in through the floppy eustachian tube. However, during descent, the eustachian tube does NOT open spontaneously. A tiny muscle pulls open the eustachian tube only during swallowing, yawning, or crying. In children, this mechanism is less efficient than in adults. The rising pressure stretches the eardrum inward and can cause pain and decreased hearing until air rushes into the middle ear space and the ears “pop”.

It made perfect sense, so we followed the advice. All but one of her flights, so far, have been relatively shriek-free.

What we missed, however, was that doctors don’t necessarily know that much about flying. Though they might be able to offer help as to how to pop her ears, they aren’t all that knowledgeable about when to pop her ears.

Enter Sharon at Flying with Children, mother and former flight-attendant who has posted a lengthy article meant to help parents navigate the airlines with their children. In the section titled “Ears and Altitude,” she writes,

It’s actually a myth that children need to suck on something for take-off and landing. I see this “tip” in almost every article on this subject and I think it’s a case that it’s repeated so often that everyone believes it (Emperor’s New Clothes, anyone?)….

Is this bad advice? Not usually. Where is the harm in giving your child a drink or some gum during those times? Nothing…except take-off is when a lot of children do nodd off. Panicked parents wake their children from much-needed-shut-eye to save their ears from supposedly exploding….

The delicate time is not during take-off or landing/touchdown but at the top of descent. Be very careful as most articles on flying are written by parents who usually have never worked in the industry and misuse airline terms. This is usually 40 minutes to an hour before landing and everyone’s ears have to reverse internal pressurization. You can feel this yourself. I can confirm that when I worked, if any passengers had ear problems, this was the time, and I actually saw more adults suffering than children.

This is another example of asking the right person the right question.

She covers much more than just ear popping, including carseats, clothing, toys, and mentally preparing your children for the flight. Sharon’s article is a mother-lode of information, and if you are planning to take your kids on an airplane anytime soon, this should be required reading.

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I don’t really listen to podcasts. I hear about interesting ones, start to listen, then drift off midway and start reading, writing, or just napping. I find most to be too long, or too self-congratulatory. But I found a new one, and can’t get enough of it.

The Princeton Review LSAT Podcast is a short (5-10 minutes, perfect while feeding the baby), weekly program that asks a single question and evaluates the arguments. The subjects are contemporary, drawn from the news and everyday life. It is produced by the Princeton Review, a test preparation company, and is meant to help prospective LSAT takers refine their critical thinking skills.

Not just for future lawyers, it is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about using logic and applying it to real-life situations.

I’ve been cruising the archives and just finished listening to “Does the latest revelation of a terrorist threat really mean that New York needs more money from the Department of Homeland Security?” As I write this, I’m downloading the rest of the 96 episodes.

[Thanks to Ironic Sans for pointing this out. He has a great interview with the host, Andrew Brody, here.]

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