Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
As much as some Baby Daddy bloggers want to turn the whole child development milestone hoo-ha into a grudge match, Dr. Lawrence Kutner advises all parents to just take a big step away from the charts. It turns out that where your kid falls on any curve is mostly irrelevant and has little influence on the type of human being they grow into.
For those who are spoiling for a fight, this advice is hard to take. I mean, if parents can’t get all up in your grill about Susie talking in complete sentences at 6 months old or Jimmy solving cold fusion on his second birthday, what do we have to talk about? How delightfully average our kids are? How thrilled we are that our six-year old doofus has finally stopped shoving peas up his nose? Puh-lease.
But as this essay by the ‘derby’s own Madeline Holler points out, there’s nothing wrong with a kidlet not excelling, despite how much it might irk parents who are really just really to do everything right. We are all desperate for outside validation of our parenting skillz. But sticking to the charts may not be the most reliable choice, even though charts appeal to our need for an orderly and predictable outcome. Or, as Dr. Kutner explains, there’s “a false belief in the precision of anything associated with numbers.”
And rest assured, those who are about to leap to Almond’s defense — I tease because I love.
