Conflicting advice

If there were a Mount Rushmore of parenting experts, it might look like this: T. Berry Brazelton, his flashing smile and calm demeanor gently reassuring parents. The late Benjamin Spock, the first “baby doc” to become a household name. Folksy patriarch James Dobson of the Christian Focus on the Family. British researcher Penelope Leach, the only woman and mother in the group. And sardonic John Rosemond, the columnist who calls Sigmund Freud “Dr. Zigmond Fraud.” Millions of parents have read their books, watched their videos and followed their advice. But are they right?

That’s what researcher Jane L. Rankin set out to find and report in her new book, “Parenting Experts: Their Advice, The Research, and Getting It Right.”

“I’m a parent and a professional, and I was going to meetings of organizations like the Society for Research in Child Development and hearing great science, just compelling and important, and then I’d read newspapers and get columnists and feature articles that didn’t reflect that science,” said Rankin, a professor of developmental psychology at Northwestern University.

“I wanted to bridge that gap.”

And there are gaps, she learned, even among these well-respected and beloved figures. She discovered the gaps by comparing their writing with the findings of hundreds of studies on children and parents. She looked at major parenting problems, including toilet training, day care, discipline and dealing with teens.

For instance, Spock’s sunny take on child care doesn’t jibe with some of the studies that found children who spend lots of time away from parents may lag in social skills. And Dobson’s and Rosemond’s stance on discipline, including a green flag on spanking, doesn’t reflect findings that while a smack may get a kid to comply immediately, it doesn’t tend to reinforce discipline in the long run.

Dobson, the president of the powerful conservative group Focus on the Family, concentrates on loving parenting, but he doesn’t believe in sparing the rod, within limits. His advice to parents is to spank a child with an object, since the hand should be associated with love. In contrast is the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation not to spank, because it’s difficult for parents to tell how hard they are hitting the child.

Rankin also found that some experts’ advice changed over the years, not necessarily in response to new discoveries.

Rosemond, for example, changed his position on toilet training, from letting the child learn cues to setting an arbitrary window of up to 24 to 30 months. That caused a public spat between him and Brazelton, who advocates letting children start the process when they are able to interpret whether they are ready.

Rankin also found that Leach, a British researcher and the only expert who was an at-home parent, had decidedly different attitudes toward child care in her books for parents compared to her book for child advocates.

“Leach, in her advocacy book, talks about early substitute child care as a threat to attachment,” Rankin said of the critical bond between caregiver and infant. “When reading her parenting manual, you get much less of a sense of that. I think that raises the question to what extent parenting manuals are influenced by marketing and the concerns of the publishers.”

The experts also are heavily influenced by their own philosophies. Dobson, the son of an evangelical minister, bases his advice on the Bible; Rosemond firmly believes in a family dominated by the couple; Spock was heavily influenced by Freud and emphasized raising kind, compassionate children.

Brazelton, the only pediatrician, who also held a teaching position at Harvard Medical School for many years, takes an evolutionary approach to child development. Leach focuses on helping children regulate themselves and maintaining their self-esteem.

So who’s the best?

Rankin hesitates. Then, just as she advises parents, she picks and chooses among them.

Spock with 50 million books sold, and the enormously popular Brazelton, still going strong in his mid-80s, probably conform most to the scientific literature she studied, she said.

She hesitated to venture on the next generation of parenting gurus. There’s William Sears, an advocate of what has been called “attachment parenting,” which promotes sleeping with your baby and “wearing” him or her in a baby sling. There is the growing influence of the American Academy of Pediatricians, which issues advice based on research by committee members.

In the end, though, parents have to choose.

“I wrote this book for parents (and professionals) who are thoughtful of the practices they adopt, and want to do so from an informed perspective,” said Rankin, the mother of two college-age children. “That’s going to lead them back to the bookshelves, reading the experts with a closer eye, and maybe picking out the best based on the accuracy of what the expert says.”