How to Decipher New "Research"

by Tony Chen

You may have seen that we here at Savvy Daddy have recently added a distinguished Panel of Experts. You can see their bios here, but basically these folks are profs, physicians, clinicians, and academics that are savvy gurus on topics relevant to us dads trying to raise great kids.  These experts have been gracious enough to answer real questions from real dads - email me your questions (tony at savvydaddy dot com) and I'll be passing along the most relevant & compelling questions to them.  Without further ado, our first Savvy Daddy Expert Panelist, Bob McMurray.

Dad Question: I feel completely overwhelmed at all of the new research coming out on infant development, and honestly, I'm growing increasingly skeptical of when news media reports on "breaking research."  As a researcher yourself, what do you look for when you see new research?  How do you discern how valid it is? 

Bob McMurray, Language/Development Professor and Researcher
One of the most important things to look for in new research is how simple the story appears to be.  Development is complex.  Really complex.  There's almost never a single thing that we can pinpoint as the "cause" of anything big like language or social behavior.  On the other hand, the media has a hard time reporting on complex answers -- they really prefer the simple, single-cause studies.  So that's most of what you're likely to hear from the media.

That's not to say that there aren't good studies being reported, or that sometimes there really are simple stories about development.  But generally, you should raise an eye-brow to any researcher who claims to have a silver bullet regarding development.
 
Scientists are trained to hold lots and lots of things constant in our experiment, and only look at one thing at a time.  It's an excellent way to really figure out what's causing what.  But sometimes it warps our worldview (or the media does), in that we tend to assume that just because we found an effect of that single thing, it's the most important thing in the world.  But in actuality, it's just one of a huge number of things that affect development.

Here's an example.  We all know that breast feeding is preferred to bottle feeding (sorry to bring Mommies into this, guys!).  It's good for bonding (for Mommies, at least, does nothing for us), better nutritionally, confers some immunities, and has lots of good micronutrients (like omega-3 fatty acids) that help with brain and eye-development.  But in order to discover this, we had to run studies that kept everything constant except for whether babies were breast or bottle fed, things like the socio-economic status of the mom's, whether or not the dad is home,  the birth-weight of the babies, etc (of course we cannot really control these things, but that's a topic for another post).  When we find a small difference in cognitive abilities, then, we can can attribute it to the breast-milk.  Hooray.

Funny thing is, many of us (by us, I mean us Daddies) were bottle fed.  We turned out fine.  What's going on?  Two things. First, Well, even when you hold everything else constant, children vary.  A lot.  The studies, of course, are only reporting the average, not the individual kids.  Second, all that other stuff that was held constant mattered!  Those of us whose mom's fed us formula, were probably fed it because our pediatrician recomended it (that was the recomended practice in the 60s and 70s for many doctors).  That means that we had access to health care, and our moms were the kind of moms that really tried to follow their doctor's advice.  These things surely compensated for whatever we missed out from the breast milk. 

The bottom line: lots of things contribute to healthy babies.  But that's not what shows up in the media.  What the media sees is "Breast is best", and then comes the extremists, who make every mommy with a bottle feel terrible.  (be glad you don't have to be a part of this battle, Daddies!).

Here's another example.  Genes.  We live in a society in which the gene is king.  We like to identify the genes for this and that trait, and we've mapped out every strand of DNA in the human genome (well actually for a handful of human's genomes).  So naturally we're going to start seeing studies showing the language gene, or the intelligence gene.  I've even seen studies reporting the liberal and/or conservative genes.  It's kind of deflating -- all that work we put in to make our kids smart and successful, and it turns out that it's all set from birth.  But here's the real deal: there is no gene for language, and there is no gene for intelligence.  There are genes that are related to these things, but they may play only a small role, and the studies are designed to find the genes, not to tell us how important they are.

More importantly, all of these genes would do zilch without a body and an environment.  We're now learning how genes themselves can be controlled by the environment (that is, whether or not a gene is expressed is determined by environmental factors). So genes are necessarily only a small part of development.  Parents have a huge role to play.  But the media, in it's relentless simplification of science doesn't report it that way.  They just say that we've discovered the language genes.   So be careful reading these claims.

So whenever you are reading media reports, look for complexity!  Development is messy (particularly around meal-times) and complex, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong (or they were misquoted).

Have a question for Professor Bob?  Send your development & language development questions to me via email (tony at savvydaddy dot com)