With a baby on the way, my “to-read” list now includes a bunch of books on parenting. Likewise, we are starting to get parenting advice from people, and I imagine that will only increase as D-day approaches. Before I end up adrift in a sea of advice, I thought it would be fun to try to sum up my parenting philosophy as it stands right now. If nothing else, I imagine this will be hilarious to read in a year or two once I have some actual experience under my belt.

1. Kids are people

You know when you are on a long flight and there is some kid screaming his head off and everyone around is getting upset too? Whenever I’m in this situation, I like to remind myself that the emotions that kid is feeling are probably also being shared by every single other person in the plane. Tired, hungry, cramped, uncomfortable, bored, etc. We’re all feeling the same things. I always imagine, deep down inside every adult, there is a similar screaming kid.  I believe that kid never really goes away, he just gets buried under layers and layers of cognitive development and learned behavior. Those layers muffle the raw emotion that we’re all feeling as we suffer through the flight. As adults we know that this won’t last forever, that we have to do this, that it’s not socially appropriate to scream and cry.

My point is this: kids and even babies are not some alien species with unfathomable needs and desires and emotions. They’re just small people who are still figuring things out. And there’s a lot to figure out! Why do babies cry so much? Well, wouldn’t you be frustrated and overwhelmed and upset if you were literally experiencing every single thing around you for the first time, and could not express yourself verbally, and could barely even control your arms and legs, let alone take care of yourself?  Why do toddlers throw tantrums? Well, for one thing, because tantrums often result in getting what they want. But also because they are feeling some strong emotion and they don’t know how to cope with it.

As a parent, my role is to help the kid figure all of this stuff out. Until the kid can communicate, this will mostly involve paying attention and figuring out what it is that is making them upset and solving the problem. Once they can communicate, this means helping them to understand. In our household “Because mom/dad said so” is not good enough. If I can’t articulate why a rule exists, then it’s not a very good rule is it? Kids are people, and I plan to respect my kid enough to be willing to explain why some behavior is not appropriate rather than just telling him to cut it out. I want him to listen to what I say because it makes sense, not because I’m bigger than him.

Of course, this is all well and good, but what about when the kid is just flipping out for no good reason? We’ve all seen those funny lists of pictures of crying kids captioned with the ridiculous reason they’re crying. They’re hilarious, but it’s important to remember that to those kids, whatever is happening is a big enough deal to warrant crying. So yeah, I may laugh when my kid loses it because he isn’t allowed to play with dog poop or because he has to wear a life jacket or because he can’t get the last cheerio on his spoon, but I’ll also acknowledge that what he is feeling is real and help him try to deal with that. And, crucially, I’ll try to remain calm even (especially) when he is not.

2. Kids are always learning

Related to my controversial theory that kids are human beings, deserving of respect, who are just trying to figure things out, the second major part of my parenting philosophy is that kids are always learning. People talk about “teachable moments” but in reality, childhood is just one long teachable moment. Learning is what we evolved to do. Cheetahs are good at running, dolphins are good at swimming, and humans are good at learning.

This means that, whether I like it or not, my kid is going to be constantly looking to me as an example. That’s just as true when I’m teaching him how to throw a baseball as it is when I am upset with him because he threw that baseball through a window. It means that how I handle work-life balance and how chores are shared in our house and what shows and movies we watch and what books we read will all be influencing him in big and small ways.  On the one hand, this sucks, because it means that as a parent you have to be “always on” and trying to set a good example. But on the other hand, it means you get to teach kids all sorts of cool stuff. I am looking forward to the period when the kid just asks “why” about everything. Partially, because as a scientist I can continue answering “why” questions for a lot longer than some people. But more importantly because I don’t want to just explain why, I want to help guide him through figuring things out, and I want to show him that even grown-ups don’t always know all the answers. Sometimes you have to look something up. More excitingly, sometimes the question you just asked doesn’t have an answer yet!

3. A good person needs to learn empathy

My goal as a parent, other than the fundamental goal of raising a happy and healthy kid, is to raise a good person. That’s why the final part of my parenting philosophy is empathy. To me, empathy is the fundamental trait that leads to all other good traits. There’s a reason the “golden rule” shows up in pretty much every major religion in some form or another. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s position and try to understand that they are fundamentally the same as you, no matter their circumstances or outward appearance, makes it a lot harder to harbor negative feelings or to judge their behavior. As the saying goes, it is impossible to hate someone once you understand them. When you get right down to it, if more people in the world embraced empathy, the world would be a much better place.

Because of this, I will be approaching parenting itself with a sense of empathy for my child (see item 1), and I will do what I can to help him develop empathy as he grows up. I am under no illusions here: empathy is hard, even for adults.  Kids can be extremely self-centered. Teaching my child to be an empathetic person will be a lifelong effort (I’m still working on it myself), but I will do my best to teach by example (see item 2) and encourage him to think about how he would feel if he were in others’ places, especially when it is most difficult to think about. I look forward to teaching my kid tons of things, but I’ll consider myself to be successful if he learns empathy.

So, there you have it. Those are the fundamentals of my parenting philosophy, based on zero experience actually raising a kid of my own. I know that, to paraphrase Eisenhower and many others, “No parenting plan survives first contact with a screaming toddler”, but I think it will be interesting to see what parts of this philosophy I’ll be able to stick with and which parts will evolve as I start to read advice books, get advice from family and friends, and finally, come face to face with the day to day challenges of parenting.

As a scientist, I try to approach everything in life from a rational, skeptical point of view, so it has been interesting to enter the world of conception and pregnancy and to begin to get a glimpse of the future world of parenting. “Interesting” not only because of the pseudo-science and outright superstition around every corner, but because I have found that despite all my training, it is almost impossible to stay fully rational about this stuff.

The first taste came when we started trying to conceive. We were just about as ready as any couple can possibly be: secure jobs, a nice house in a nice town, good financial situation, two dogs (aka imitation infants), etc. That was two years ago. Erin is 19 weeks pregnant right now, so if you do the math you’ll see that it took us a while. Everyone drills into your head that it’s so easy to accidentally get pregnant that you assume that as soon as birth control stops, it’s only a matter of months before there’s a baby on the way. That’s not how it worked out for us.

We started trying, and nothing happened. Months passed and Erin had not yet “fallen pregnant” (a term which I have learned to hate – as if getting pregnant is as easy and accidental as falling off a log). Meanwhile, our Facebook feeds were a parade of pregnancy announcements, baby bump pictures, birth announcements, and baby pictures, mixed in with self-righteous posts about choosing not to have kids. We tried to be happy for our friends and their growing families (or their choice not to do something we wanted so desperately), but as time went on, each adorable baby seemed to be less a promise of things to come and more of a reminder of our own failings.

We got tested. Erin’s came back fine, mine did not. I didn’t realize how much of my identity I had based upon the idea that someday I would raise a family until suddenly I was staring at a test result that said I was unlikely to be able to do it. The results had a terse single-sentence note from my doctor, not even explaining any of the test results, just referring me to a reproductive specialist. Faced with such a result, it felt like the universe’s way of saying “you are failing at the primary purpose of your existence”.  It felt like a judgement. My life has been so fortunate and easy in every other respect, maybe this was karma: some way to balance out all of that privilege. Some cruel trick played by the Fates to even the score.

Of course, none of that makes any sense, but that doesn’t matter to my irrational brain. Ironically, I think my skeptical nature actually led me down the path to these sorts of irrational thoughts. I put so much emphasis on having and raising children as a part of my life precisely because I do not believe in any afterlife or higher power. Without the comforting promise of an afterlife or a divine plan, there is a lot of self-imposed pressure to do something with my life that will last after I’m gone, and the easiest way to do that is to pass on my genes to offspring and to rear those offspring to be good people.

Rationally I know how ridiculous it is to anthropomorphize the universe. To ascribe motives to it, to think that somehow bad luck makes me a failure,  or that this is some way to balance out previous good fortune. The luck of being a white straight male in a society that values those traits has nothing to do with misfortune of having a slight hormonal imbalance that impacts fertility. These variables are uncorrelated, orthogonal, independent. But when you want something so badly and have so little control over whether you get it, the natural response is not logical well-reasoned thought. The natural response is seek out some reason for things to have happened the way they did, because the alternative of an indifferent, random universe that is completely out of your control is anathema.

My other immediate response to getting the test result back was to seek out information. Some people get freaked out by medical jargon and technical language. I’m comforted by it. Something is wrong? I want to know everything I can about it. I can confidently say that I now know more about male (in)fertility than most of the population. Hell, more than some doctors. The extremely supportive infertility communities on Reddit were sanity savers. We live in a society where fertility is a taboo subject (thanks, religion!) which makes it really awkward to talk about this stuff. I didn’t learn that many men in my family have had fertility issues until I finally told my parents about the trouble we were having, and that wasn’t until months after I got those first results and we started to see a specialist in Phoenix.

Luckily, we didn’t have to resort to IVF+ICSI.

In the initial panic and shame after that first test result (made worse because it had to be kept secret) the ability to find a group of people online going through the same difficulties, and to speak candidly and anonymously with them, was tremendously valuable. It was also very comforting to see how science-positive the people on the infertility boards were. It makes sense: many of the people on those boards had much worse diagnoses than I did, and so their only recourse is in-vitro fertilization (IVF), often using intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) which basically involves injecting a single sperm (sometimes surgically extracted!) into a single egg. These people are depending on cutting-edge science to be able to have children.

But at the same time, there was inevitably a strong undercurrent of pseudoscience in the infertility communities, especially if I dared to stray from the Reddit boards to elsewhere on the internet. Even as people complained about friends and family members saying completely nonsensical and often hurtful things like “just relax and it will happen” and “everything happens for a reason” they would, in the next sentence, talk about how they are looking into homeopathy or aromatherapy or, most of all, acupuncture. I’m sorry, but having a stranger stick you full of needles is not going to get you pregnant. That’s really not how this works. But at the same time, I get it. What else can you do? When you’re faced with infertility and even the most advanced (and expensive) medical treatments can’t help you, it’s irrational but also completely normal to look elsewhere. I just hated seeing these people who were suffering through infertility being given false hope by snake-oil salesmen.

Thankfully, in the end my diagnosis was very mild, and it was just a matter of taking some tiny, cheap pills and continuing to try. We were absolutely thrilled when we found out Erin was pregnant, and when the time came we made our own obnoxiously cute announcement on social media. To our friends who are secretly struggling to have kids, I’m sorry you have to go through that. Part of why I’m writing this post is to do my small part to fight back against the taboo of talking about it.

I feel kind of bad about how adorable this is.

Now that we are expecting, I have found that it comes with a whole new realm of irrational thinking. First there is the superstition carried over from before modern medicine existed.  For example: ritual genital mutilation (a.k.a. circumcision) is still shockingly common. And then there is the highly personal and ambiguous morass that is the choice between a midwife and a doctor, and between a birth center or a home birth vs. a hospital birth. I hesitate to even write about this because it’s such a charged topic, but I think it’s an important one.

To me, the surging popularity of midwives and births outside the hospital setting is a symptom of a general mistrust of the “medical establishment” and anything that isn’t “natural”, which always causes alarm bells to go off in my head. I mean, I get it: I don’t have the highest opinion of doctors. I had to self-diagnose myself with Lyme disease in grad school because my doctor couldn’t figure it out. When I tried to establish a general care doctor for myself here in Flagstaff I was met with confusion and told not to come back unless I was sick. And as discussed above, the doctor who ordered my first fertility test was not exactly sensitive to the devastating news she was delivering. So I understand the desire to seek out someone who provides more caring and personal treatment for an extremely emotional and painful experience. With all that in mind, I think that midwives who have medical training and work at hospitals to provide that sort of care are excellent.

I also recognize that for the vast majority of uncomplicated pregnancies, giving birth at a birth center with a midwife is likely to be a better experience than a hospital birth. But to me it all comes down to what happens when things don’t go according to plan and the lives of the mother and/or baby are at stake. In cases like that, I want to be at the hospital already, with experts on hand to do whatever needs to be done. I just cannot trust the life of my wife and child to an organization that also offers herbal and homeopathic remedies and acupuncture (as our local birth center does).

To be clear, this is a very personal and complicated decision, and I am not in the best position to judge since I will never have to give birth myself. And I recognize that my aversion to birth centers and midwives just because they tend to be open to pseudoscience is not entirely rational itself. Most births are not complicated, and it’s not as if they force you to do acupuncture or to take sugar pills instead of regular medicine. This aversion is part of a larger theme for me: a lot of my feelings about pregnancy and birth are controlled by an overarching paranoia about all the things that can go wrong.

I think some of this paranoia is a direct result of our difficulty in getting pregnant. According to my irrational brain, since there is clearly something wrong with me that prevented conception for so long, there must now be something wrong with the baby. It didn’t help that the infertility boards were full of stories of miscarriages and genetic problems (Those infertility boards are a strongly biased sample of the population, but my irrational brain doesn’t care!). I find myself reading medical sites and trying to internalize all the statistics on birth defects and abnormalities and how rare they are. We did a blood test that came back indicating no chromosomal abnormalities. We did the initial appointments where we got to see and hear the heartbeat. All signs indicate that everything is as healthy as it can be. And yet there’s still this fear that something will go wrong.

You hear all the time that a baby is a “miracle”.  I don’t believe in miracles, but when I think about the near-infinite number of things that have to go just right for a single cell to grow into a functional human being, it quickly does begin to seem miraculous that anybody is ever born healthy. Every healthy adult human being, heck every healthy adult anything that has ever lived becomes this amazingly unlikely and precious thing. It’s awfully tempting to offer up a prayer that all of those steps go well for our baby, even though I know there is nobody listening. Again, when something is so completely out of your control, it’s a natural response even though it makes no logical sense. It takes a conscious effort to remind myself that procreation is a self-refining process. It is the one thing that life has to get right, and so life has gotten pretty good at it. It has been happening in some way or another since the dawn of life on Earth. The likelihood of a problem is as low as it possibly can be.

The problem is, once you are expecting a kid, everywhere you look there are warnings about all the ways you are going to harm your baby. Thou shalt never eat lunch meat or soft cheese or take a sip of wine or come within 30 feet of a piece of sushi or take any form of medication, etc. As a scientist, I can recognize that the vast majority of this type of advice is just an overabundance of caution. Lunch meat is fine, just don’t eat it if it’s spoiled because it can make you sick. Ditto soft cheese: just make sure your dairy products are pasteurized so you don’t get sick. Even sushi is technically okay if you avoid fish with lots of heavy metals and it’s fresh (so you don’t get sick, noticing a trend?). Despite the widespread paranoia about food on parenting sites, even my neurotic brain has been able to stay mostly rational about food advice.

How dare you eat sugar and wheat and cold cuts? Don’t you love your baby?

Various ingestible chemicals, on the other hand, have proved harder to think about logically (never mind the fact that food is also just ingestible chemicals). Everyone knows that alcohol is bad for the developing baby, but realistically a sip here or there is not going to make a difference. I know this. I understand how dilution works. And yet there’s still this faint irrational panic in the back of my mind when Erin tastes an alcoholic drink. Likewise for medication. Early in the pregnancy, while we were road-tripping around the west, Erin had some bad nausea and we got her some Emetrol to take. Now, this “drug” is just a sugary syrup mixed with phosphoric acid. Know what else is basically just sugar and phosphoric acid? Coke. But somehow the fact that Emetrol is a “drug” made the paranoia flare up. Now, later in the pregnancy, heartburn has replaced nausea and Erin has switched over to taking antacids. Again, these “medicines” are just basic harmless chemicals, this time things like calcium carbonate, but that irrational voice in the back of my mind is always there whenever she takes “medicine”.

As we pass each milestone in the pregnancy, I know that the likelihood of something going wrong decreases. And  yet, it’s not like all danger has passed once the kid is born. The flip side of Facebook’s endless parade of baby pictures is that several friends of mine have been brave enough to share sad news as well. One couple lost their baby shortly after birth (thankfully their second baby appears to be happy and healthy). Another couple’s son has had 5 surgeries and he is only a year old (thankfully the prognosis sounds good). Someone at work has a son with a genetic disorder so rare that there are only a handful of people in the country who have it. And even outside our personal network, I now find myself hyper-attuned to anything bad involving babies or children. Thankfully we are safe from Zika here in Flagstaff (too cold), but early in the pregnancy Humans of New York did a whole heart-wrenching feature on pediatric cancer. I find myself significantly more affected by even fictional stories about babies or kids getting hurt or dying (and once you start to notice them, you find that such stories are everywhere, just as when we were trying to conceive it seemed like every piece of culture we encountered was about pregnancy). Even just the process of shopping for our baby becomes a litany of nightmare scenarios. Shopping for cribs you read about SIDS. Shopping for car seats you worry about car crashes.  Shopping for toys you worry about choking hazards.

I know rationally that the odds are very good that our baby will be born perfectly healthy, that he will grow up safely, and none of the things I am worrying about will come to pass. But at the same time I get the feeling that this paranoia of mine is here to stay, that it is going to become the background noise of parenthood. My son isn’t even born yet and already I am developing a much deeper appreciation for what all the parents out there in the world have gone through.

I have tried to stay rational and reasonable about every step of this long journey that we are just starting,  but it has been a struggle. So much of this process is so completely beyond anyone’s control that it’s very hard to stay grounded. Part of why I get so paranoid about everything that can go wrong is that I am looking forward to being a parent so much.  It’s easy to lose sight of the joys that we have in store when faced with nothing but worst-case scenarios.

I was not expecting this post to end up so long or so relentlessly negative, but the reality is, that’s where my mind is lately. I know that I need to make a conscious effort to focus on the positives. In fact, I think a good follow-up post to this one would be to talk about all the many things I am looking forward to about becoming a father. Despite all my worries, I am really excited about it and that, at least, is definitely a rational response!