BY ANNE LOUISE BANNON
Once upon a time, when a young mom wanted help raising her children, her mother or mother-in-law was right there with plenty of advice, some of it actually solicited.
As the 20th century got rolling, science started poking its head into the domestic sphere, and by the 1930s, several baby books were available, mostly written by male pediatricians who had more experince giving shots than walking the floor with a wailing infant.
By the 1960s, the was Dr. Benjamin Spock and his cronies. Information expanded into magazines, and no longer was the focus solely on babies. Older children came under scrutiny by the scientific community.
Nowadays, most bookstores carry several shelves of books on various aspects of raising kids. Newspapers run regular features on parenting. Magazines focused on child-rearing are all but an industry unto themselves. And there's the Internet, with its multitude of sites devoted to parenting.
There's more and more information available daily. It seems as though scientists release new studies every minute, and half of them contradict each other. The ultimate irony is that as this veritable feast of information becomes available to parents, parents are finding themselves which much less time to read and sift through it all.
Making sense of the overload is no easy task for busy parents, who are no less hungry for information about their children's development than they were back when family provided all the answers.
"In the last year or so, there's been a lot of new findings about how the brain develops," said Dr. Paul Thompson, who, as an assistant professor of neurology at the UCLA Medical Center, is in the thick of the work being done.
Thompson, however, said that much of his work is really just explaining and/or proving what parents and educators have known all along. For example, math instruction doesn't really get going until kids are in second grade. Thompson said it has been discovered that the part of the brain that controls math learning doesn't really start growing until around age 7.
"That's kind of a neat thing," he said. "Now we have something kind of concrete that would help explain why it would be a good time to teach math at that age."
Which is nice for people like Thompson, but what can the average parent do with such knowledge?
Well, according to Dr. Lois Schunk, a Manhattan Beach marriage and family therapist who teaches parenting classes at Torrance Memorial Hospital, what you do with these various bits of information has a lot to do with your individual child.
"Some of the things you might read or try are really sort of harmless," she said. "If the child takes an interest, great. If the child doesn't, then I wouldn't keep pursuing it."
The hard part is that a lot of the information out there is either distorted or based on badly done studies. Some is just flat-out wrong and other information is based on reliable research, but taken further than it was ever meant to be taken.
For example, when some very reliable research showed that babies' brain grow a tremendous amount in their first three years, several commercial interests pushed learning aids to help children learn more in these early years. Others recommended playing Mozart to infants, based on a study that showed that college students learned math a little better for a short time after listening to Mozart. Thompson said that these well-meaning conclusions were not justified by later research.
"If you went back to the researchers, they would agree that it was nonsense to play it at children," Thompson said.
So, you want to check things out wherever possible. Sometimes that's as simple as talking about it with your pediatrician or other parenting experts. Thompson also suggested being wary if there's a commercial interest involved.
If there is some scientific discovery that you read about in your local paper that has some special bearing on a challenge with which you are dealing, such as a child with Attention Deficit Disorder or autism, then you may want to check the information out more thoroughly.
Thompson and Schunk both said it's important to know how a study was done and who paid for it. A study funded by a company that makes a given drug may show more positive results than a similar study done by a government-funded research lab.
You also want to know how many subjects participated in the study - for instance, if there were only a few babies involved, then the conclusions are less likely to apply to most babies. A double-blind drug study means that neither the doctor nor the patients knew who got a placebo and who got the the real drug, and is, therefore, more trustworthy.
Studies that are done by known institutions probably will have more reliable conclusions than those done by a doctor on his own. You'll also want to know if someone else in the scientific community has been able to get the same or similar results with the same process.
Thompson said a good way to know the information is reasonable is if it's been published in a respected peer-reviewed journal such as The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, or Nature. Peer-reviewed articles are those that another scientist has read to make sure all conclusions are based on the study's data and that the study was conducted appropriately.
If you're not up to reading a scientific study - and the vast majority of us are not, no matter how intelligent we are we aren't scientists - Thompson suggests looking for what are called review articles. Again, check out who's doing the review, but these articles look at a cross-section of the current work being done in a given field.
Whether it's a study or a review, Thompson said not to be shy about e-mailing the researcher if you still have questions. "We get a lot of e-mail from parents and teachers," he said. Both studies and review articles can be found at a public library and some can even be found on the Web. But be especially cautious with what you find on the Internet.
"That's hard to know [who's got good information]," said Helen Reid, retired director of the Cedars-Sinai Children's Center. "Everybody puts themselves forth as an authority."
Make sure you know where your information is coming from. If it's from the National Institutes of Health Web site, the odds are reasonably good that the information is sound. Art's Amazing ADD Cure is a lot more suspect.
Finally, don't be afraid to trust your gut.
"You don't do anything much different than any parent has done in the past," Reid said. "The child needs a lot of input from the parent and a lot of talking to. Most parents talk to their babies a lot."
Even Thompson said that most of his findings just bolster common sense. Gay MacDonald, the director of the UCLA Children's Center, put it this way: "There is no substitute for interactive language and interactive play. That means running around, being inconvenienced and talking up a storm."
So while it's nice to know what part of the brain is driving all that activity, if you can't get to every last detail of every last study on it, your kids will still be fine. If you need more information, tread carefully, and stick to reputable sources.
And there's always your mom or mother-in-law.
Where to get more information
That magazine article had something interesting to say, but does it hold water scientifically? If you've got a little time for research, here are some places to look.
The Cedars-Sinai Warm Line, not an emergency line, has 12 different audio cassettes with all sorts of information about children. Call 310-423-3500.
Dr. Paul Thompson, of the UCLA Medical Center, recommends the Reuters Health Information Web site at www.reutershealth.com and he also likes www.WebMD.com
If you want to check out summaries of the latest research papers, there's the searchable PubMed database from the National Institutes of Health at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez/query.fcgi
If you want to see some of Thompson's research, check out www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/MEDIA/press_release.html
Anne Louise Bannon is a freelance writer based in Altadena.