Does Parenting Have To Be This Hard? What Babies Can Teach Us

American parents are finding parenting much harder than they expected.  And, it’s not just how they feel—parenting is more demanding than it used to be—such that Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, warns that many parents are now stressed to their breaking point. 

 Over 80% of parents use internet search engines to look for parenting advice, but less than 50% of them found the results to be trustworthy. Almost 70% of parents say they would use more positive parenting strategies if only they knew them. 

So, where do we find these more positive parenting strategies that go beyond the prescriptive expert-driven “how to” approach of the internet?  Our research suggests that the baby can teach us most of what we need to know as parents, since children influence the way their parents behave as much as parents influence their children. In fact, much of what looks like the effect of genes may really be the result of the way genes feed back on the environment. 

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J. Kevin Nugent was born and educated in Ireland and has worked at Boston Children’s Hospital since 1978.  He is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Brazelton Institute and his research and teaching focusses on newborn behavior and early relationships.  Dr. Nugent has authored or co-authored 10 books, has written 24 book chapters and over 100 scientific papers.  He has been studying child development in different cultural settings across the world for over forty years.  He has also written a best-selling book for parents, Your Baby is Speaking to You, published by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt.  He is Emeritus Professor of Child and Family Studies, the University of Massachusetts and has been a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School since 1981.  He is on the Board of the Discovery Museum.