A Second Helping of Fried Mice

In Autism, Vaccines, and Fried Mice,  I talked about mothers' distrust of the medical world, and I want to talk a bit more about that.  In The Winter Rose India goes into Whitechapel armed with pictures of smiling broccoli (literally) assuming that parents in poverty don't know that vegetables are good for their children.  I felt a like one of those mothers recently.  I had checked a variety of books on children and sleep out of the library.  Like so many parents, bedtime is not my forte and my son is often up later than I would like and/or putting him to bed does not go as smoothly as I would hope.  So, because reading a book is how I start to solve almost any problem, I read some books.  And one of authors spent the first third of his book telling me how important sleep was.  How my son had to get a good night's sleep if I wanted him to excel in school, to be happy balanced adult, if I wanted to be a good parent.

I was offended and stopped reading.  Of course I know my son needs a good night's sleep, just like I know I do.  If I didn't think he needed sleep, why would I be reading a book on it?  And this writer's assumption of my ignorance reminded me of India and her smiling vegetables.  And made me realize that things maybe haven't progressed so much in the past 100 years.

Granted, this book on sleep was at least a decade old and things have changed a bit.  There seems to be a new trend, particularly in nutrition, that we should trust our child's instincts more and force things less.  But the dynamic between the medical professional and the mother has been ugly for a long time and will not be easily changed.

I am not saying that the public does not need to be educated about changes in scientific thought, both the vaccine/autism debate and the creationism/evolution debate speak the general population's dearth of understanding regarding the philosophy of science.  But the tone and relation between the mothers and medical authorities is way out of whack.  I wonder if some of this goes back to the rise of science and medicine and the way healing was removed from the women's realm and put in the men's.  The reaction to the plague in Ken Follet's World Without End seems an accurate fictionalization of how gender affected the development of medicine and vice versa.

What I think what needs to change is the American Medical Associations', the American Academy of Pediatrics' and even the CDC's approach.  There is frequently the tone that they are the "learned" ones while mothers are ignorant and must be educated.  There is general amnesia about the fact that mothers have been raising children successfully for thousands of years while these groups have only been around for decades.  And that what these groups recommended a generation ago is now not recommended, even frowned upon.  While we have seen a shift in the gender roles within medical practice (at least women are allowed to practice in our culture), there is still the nature/science divide.  Things like homeopathy and co-sleeping are discounted and in the process medical authorities remain didactic instead of understanding and helpful.  And as a result, women will continue to feed their children fried mice, at least figuratively.