For many years now, my wife and I have noted how so many people believe they’re “experts” in our fields. My wife is a Registered Dietitian, who now has a Master of Public Health from UCLA and is a Certified Lactation Educator. Still, she meets people who don’t trust the established science of nutrition and prefer popular diet books, like Eat Right 4 Your Type (a book assigned specific diets to different blood types). Christina may be an actual expert, but she is corrupted by the nutrition “institution” according to these folks who have read a popular book or two.
I have had similar experiences with biblical studies. I’m sure my fellow bloggers can relate. I used to find myself “tested” on my biblical beliefs often in random places: on a bus, in Barnes and Noble, selling a guitar to a fundamentalist. Back in college and just after graduating, I would try to “assure” people that they don’t have to “test” me by telling them I was a Bible major. This only made things worse. For the people I interacted with, higher education (particularly on the Bible) is not trustworthy. Anything that suggests the average Joe or Jane can’t understand the simple words of the Bible by themselves threatens their basic understanding of the Bible.
We have now transitioned into a new arena of “Everybody’s an expert.” We certainly are not experts at parenthood, by any stretch of the imagination–though my wife’s specialization in pediatric nutrition and her lactation training certainly come in handy. But there appear to be so many parents who think that they are experts on all children and all parenting scenarios simply because they are parents. I can’t understand it, but these parents seem to want to make us feel dumb by asserting their “authority”–not unlike the “friends” of Job.
We have an exceptionally fussy baby. Really. I am not making this up. We have received confirmation from actual medical experts and from our own reading that our baby is more fussy than most other babies. People don’t seem to believe us. They downplay our experience by saying that they dealt with similar moments and then tell us what we need to do. It’s always a simple answer. There is no simple answer for Declan. It is a complicated, messy business.
When people do recognize that Declan is exceptionally fussy, sometimes they suggest that he’s “high-spirited” and “smart.” I don’t mind this comment. It’s a nice consolation prize, though I laughed when a mother we know (who holds a Ph.D.) recently told us: “People used to tell me it meant that our daughter was ‘smart’ because she napped for only 30 min at a time (an hour, maybe)–and only if held. Yeah, well, I didn’t ask for a genius, just a blessed moment to my SELF, a moment of SNOOZING, maybe a bit dumber of an infant. Who cares if they talk at 9 mos or 12?”
If we share our parenting challenges, we are not necessarily looking for “expertise” to help us, but sometimes just need to share our laments with others.
