As I’ve pointed out before, my wife is fond is of saying that kids are born scientists—curious about the world and how it works—and only begin to lose interest, if they do, when they go to school and get their curiosity bored out of them. My career path, such as it is, confirms this adage: I have been, in some manner or other, a scientist for all my life.
A recent article from the New York Times has given me pause, however, at a number of different levels. The article, written by Pam Belluck, and entitled “Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad,” reviews how various scientists have used their own children as test subjects. There are a number of choice examples in the article, but here are just a couple:
“You need subjects, and they’re hard to get,” said Deborah Linebarger, a developmental psychologist who directs the Children’s Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, who has involved her four children in her studies of the effect of media on children.
“I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable, like I’m invading their privacy,” said Dr. Linebarger, who ultimately set some boundaries. “When you mix being a researcher with being a parent, it can put your kids in an unfair place.”
For the record, I am not picking on Dr. Linebarger here, but the two quotes do get at some of the underlying competing desires of researchers/parents. That said, I’m somewhat amused by the fact that she’s discussing her use of children in studying the effects of media on children in arguably the highest profile print newspaper in the US.
Put simply, I am torn. On the one hand, it is one thing to be a scientist all your life, but it quite another to be a research subject all your life. There are good reasons why getting children as subjects is difficult. It should be difficult. They are kids. That they had the luck/misfortune to be born to scientists who study children shouldn’t make them any more of less able to become subjects in their parent’s research.
On the other hand, I am kicking myself for not thinking about this clearly when my wife and I decided to breed. Imagine all the work I could have gotten done had I only decided to experiment on my children rather than driving them to soccer, baseball, and music lessons. To be fair, however, the wife and I did do a fair amount of experimentation on the kids when they were younger. I’ve mentioned before our liberal use of the Placebo® in the treatment of psychosomatic illness. But sadly, none of this research was of publishable quality and has only served to provide moderately amusing stories in our dotage.
But the truth of the matter is that I know of few parents who don’t experiment on their kids. After all, despite the best efforts of hopeful writers of child rearing books, no one is an expert on raising kids, and no one has the specific expertise necessary to raise a particular child. The best you can hope for is that you and your child will both learn, though mostly trial and error, the optimal ways to communicate your mutual desires. And what is experimentation if not trial and error. The main difference is that most of us don’t have to go through an IRB in order to bring a child home from the hospital.
