Dad to Experts: You’re Outta Here!

Let me set a scene for you: It’s 9:30 pm. You and your wife are sitting across the kitchen table from each other with your heads in your hands. Somewhere a floor above you, your infant child lies in his crib…screaming at the top of his lungs. You, stare at a pile of books that rests between you and your wife on the table distraught, confused, angry and fearful that a neighbor will hear the wailing and call the Department of Family Services on you. Images of you and your wife being led away from the house in your jammies and hand cuffs flash through your head.

You think to yourself “WTF!” and “why won’t someone…anyone…help us DEFINITIVELY figure out what to do!” Problem is, they all contradict each other. Helpful. Yep, you’re trying to teach your baby to self-sooth and sleep through the night. They may call it “Ferberize” or “Cry it Out” but you’ll just call it the most excruciating experience of your life or simply “@#$*ing hell.”

It’s true that it sucks to have to hear your little one cry but the biggest problem with teaching self-soothing and “sleep restoration” is that every shmuck who has a book about it tells you to do it differently. And in your sleep-deprived state, you bought ‘em all (or several) which just makes the whole situation worse. You went looking for answers and all you ended up with was a 2000+ page pile of contradiction and even more questions!

The more time you log in at this gig we call fatherhood, the more you come to view “expert advice” with skepticism and even though you certainly don’t have more answers then they, you develop the ability to put it in perspective. In caveman terms, you realize that you need to be more of a “gather” of insights than “hunter” for THE answer. That and you need to skin the mastodon yourself…it’s up to you as parents to figure it out.

At Noodad.com, we appreciate widely-distributed insightful fatherly perspective, good humor and most of all, excellent writing. This article, by Tom Scocca, which appeared in today’s Sunday Boston Globe exemplifies all three and does a great job saying what most of us dads at this point in our dad-careers think about the so called “experts.” Reading Tom’s articulate, humor-tinged prose and badly-needed lampooning of “experts” inspired this post…