Parenting manuals? No, thanks. I prefer a scientific approach to life as a parent!

As a mother, I am very familiar with the challenges and struggles, the doubts, the worries, the sense of guilt, the anxiety, the extreme tiredness, the lack of time, the feeling of constantly being judged by others, the competition with others as well as with your previous self, the unbalance between your needs and your baby's or your husband's needs, the pressure of expectations from colleagues, friends and family, and from society more in general, the feeling of loneliness. This comes all in the huge and heavy package of motherhood (or parenthood in general). Luckily, the package contains extreme levels of joy and satisfaction, a sense of peace and happiness that I never experienced before as strongly as when we are all together as a family with our daughter. But how to enjoy motherhood with all that I just mentioned? Well, I found my way and I'd be happy to talk more about it in a second, but the first thing I want to say is that you can't avoid it or pretend that it's all magic wonderland. To really enjoy the bright side of being a parent fully, we should find a way to handle the rest of the package. That is different for every one of us. Someone might relate to my struggles and what I mentioned before, someone else might have experienced less difficulties, others more, others just different ones. All I say is that no matter how, parenting can be hard and we all look for ways to sweeten the sour. 

Here comes what I consider the real enemy of a parent: information overload. When you become a parent, you realise how infinite is the amount of information going around about babies, parenting and child development. Not to mention the bombardment of (mostly unsolicited) suggestions or even instructions that parents receive from the first stages of pregnancy, which increases when the baby is born. Everyone has an opinion and knows better than you do. They even know how to fix or improve your baby (especially those who don't have kids). And if you are struggling as a new parent, you might not realise that it does not need "fixing" and instead feel so inadequate not to have known how to "fix it" yourself! There are so many parenting manuals promising the moon, and magical solutions that we are all tempted to try out when we are facing the unknown of parent life, as unexperienced parents, nervous and scared by 9 months of stories from other people. And what do you do if that solution does not work out for you? You find another solution from someone else or from the internet and try that one out, almost immediately, without giving even enough time to work so much we are worried about "fixing problems". And we go on trying out one solutions after the other, many of which do not solve anything, and the only thing you achieve is getting more and more stressed and discouraged, and feeling a terrible parent. All these messages that we get from people around us, from the media, or even from professionals, are so demanding and so conflicting that we don't know what's right or wrong anymore. While we are looking for ways to help us handle our struggles and be the best parents possible, we just end up more stressed, feeling overwhelmed, judged and inadequate! Then, we just have to choose what kind of parent we are going to be, and we mostly do that based on our experience, on what our own parents did, what our grandma suggests, what works so good for our friends, or what some famous people posted on social media. We choose of course based on our environment and what feels more comfortable.

What really helped me there was science. Easy access to knowledge is a great advance of modern times, but also extremely dangerous if you don't know how to navigate through the vast amount of knowledge available! Science helped me navigate the ocean of parenting strategies and advices. And I am not talking about using special drugs or doing complicated things in the lab. I am talking about translating the knowledge acquired by scientists over child development to real life tips and tricks, and about using the scientific method, the true (yet often forgotten) nature of science, as an approach to issues you may come across in your everyday life. That is to observe what is happening around you that you want to change or just know more about, examine the scientific knowledge available on what you just observed, make your own hypothesis about it, test this hypothesis, and just see if it works. Taking these simple steps, you are indeed a scientist making an experiment in your own home about your own life!

I am a neuroscientist and my approach to everyday life is very scientific. It comes then natural for me to feel comfortable with this solution to parental challenges. However, it was not always like this. I forgot science when I became a mum. I approached life as a mother by following advices from people close to me as well as nurses and pediatricians who helped in the first weeks after my daughter's birth. I thought they knew better, but here is the truth: nobody knows your baby, your family, your needs, your feelings and your struggles better than you do! That is why you are the only one who can find the right solution. I am not saying this to put further pressure on you, but to give you confidence that you can do this in your own way, and it is completely fine! I was struggling all the time I followed other people's solutions. Then I reconnected to myself. I am a neuroscientist, so I chose to trust my maternal instinct and empower that with what I know best: scientific knowledge about brain and child development, and a scientific approach to life problems! This helped me and my husband so much that he came once to me and thanked me for the knowledge and experience I shared with him, and encouraged me to share it with others who might also benefit from that. Here I am, then, sharing my experience with you, my scientific knowledge about babies, their brain and development, but also the brain and mental health of parents, and ways in which I use this to navigate life as a parent. I want to share the wonders of science, all the incredible methods we use to gain different kinds of knowledge about the developing brain, and the marvelous things we know about how a person grows up from being a baby to becoming an adult with all the peculiarities and special skills that rarely present themselves in the same way in another person.

I hope this just not adds to the overwhelming amount of information going around. I do not provide quick fix solutions to problems that parents may experience, or instructions for how to be a good parent, or how to raise a perfect child. That makes no sense and you should avoid advice promising that! We are all different and you should just do you! The knowledge and methods I share are not even a guarantee that life will be magic pony-land. Life as a parent is very demanding and can, of course, be difficult. We will always have our struggles. I want to share a way to tackle the issues that we face, to be more confident knowing that when we have an issue, we also have a plan! Is there something wrong? I don't panic! I worry, of course - I am always a mother, with all the anxiety that comes with it! - but I take a deep breath, observe, think about possible causes, try to change something that I think might solve the issue, wait enough to evaluate the possible effect, and see whether that's my solution indeed! I share science-based knowledge and approaches to inform parents about brain and child development, and to support parents in making their own choices about parenting, choices that are tailored to their family. The aim is to help parents disregard nonsensical advice, make them more confident about their choices, less stressed out about meeting impossible societal standards, free to enjoy their new life as parents, more focused on nurturing their relationship with their child and family as people, and not based on rules and behaviours imposed by others!

Hope you enjoy the material I share, that I can transmit a little bit of my love and passion for science and babies, and that this can help you find your own balance the way it did with our family 💕