The Science Baby

Hello parents, and everyone else! I hope 2025 is treating you well. I wonder if I can ask a favour…?

One of the things that I have come to realise as a parent, and as someone who has tried to find and share baby science and evidence-based parenting advice, is that there isn’t actually a whole lot out there! And what there is, is flawed in many ways. Many of the times I’ll say ‘studies show…’, or ‘scientists think…’, there might actually only be one study, from 30 years ago, that had a sample size of 42 white middle-class first time mothers from Norway. I’m sure you can see how the results of that study should be taken with a pinch or a handful of salt!

There are a couple of reasons why reproductive research is so bad. One is down to ethics. Good experimental research relies on repeatable results, clean comparisons, and complete ignorance on the part of the subjects and the testers. But when you’re talking about the health and well-being of newborn babies and vulnerable mothers, it’s not fair or ethical to deprive some of a potentially life-saving drug or treatment, just to see if it really was life-saving. There are ways to get around this, with different research approaches that use purely observational data, but these can be easily flawed by small sample sizes, or weirdly specific or skewed demographics.

The other reason for bad research is the way our society has worked for generations. Consistently, research into women’s issues has lagged behind that of men, because it’s often the men doing the researching, and their interests and expertise lies in only those issues that affect them. As a result, women – and especially the mothers who traditionally bear the unspoken load of childbearing and rearing – are often left behind in the world of well-funded, rigorous testing. I’ll get off my soapbox now.

I want to do my part to address the holes in our knowledge.

Now, I’m not suggesting that I’m going to be able to do a better job that well-funded, clinical institutions with rigorous double blind research studies. But I am a real research scientist who just happens to have the ears of a couple hundred thousand parents on social media, so I’m hoping to use my powers for good: to collect as much relevant data as possible, from a wide variety of demographics, to find out what’s really going on among new parents these days.

This is just the first year of this data gathering experiment. Since big sample sizes are the holy grail of good research, my goal is gather at least 1000 responses this year (although I’d love 1,000,000 too!). I’ll analyse the data, make some fancy charts, and share everything I’ve found. In future years, there’ll be even more data, and we can track the changes through time as well.

(Oh, and if you’re a research institution or funding body reading this and want to help me make this a full-time effort, you know what to do! 😉)

Who is the survey for?

The survey takes the form of a simple, largely check box questionnaire. It should take no more than 15 minutes to complete. Perfect for when you’re nap-trapped or in the middle of a nighttime nursing session.

I’m happy to hear from:

• Mothers, fathers, people of any gender identity
• People who are straight, gay, or bisexual
• Single parents as well as couples
• People from the UK, US, Europe, Australia, or anywhere else in the world
• People of any race or identity
• People who have experienced pregnancy loss or miscarriage
• People who chose to terminate their pregnancy for medical reasons
• People who experienced a stillbirth or neonatal death
• Preemie parents and NICU parents
• …basically everyone!

I will say that I’m primarly looking for first-hand experiences of childbearing, from conception through to the perinatal period, so the majority of the questions are most relevant to the birthing parent, but if you are not the birthing parent, or if your pregnancy ended in loss or termination, I still want to hear from you! Just answer the questions that are relevant to you.

So, without further ado…

Fill out the questionnaire now!