#PubScience #scimom edition

Yesterday I stayed up past my normal bedtime to participate in #PubScience organized by @DrIsis and @MTomasson. We talked about being a parent in science, and you can watch the episode here and below (do it! It’s a lot of fun and an interesting conversation).

I had to leave about an hour in because BlueEyes woke up and needed some comforting. And then I fell asleep, because as I said: this was past my tired-pregnant-self bedtime. Talking about being a scimom.

What I wanted to clarify is that when I talked about one of the parents stepping back to make sure the other can excel in their job, both Dr. Isis and Dr. Rubidium said that that was a very privileged situation being able to take a step back. I agree that parents that have to work double shifts at McDonalds in order to be able to support their families probably have a way harder time than us academics do. But while there are usually people that have a harder time than others in whichever aspect of their life, for me this is still an issue in my life and therefore worth discussing. I see people around me where one of the parents decide to take a step back, taking a job where you are not expected to travel to meetings, you are not expected to work late nights to make deadlines and you don’t need to be in the lab on the weekend because your experiments require that. By doing this, they give up the dream of becoming a tenure track scientist. Even though I think doing this will increase the chances for my husband (and the other way around) neither of us is ready to do this.

Also, while we were discussing all this, on twitter some people were wondering if, after hearing all this, they were ever going to want to have babies. I have this to say about that (and I may have said this before on my blog or anywhere else): For me, having a baby was an entirely different desire than wanting to be a kick-ass scientist (preferable in academia). I know I would be very sad if I would be forced to leave science because I cannot work hard enough/publish enough papers/get enough grants, but I would have been heartbroken if I didn’t have kids. So for me it’s not kids or career, it’s kids and then see how far I can get in my career.

Should I stay or should I go? –part 2

Part 1 can be found here and is about staying in Europe or going for a post-doc abroad. This one is about staying in academia or not. I’m clearly not the only one pondering this.

I know I’ve written about this before, but the question whether I am going to stay in academia or not came on the foreground a bit more after having received a faculty position rejection (from the homecountry) and a fellowship rejection. I guess it is safe to guestimate that given my CV and ideas I usually rank in the top 15-20% when applying for grants and fellowships (yup, the n is large enough to guestimate this from). Given the current funding situation, this might not be enough. And FYI, the homecountry (to which we are sure we will return now that husband has a position there) does not have the equivalent of SLACs, so the option to do research there does not exist. 

I gave myself another year(ish) to get a position and/or grants and if that doesn’t work, I’m going to look for something else. But is that a good strategy or should I start looking now and determine what skills I need and get those skills now? And won’t that take away from the energy that I need to spend on getting myself from the top 15-20% to the top 10 or whatever % that is necessary to succeed? How do other people do this? Can you do both at the same time? Please enlighten me, people who have successfully transitioned out of academia AND people who have looked outside academia but decided to stay (and anyone else with something useful to say)!

What's in my desk?

Obviously I'm procrastinating finishing my to-do list, so here's my contribution to Dr. Isis' What's in your Desk-Meme.

1. Three nutmegs. A colleague gave them over a year ago, but what are you going to do with whole nutmegs..?

2. A converter-thing to plug my apple laptop into the projector. Sadly said apple laptop died 3 years ago.

3. An empty vial of Alexa Fluor 568.

4. A laser pointer that is also a pen. However, the laser pointer doesn't work anymore.

5. A whole bunch of invitations to my thesis defense and party, they were supposed to go into my thesis booklet, but I forgot.

6. A whole bunch of cage cards from experimental animals that are no longer with us.

7. Empty (and used for crackers) ziplock bags. You never know when they might come in handy.

Outside the picture but in my drawer (because it's kind of awkward to take a picture of your drawer with 3 other people in your office: Shea lip butter from The Body Shop and an empty tiny vial of Ralph Lauren Glamorous.

On gender-neutral toys

I really appreciate that my parents tried to raise us with gender-neutral toys. My brother and I both had a doll (my brother had a boy-doll and I had a girl-doll, with actual boy and girl bodyparts!), we both had legos and we both had musical instruments. Of course this only worked up to a certain level, because my brother liked building things with legos, while I like playing stories with the lego-people (and later I really liked my barbies). But I’m really grateful for the message that you can do the same thing whether you are a boy or a girl.

I think this was easier back in the 80s, judging from the type of legos adds you had then.

I think this add is awesome, it instantly makes me want to play with legos!

Nowadays, in some stores it seems that gender-neutral toys are non-existent in some stores (check out  this post from Dr. Isis for example). However, we do try to give BlueEyes the notion that you can play with whatever you want. He has a doll, pans to cook with (but in our house cooking is not necessary a women’s job anyway), and trains and cars. 

But last weekend we went to get him a helmet for on his balance bike. At target they only have helmets with Disney princesses or with cars. And BlueEyes liked the pink one with Disney princesses the most. On the one hand I wanted him to be free to choose which one he wanted, but I was also a bit afraid about the judgment from the older kids in our neighborhood and the kids at his daycare. So in the end I persuaded him into thinking that the blue helmet with a car on it was more comfortable than the pink one with the Disney princesses and he happily agreed. But I still feel a bit bad about forcing him into society’s strait-jacket of gender-marketed toys. Where are the gender-neutral helmets, Target??!

A little person

Last weekend, Dr. BrownEyes was away to a conference and BlueEyes and I were home by ourselves. When he was very little, those days would feel kinda lonely: being by yourself with a little baby to me feels like being by myself, but constantly being busy taking care of the little baby. You’re talking to the baby, but the baby doesn’t respond, or even acknowledges that you say something.

Now that BlueEyes just turned two, those days when it’s just us feel so much different. By now he’s a little person, and even though he hasn’t mastered the art of putting two words together to form a sentence, he can talk about many things (and even joke!) just using one word at the time. So now those days feel like I’m hanging out with someone: going to the park or the pool or just the grocery store, while chatting about the things around us. And that little person is not just someone; he’s one of my favorite people in the world. It’s crazy and weird how fast that has changed.

The (faulty) neuroscience behind attachment parenting

Yesterday, I read this article on Slate.com about how sleep training (‘crying it out’) may not be as dangerous as some groups may lead you to believe it is. Frequent readers of this blog may know that I haven’t tried much sleep training with BlueEyes, despite his frequent night waking, because I felt more comfortable soothing or nursing him to sleep. And then it is nice to read in books like Sue Gerhardts “Why love matters: how affection shapes a baby’s brain” that this is the ‘right’ thing to do, because neuroscience tells us so. 

But wait a minute, I’m a neuroscientist myself (and one who is very interested in the developing brain too). So why do I read a book about the brain without questioning where those references come from, whether the author interprets them correctly and whether she leaves out any relevant research? Let’s say I was sleep deprived for a while and of course it is nice to hear that the strategy that you’re choosing is the right one, because neuroscience tells us so. But both the Slate article and this paper by Bruce Maxwell (that DrSpouse tweeted to me) show that if you take a good look at the real neuroscience behind these parenting advices, the science is really not that solid. The rationale behind responsive parenting or attachment parenting is that responding adequately to your baby’s needs keeps their cortisol levels low, which is important because high cortisol levels will have lasting, negative effects on the developing brain. However, as I said before, the science is not that solid: evidence either comes from children that are neglected heavily (such as orphans in third world countries), or from animal studies where young monkeys or rats are isolated from their mothers. These results are then extrapolated to children whose parents let them cry it out. Or, as the slate piece points out, the results come from a study that looks at cortisol levels during hospital-based sleep training, but this study really fails to include any relevant control group. However people abuse this study by drawing conclusions that are really not warranted by the data.

So do I still ‘believe’ in my parenting strategy? Yes, because it’s honestly just parenting for lazy people, and it’s a style that seems to work for us. However, I will never again think that I am doing it this way because of the neuroscience evidence, because that is really too thin to draw such firm conclusions. We need to do much better controlled studies, or longitudinal studies looking at the outcomes of different parenting strategies to say things like this. And I think it is sad and even unethical that writers of parenting books and articles take such a one-sided view and lead lay parents to believe that there is scientific evidence for any parenting strategy.