Friday, September 16, 2005
Lowered expectations
NYT discusses What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I actually have a nickname for that nobody else has mentioned: Don't Expect to Find an Existing OCLC Record, because I remember trying to copy-catalog the monster and finding that it had so many different printings and assorted oddities that finding an accurate record for whichever copy you were holding in your hand was always next to impossible.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. The Times article talks about how people don't like the book because it paints such a dire picture of pregnancy, and tells you everything that could possibly go wrong, even if there's only a 2% chance or something. Well, it's true that it goes into great detail about things that most women will never experience. And it's true that the diet probably seems restrictive to some (it didn't to me, but then, I'd been on Weight Watchers for a couple of years when I got pregnant, so it just seemed like a normal, healthy diet--and I think eating a basically healthy diet in the first place has helped me not get a lot of cravings and things, but maybe I'm just lucky).
This is where critical reading comes in. There are a lot of books, particularly pregnancy and parenting books, that I don't agree with or that I find hard to believe; anything by James Dobson, for one. And a lot of the natural childbirth books are scarier than anything in the What to Expect series; I remember one that had graphic photos of the birth process that freaked me out so much I thought about calling my doctor right then to schedule a c-section. But I'm not going to complain to the authors, the publishers, and the New York Times about them; I'm just not going to pay as much attention to them as I do to the ones I think are better suited to my information needs.
The thing about What to Expect (or any other book) is that you can take what you want and leave the rest. I haven't read anything that indicates that it's actually giving inaccurate information; just that people think it gives them too MUCH information. So does reality TV. Deal with it.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. The Times article talks about how people don't like the book because it paints such a dire picture of pregnancy, and tells you everything that could possibly go wrong, even if there's only a 2% chance or something. Well, it's true that it goes into great detail about things that most women will never experience. And it's true that the diet probably seems restrictive to some (it didn't to me, but then, I'd been on Weight Watchers for a couple of years when I got pregnant, so it just seemed like a normal, healthy diet--and I think eating a basically healthy diet in the first place has helped me not get a lot of cravings and things, but maybe I'm just lucky).
This is where critical reading comes in. There are a lot of books, particularly pregnancy and parenting books, that I don't agree with or that I find hard to believe; anything by James Dobson, for one. And a lot of the natural childbirth books are scarier than anything in the What to Expect series; I remember one that had graphic photos of the birth process that freaked me out so much I thought about calling my doctor right then to schedule a c-section. But I'm not going to complain to the authors, the publishers, and the New York Times about them; I'm just not going to pay as much attention to them as I do to the ones I think are better suited to my information needs.
The thing about What to Expect (or any other book) is that you can take what you want and leave the rest. I haven't read anything that indicates that it's actually giving inaccurate information; just that people think it gives them too MUCH information. So does reality TV. Deal with it.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 12:08 PM 
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