Science Proves That Your Mother is Better At Watching Your Kids Than You or Is Maybe Just Scared of You

I read an interesting study this week that just came out in Pediatrics magazine . The researchers looked at kids that were 30 to 33 months old and tried to figure out what attributes in the kids’ parents or lifestyles made it more or less likely that the little tots would be injured.

Most shit didn’t matter, even stuff you might think would matter. Income didn’t matter. Child’s birth weight didn’t matter. The mom describing herself as depressed didn’t matter. The mom thinking she was competent didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter. Ethnicity didn’t matter. Of the things they tested, 5 things mattered. Three decreased the chance of injury and two increased it.

The two things that increased the chance of injury are kind of boring. First, if the parents split up, the kid got hurt more. This one’s simple math: one person potentially watching out for you vs. two. The second is whether the kid’s father was identified as the primary caregiver. Then the kid was more than twice as likely to get hurt, which basically proves that when toddlers start trying to climb bookshelves, fathers have an impulse to sit back in their chairs “just to see what happens” that they have to overcome before springing to action. Apaprently this is not an easily overcome impulse. Or dads are pulling a Cosby and trying to prove their incompetence so as to be relieved from their child-watching duties.

The decreases are more interesting, at least to me:

(1) How old your mother was when you were born.

This one is easy. Old moms aren’t gonna play a lot of running around games themselves. And old moms have earned enough money in their lives to have bought actual nice stuff, so they don’t let their kids tear shit up in the house. Kids have to play calmly, thus they don’t get hurt.

(2) Whether you’ve moved recently.

This is the one that shocked the researchers. If you moved recently, kids got hurt a lot less. But this one’s obvious too if you think about it. Anyone that’s ever moved knows that your parents don’t let you do shit, don’t let you even cross the street they’re so overprotective.

(3) Whether your grandparents take care of you during the day

This one is the best, and is news that will surely be greeted smugly by all grandmothers around the globe, who I’m sure suspected this, never doubted it for a second. The conclusion was that if the grandparents take care of the kids during the day, their chances of being hurt are cut in half compared to if someone else or the mother herself watches them. The best part about this one is that it apparently isn’t wisdom or experience that makes grandmothers better at this, because if the mom is out of the picture and the child is watched by the grandmother full-time, the injury rate goes back to normal. So grandmothers aren’t better at parenting. They are only better at watching their grandchildren if the parents are still around.

Best I can tell, this suggests that there are one of two things are going on (or maybe both). First, the grandmothers are keeping the children from being injured simply as a way to look better compared to the mothers. It’s a simple “watch me do this better than you” dynamic, which is really pretty awesome that science has demonstrated this (even though it was obvious, it’s nice to have scientific proof that moms are secretly competing with their mothers and mothers in law despite their denials to the contrary). The other thing that might be going on are grandparents that are deathly afraid of the kid getting hurt and the mother starting to withhold the presence of the grandchildren.

So either your parents think they are better than you at raising kids, or they’re afraid of you. You can decide which one applies to you, but you can’t deny both.