Pants-Free Parenting: Parenting in the Internet age is no easy task

Last spring I hauled my kids to go watch my husband play softball. As my daughter covered herself head to tutu in dirt, and the baby screamed and ate another fistful of grass, I struck up a conversation with a woman. She had the wide-eyed desperate look of a new mother, and she clutched tightly to her newborn, who was bundled with a hat, gloves, fleece pajamas and a blanket. The temperature was 72 degrees. As we chatted, she told me nervously that she used a pacifier even though she'd read on a message board that it would harm her child's teeth. 'He just likes it, you know?”

I nodded. She also confessed to using a bottle for the nighttime feedings. 'I don't want him to have nipple confusion, but I'm so tired.”

I smiled encouragingly. 'It's OK,” I told her. I motioned toward my daughter. 'She had a pacifier until she was almost 3 and he ...” I motioned toward my 10-month old chewing on the grass, 'he still sleeps with me. We all do what we can to survive.”

The new mom frowned. 'You shouldn't let them sleep with you. I read a scientific study that said it's bad.”

'I read a scientific study that said being a judger was bad, too,” was something it took all my restraint not to say.

Studies are the bane of my existence as a mother. There is always a study coming out proving that we have done something wrong. We spaced our kids too close together. Wait, now they are too far apart. Too many mothers give their kids pizza and iPads. Don't co-sleep. Don't cry it out. Two-thirds of parents should be more attentive. Four-fifths of parents should stop paying so much attention. If science hasn't proven that you have screwed up your kids in some way, just wait. It's coming.

Struggling with feelings of inadequacy as a parent is nothing new. But having science kick you when you are down is. Millennial parents are raising children in an age surrounded by information. We can't escape it. Even if you chose to go off Facebook and Twitter, the research still awaits on late-night Googling sessions. Why is my baby crying? She's getting teeth or cancer, answers the Internet. No Internet? Don't worry, other parents will fill you in. They are good at that.

My mom often laments that she would have been a better parent if she had more information available to her. I, like a good daughter, always assure her that she'd be just as insane, if not more so with the help of the Internet and science.

More information is just that, more information. It's not bad. It's not better. It's just a tool - a tool that can be used to help us parent or help us beat up other parents. I think of the philosophic parable that argues the morality of a hammer. A hammer can be used to build a house for a homeless person. It can also be used to murder. But the point is not the hammer, the point is how the hammer is wielded.

As parents, information is our hammer. We can use it to build our lives constructively or beat other parents into submission. But at the end of the day, it's not the science. It's how we use it that is important. And research is quickly evolving. Studies are often incomplete. If you look closely at any given study, you realize that the hammer is really just a stick and a flimsy one at that.

My husband has a maxim that states that any amount of Internet research can prove anything. William Blake wrote it more eloquently: 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.” In the end, as parents, we just have to do what we need to do to survive. The research will catch up, eventually.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.