Surveys about parenting? Totally useless no question

How confident is anyone about their parenting skills? According to a recent study, all parenting styles produce miserable grown-ups -- doesn't that make you want to laugh? Especially as this one's a fake.

How bizarre. Would you see through such a report? According to a later article in none other than Time, some parents fell for it. 

I can well believe it. The 'research' may have been cited in the infamous spoof site, The Onion, but when it comes to parenting surveys, it seems we are ready to believe anything -- or to read any old nonsense masquerading as serious research to publicise a company behind it.

I find it a little baffling and sometimes funny, entertaining even. But I also worry how seriously people take this information. At a time when, as ever,  parents are just doing the best they can, in ever tougher circumstances, we really don't need these surveys to make us feel worse. 

Just yesterday we were told that hygiene is the most important aspect of parenting.  And in a case of stating the ever so obvious, we were informed that parents are cutting back. 

Another very recent poll, this time from Daybreak and Netmums, perhaps takes the biscuit in the 'tell us something we don't know' stakes. Apparently 85 per cent of mums 'feel pressured by other mums.' 

I nearly fell off my chair when I read that one, let me tell you - who would have thought it? I know, I know you can hardly believe such a thing could be true.

Some 85 per cent of mothers reported other mothers could be "cliquey" and judgmental, four out of five were sleep deprived and 76 per cent felt guilty about how much time they spend with their children.

Seriously, can anyone explain why we need a poll in the name of PR for its organisers to publicise this fact? I don't get it. It's not offering any solution, just providing glib soundbites to gain column inches.

Everywhere you look, in magazines, newspapers, on TV and online, there's at least five or so polls a day, isn't there? Why do we fall for them?

And of course they can prove anything you want them to - especially when your sample of people polled adds up to all of 1,000 people. How do we even know they have been asked? How do we know these people aren't just mates of the PR team or the company hiring them, doing their own sure-fire-hit publicity with such a survey?

Nobody has ever asked me! If they did I'd tell them I didn't think that mums were any more cliquey than any other section of society, thanks very much.

Since having my girls I've lost count of the number of polls telling me how I should be bringing them up. A perennial fascination of researchers seems to be whether working mums are responsible for all the world's ills, or just half of them. Even in this most contentious of discussions, you just can't win - stay at home with your children and along come the experts to warn they may lack independence or go out to work while the researchers will tell you (wait for it) you may miss them. 

The very wise and wonderful Ready for Ten writer Joanne Mallon is also an author and coach and in her new book on parenting, she says: "There are many surveys and studies done into how and why small children behave as they do. Take everything you read of this ilk with a very, very large pinch of salt.

"For whatever a survey says, there will very likely be another survey along in a few months to say the exact opposite. As one claims that nursery turns children into little hooligans, so another trumpets that nurseries are great for confidence building. Meanwhile, if you’re the parent who has no choice but to use a nursery, it’s easy not to know which way to turn, apart from straight towards Guilt City."

Joanne, whose new book is Toddlers: An instruction manual, due out at the end of this month, adds: "As a journalist I can see how many surveys are basically just about promoting something, and are angled to produce a particular response which the company paying for the survey wants. Of course you do get some academic surveys which are more rigorous, but if you wait long enough then even those will be contradicted at some point."

Thanks Joanne. This morning I have done a survey of my own. I asked five (hey, nearly as many as a cosmetics advert) mums what they thought of parenting surveys. The result? One-hundred per cent piffle of course.