Welcome to the Parenting Zone

Parenting Science Gang is a citizen science project run by parents who want to find scientific answers to questions about parenting. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

What do you mean, ‘Citizen Science project’?

Citizen science loosely means that non-scientists are involved in ‘doing some science’. Usually this means that volunteers help collect data, or interpret it (e.g. The Big Garden BirdwatchGalaxy Zoo, or fold.it), in experiments that professional scientists have chosen and designed. These projects are great, as far as they go, but it’s still scientists in the driving seat and members of the public are just helping them achieve their goals.

Parenting Science Gang goes a step further. Members of the Gang come up with the questions they want to answer, they work out how they might answer those questions and design their own experiments. And then they do the experiments. All of those stages are part of doing science.

Our Gang will get advice from professional scientists, and some tests will have to be done in a lab, but it’s us setting the agenda and choosing what questions we want to answer.

Why? Because what better way to get science doing stuff that’s relevant to people? And what better way to engage people with what science really is?

What kind of questions are you going to answer?

We don’t know yet. Isn’t that exciting?

This year there are four groups and each are going to research and discuss the questions they are interested in. They’ll work out what is feasible, and also think about what they most want to know. And then they’ll pick the questions to focus on.

Suggested questions so far include:-

  • Is it important to burb babies? If so, what’s the best method?
  • How important is milk in toddlers’ diets and how much does it matter if this is from cows, goats, sheep, oats or nuts?
  • Why do so many babies twiddle the nipple while breastfeeding? And does it have a biological purpose?
  • Do amber teething necklaces work? (Science says no, but no-one has actually done the experiment)
  • Do different types of sanitary protection change how long your period lasts?

As you can see, it’s a really varied list of questions, involving lots of different areas of parenting and science.

Who we are

This project is the brainchild of Sophia Collins, an award-winning public engagement specialist. She developed I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here! (a highly successful project bringing together scientists and school students) and ran it for many years. In 2013 she had a baby and began using reusable nappies on her son. She was frustrated by the lack of clear, evidence-based information about reusables, so she had the idea of Nappy Science Gang.  This project was a great sucess answering several questions about cloth nappies that no-one had thought to research. You can find out all about it here: https://nappysciencegang.wordpress.com/

The members of the Parenting Science Gang are a group of parents (overwhelmingly mums, it must be said – but feel free to get involved dads, we don’t bite) who have questions they’d like to answer with science. They range from people with one science GCSE, to research scientists with PhDs in various areas. They are united by an interest in what we find out and a willingness to learn and experiment. The volunteers are all members of the four Parenting Science Gang facebook groups:

and were recruited from existing facebook groups.

Our project team is Rebecca Brueton, Sophia Collins, Tamasin Greenough Graham and Amy Strother.

Our evaluators for the project are Sarah West and Karen Bultitude.