If you have a baby, you probably also have an information management problem that you need to solve. Family and friends, your pediatrician, your nanny, Google, and social media are sources of infinite information a first-time parent can access today. The sheer volume of the information out there, plus the stress and nervousness one sometimes feels with a newborn, can be overwhelming. But how do you take advantage of that available information and make sure you do not drown in it?

What I think is most important to understand is that not all the information out there is the same. In other words, there are different types of information, mainly determined by the source from where they come from. If you are able to distinguish what type of information you need to deal with in any given circumstance, it all becomes less overwhelming and more manageable. To me, there are three types of information, numbered in order of precedence:

1. Medical advice,
2. Scientific information, and 
3. Anecdotal recommendations.

The first type of information, medical advice, is probably the easiest to identify. As you can imagine, it comes from a medical professional exercising their profession. For example, in our case, the source of this type of information is our pediatrician during our monthly appointments or during our ad-hoc phone calls. It’s important to highlight the ‘exercising its profession’ part, as you will get this type of information only if that is the case. 

What we mean by exercising its profession is that a doctor is giving you medical advice only when they examine your baby and, through the filter that is their education, training, and experience, they recommend to you a course of action, possibly including medication or recommendations on how to handle something. Their recommended course of action, their advice, might be good or bad, but it is advice nonetheless. It is medicine applied to the concrete case, much like a judge applies the law when giving a sentence or an engineer applies engineering principles when building a bridge. 

It is important to note that medical professionals do not always provide medical advice. For example, if you see a doctor on Instagram, he is most likely giving you another type of information, but it is not medical advice. They need to analyze your specific case to be able to do so. This is the scarcest type of information, even if it is available on demand. You will only get it once you reach out to your doctor.

The second type of information is what I call scientific information. You will find this type in the available literature about pregnancy and babies. There are a lot of sources out there for this type of information, like books and videos. For example, the one we use is What to Expect. The differentiating factor for this type of information is that it is compiled scientifically but not applied to a specific case, like medical advice. In a way, it is medical advice without the specificity of it being given to you considering your circumstances.

We call this type of information scientific because it is compiled in a methodical and organized way, following universally accepted standards that others can check and contrast. Of course, the source that will reach you, a simple mortal without any technical knowledge, will be simplified for the benefit of a non-expert audience. In that sense, there’s the risk that a possible source of this type of information is not trustworthy because they have misrepresented the technical information they claim to make available to the masses. Considering this risk, we chose What to Expect, which is widely popular and was also used by my mother-in-law when my wife was born.

The last type of information is the anecdotal recommendation, which is the bulk of the information that you will find out there. It is someone who has gone through parenthood before and gives you recommendations according to their experience. Most of what is out there on social media and what the so-called “thought leaders” offer in the form of courses and such is anecdotal recommendations. As time goes by and these thought leaders gain more experience and data, they might get closer to a form of scientific information, but until they produce it in a way that others can contrast it, it will continue to be anecdotal. This blog, for example, is full of anecdotal recommendations.

By understanding the types of information out there and what makes them different from one another, you will be able to use them without being overwhelmed. The key to this is to know what can be accomplished with each type of information. Below, you will find how my wife and I have been using them so you can have an idea of how you could do it yourself.

As mentioned above, the three types of information to us have an order of precedence. In other words, when we have a type of information, the ones below it in the order of precedence are excluded. As you can see above, medical advice is the highest in the order. This means that nothing we can find in What to Expect or other sources of scientific information can convince us to do something different from what our pediatrician told us to do in a given case. Much less, of course, will someone’s recommendation lead us to not follow our pediatrician’s advice.

The same happens with scientific information. What we see in What to Expect’s book about the first year will almost always trump what someone might tell us they did with their kid during that same period. Here, we are, of course, more open to considering anecdotal recommendations over what the book says, but it has to be someone that we really trust and that we know has considerable experience. For example, my wife’s grandmothers, who are, luckily for us, still alive and each of them had more than four children.

The order of precedence is important to us because it matches what each type of information can help you achieve, meaning with the appropriate issue. Medical advice is for medical issues or problems, the scientific information helps us have a benchmark against which to compare whatever is happening to us, and the anecdotal recommendations help us adapt better to our baby’s needs as she grows and to avoid pitfalls others had to suffer through in developing habits and such. Having this structured approach can help you in at least two ways.

First, it will allow you to develop a sense of what sources will be helpful for any given issue you might face. Of course, you will also need time and experience to develop that sense, but the theoretical differentiation from the beginning already takes you a long way. Whenever you are facing a given situation, you will know where to turn to get what you need, which reduces the potentially helpful information pool significantly and will thus prevent the sense of feeling overwhelmed. Second, it will allow you to have a sense of resolve to stick to what you have decided to listen to from what you deemed to be the appropriate type of information, until new information from that same type or one above it in the precedence order becomes available.

The second reason above is especially important, as mixing together types of information with the wrong issue will create problems for you. For example, if your baby has a condition that your pediatrician recommended you treat in a specific way, you will not stop the treatment because your parents or a friend once had a kid with the same condition, and they cured them in a different way. That would be an example of confusing an anecdotal recommendation with medical advice. Or you are not going to suffer too much if your friend’s baby reaches a developmental milestone before your baby, even if yours is still within the age range in which babies reach that milestone. That would be an example of mixing anecdotal recommendations with scientific information.

Slowly but steadily, you will feel more and more comfortable picking where to go for information, and you will become more and more adept at correcting your course whenever what you initially decided to do proves to be ineffective. What is important is to realize that not all the information out there can always help you and that you have clear criteria from the beginning to be able to make those judgments. The rest will come with time.