Boundaries of Science in an Online Parenting Community

While parents have long turned to experts of various kinds for childrearing advice, books like Emily Oster’s Cribsheet suggest that parents can empower themselves by using research on child development to inform their parenting decisions. The online community r/ScienceBasedParenting was designed as a “safe space” for this kind of parental labor, allowing users to request evidence-based advice without the threat of misinformation that often plagues online parenting spaces. This article analyzes how users of this community establish a boundary between science and nonscience, establishing science as an amorphous shared value rather than a set of processes or standards. The community establishes personal feelings and experiences as unscientific and implicitly inferior to “science,” vaguely construed, and user conversations indicate the struggles associated with this construction. The community’s internal rhetoric illustrates that there are limits to the reassurance and empowerment that evidence-based parenting can provide.