Writing up your children
May. 10th, 2008 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylAre there ethical problems with writing up the early lives of your children? I ask because today's Graun contains a feature on psychologist Charles Fernyhough's project to detail the first few years of his daughter's life. I also ask because, when we were talking about childhood language learning over Easter, I realised just how close I'd come to be written up by mater — I think I only escaped because she moved from academia to teaching full-time after my sister was born.
The revelation occurred after we got to talking about the connections between language and thought over lunch. Initially we discussed Pinker's strong claim about the falsity of Sapir-Whorf and then got to discussing some of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about language acquisition, at which point mater said, "Oh, if you're really interested in language, you really want to read James Britton — C's dad. He used her to provide evidence for a lot of his ideas. Actually, you were a lot like that. I think I've still got all your conversation books somewhere." She then disappeared for a minutes or two — suggesting, rather disturbingly, that she had them all immediately to hand — reappeared with a whole set of notebooks covered some very 1970s groovy patterns and spent the next half hour recounting some classics from the archive. She then said, rather casually, "You were such a wonderful subject. It's a pity I didn't do more with all this..."
So while I think I'm now safe, I was sudden aware that, had things gone only slightly differently, I could have been subject to the excruciating embarrassment of having had all my precocious childhood utterances written up and published for all the world, or at least some minimal portion of academia, to see.
The revelation occurred after we got to talking about the connections between language and thought over lunch. Initially we discussed Pinker's strong claim about the falsity of Sapir-Whorf and then got to discussing some of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about language acquisition, at which point mater said, "Oh, if you're really interested in language, you really want to read James Britton — C's dad. He used her to provide evidence for a lot of his ideas. Actually, you were a lot like that. I think I've still got all your conversation books somewhere." She then disappeared for a minutes or two — suggesting, rather disturbingly, that she had them all immediately to hand — reappeared with a whole set of notebooks covered some very 1970s groovy patterns and spent the next half hour recounting some classics from the archive. She then said, rather casually, "You were such a wonderful subject. It's a pity I didn't do more with all this..."
So while I think I'm now safe, I was sudden aware that, had things gone only slightly differently, I could have been subject to the excruciating embarrassment of having had all my precocious childhood utterances written up and published for all the world, or at least some minimal portion of academia, to see.
