Listen, people, I know none of us here are professional scientists but I'm sure we've all heard before that the plural of anecdote is not data. It doesn't matter if you, your friends, your relatives, or even every single person you know successfully raised happy, healthy children while practicing medicine. The people you know are not a representative sample. n is too small. You cannot draw conclusions about general social trends from just the people in your own life.
It would be a hard argument to make that having children during medical school would be bad for them. Especially in the myriad of individual aspects associated with it.
I disagree; it's an extremely easy argument to make. What's better for babies and young children: to be cared for primarily by their mother, with whom they have an instinctive and biological bond; or to have their care farmed out to family members or even strangers? Answer: the former.
The argument you seem to be making is that there might be some child of a doctor out there somewhere who wound up doing better than some other child of some stay-at-home mom somewhere, so therefore you can't say that children of doctors are worse off. But as I said earlier, the plural of anecdote is not data. n = 1. In mathematics, one counterexample disproves a proposition, but in the messy real world, we
do have to work with general trends and averages, and the existence of a few counterexamples that buck the trend does not disprove the trend.
Tris, you're a med student and have more experience here, but I think that is a little too strong. If doctors are taken from among only monomaniacs, then we have entrusted our health to mentally unhealthy people.
Not exactly monomaniacs, but definitely people whose primary focus is medicine. And that's as it should be: whom do you want operating on you, the guy who can't get enough of the OR or the guy who's thinking more about playing with his garage band this weekend? What I said isn't controversial; it's a common mantra on SDN--one I argued against as a pre-med, but now affirm--that you should only do medicine if there's nothing else in life you want more. Even my own biggest fan,
jl lin, said the same thing upthread.
that being said, i will pass along to you a piece of advice given to me when i was balking last yr about being the oldest student in my class by about 10 yrs and wondering again why i was doing this to my family when i could "settle" for something less in a shorter period of time that was told to me by an ER physician:
"in 5 yrs, you will still be 5 yrs older whether or not you pursue med school. you can spend those 5 yrs pursuing something you love and in the end have a career you enjoy and love....or you can spend those 5 yrs settling for something else and always wondering in the back of your mind 'what if?'."
just replace the 5 yrs (my case) with however long it will be until you graduate med school in your case......
look long and hard at what you want......if you want it then chase the dream.
Perhaps we should start a catalogue of these common lines that aren't really valid, like the one I mentioned earlier: "there's no perfect time to have kids." This "you'll be X years older no matter what" is another. To see why, look at what you yourself said about replacing the 5 with however long. Let's say that it took not 7-11 years to become a doctor (med school + residency and fellowships) but 50 years. 50 years of intense schooling and training. Now, imagine you're a 21 year old college junior trying to decide whether to apply to medical school. "I don't know," you say, "I do think I want to be a doctor, but 50 years is a long time." Someone replies "well, you'll be 50 years older regardless of whether you become a doctor or not, so go for it!" You'd think they were crazy, right? Because there are a
huge number of other things you could do with your life during those 50 years. There might be a lot of other things you'd like to do besides medicine, but spending those 50 years in school and training would cause you to miss out on all of them.
Now, where do you draw the line between 5 and 50? There's no hard and fast line; it's a gradation. People have different priorities. One person may well think 5 years of exclusive devotion to medicine is worth it, but for another person, maybe one who's older and for whom it would be more like 10 years, may have too much else they want to do. I mean, when I was 30, I could have said "in 10 years I could be a doctor, OR I could be a non-doctor who has in the past 10 years learned to play the guitar, gotten a novel published, hiked the Appalachian Trail, etc." And the latter may very well be a better option for me.
Yeah, thats very true. There is also a thought about what is better for your children. People often allude to the "hardships" of med school being a negative influence on your children but what could be more positive than a parent chasing their dreams, following their heart?
Answer (for young children anyway): having their mother be there for them. Besides, what if for you chasing your dreams and following your heart
means giving the priority to your family?
Fast forward 15 years when you look your defiant teenager in the eye and say, "if it wasn't for you, I would be a doctor now. See what I sacrificed for you!"
Or, you could just not say things like that to your kids. But yeah, I guess if you're so obsessed with being a doctor that if you don't do it 15 years from now you'll be seething over not being one, you should go to medical school.