Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool (The ParentData Book 2)

by Emily Oster

earlier. If you start training at twenty-seven or twenty-eight months, you can expect to be done by around age three, but it will take ten months to do it. If you start at age three, you finish later, but it’ll likely take you less than six months to fully train.

First, there is the parent-led, “endpoint-oriented” potty training.6 These methods are discussed in books like Oh Crap! and 3-Day Potty Training. In general, the idea is to just take the diapers away and start putting your child on the potty a lot. Ideally, within a few days they are (mostly) trained.

On the other side is a more laissez-faire approach, where you more or less let the child lead with the timing that works for them. This approach involves looking for signs of readiness and encouraging toilet use when they become apparent. This is goal oriented in the sense that ultimately you would like the child to use the toilet, but it does not work on the same time frame.

One study of four hundred children, published in 2003, showed that the length of refusal (i.e., the number of months this goes on) decreased with a child-oriented intervention where, among other things, parents made a big deal about the child pooping in the diaper before potty training started.13 This means saying things like, “Wow! You pooped! That’s so great!” and so on. The kids in this treatment were no less likely to have the problem at all, but it lasted for less time.

Actually, it would be faster to clean up myself than get her to do it. It’s more that I’m trying to teach her to be someone who takes responsibility for her messes, both the LEGO messes now and the inevitable non-LEGO messes she’ll create in the future. This is the discipline-as-education philosophy espoused by French parenting (thanks, Bringing Up Bébé!). Discipline is not the same as punishment. Yes, there is a punishment component. But it’s in the service of raising better humans, not punishment for its own sake.

All these interventions emphasize not getting angry. Don’t yell, don’t escalate, and definitely don’t hit. Controlling parental anger is the first central part of the intervention.

For example, do not let your child use a tantrum to get what they want. The evidence that these work is based on a number of randomized controlled trials.

There is some literature that even argues that spanking is associated with very long-term problems—alcohol abuse, suicide attempts—although it is very hard to argue this convincingly, given the other differences in family background for children who were spanked versus those who were not.9 There is correspondingly no evidence that spanking improves behavior. The same goes for other forms of physical punishment, which show evidence of negative impacts and no evidence of positive impacts.

Kids can be frustrating and, yes, they do need to be punished sometimes. But this punishment should be part of a system of discipline that aims to teach them how to be productive adults. Learning that if you misbehave you’ll lose some privileges or some fun experience is something that will serve you well as an adult. Kids do not need to learn that if you misbehave, a stronger person will hit you.

Children who are read to more as young children achieve greater reading success in school. One concern is that these kids just generally get more attention; this is a possibility, but the effects do not extend to math, so the authors argued that it does seem to be something about reading in particular.

In this particular study, the kids were put in the fMRI machine and then were read stories. What the researchers found was that children who were read to more at home showed more brain activation in the areas of the brain thought to be responsible for narrative processing and imagery. Basically, it looked like kids who were read to more were processing the story more effectively.

researchers have found that the benefits are bigger with more interactive reading.6 Rather than just reading a book, kids benefit from being asked open-ended questions: “Where do you think the bird’s mother is?” “Do you think it hurts Pop when the kids hop on him?” “How do you think the Cat in the Hat is feeling now?”

goal. If you doubt the success, the website suggests, just search YouTube for “baby reading,” and you’ll see that it is possible!

Children who learn to read like this—and this is also true of kids who learn to read early within the normal range—are more likely to learn with sight words than phonics.

Before you have children, your relationship is just about the two of you—you have the luxury of sleeping late together, going out, just spending hours talking about what is going on, big and small. Once you have kids, it is almost impossible to replicate this, and if you are not careful, you can find that you virtually never talk about anything other than the children. The relationship falls by the wayside, and not usually for the better. You’re connected through your children, but it can feel like you’ve lost the connection to your partner. Being aware of this may be helpful, and in this chapter I talk about some proposed solutions to the marital-happiness problems.

The first is unequal chore allocation: women tend to do the bulk of household work, even if they also work outside the home. The second is a decline in sex: parents have less sex, and sex makes people happy.

One is the “marriage checkup.”16 The idea behind this is to have an annual meeting—possibly facilitated by some professional—to actually discuss your marriage. What do you feel is working? What isn’t working? Are there particular areas of concern or unhappiness? These checkups seem to result in improvements in intimacy (i.e., sex) and marital satisfaction. This makes sense in the abstract; it’s helpful to talk things through methodically with a neutral third party.

Part of the reason these work may simply be that they force both people in the household to reflect on what the other person is doing for the family. You can see the things you are doing clearly, and you probably have some sense of what your partner does, but you do not always see it so obviously.