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

by Emily Oster

Videos may be a dud for baby learning. But there is more evidence that older kids can learn from television.

Researchers in the lab have shown that three- to five-year-old kids are able to learn words from television.

Children under two years old cannot learn much from TV. Children ages three to five can learn from TV, including vocabulary and so on from programs like Sesame Street.

In the field of statistics, there are at least two broad approaches. The first is “frequentist statistics,” which approaches learning about relationships in data using only the data we have. The second is “Bayesian statistics,” which tries to learn about relationships by starting with a prior belief about the truth, and using data to update it.

We basically have no research on this, and it’s not something about which one is likely to have very good intuition. I could believe that this is good—there are many very neat apps for math and reading. I could also believe it is bad—you’re not really learning, you’re just tapping around.

At the two-year-old doctor visit, it is common to be asked whether the child has at least twenty-five words they say regularly. At fewer than this, it may be appropriate to bring in some outside help to figure out what is wrong.

One main takeaway from these graphs is the explosion of language after fourteen or sixteen months. Even the most advanced one-year-old has only a few words. At eight months, virtually no children have any words or gestures.

Perhaps the most interesting of these splits is by gender, given the general impression that boys develop more slowly. This is, indeed, borne out in the data. The graphs on this page separate out boys and girls, and we can see that boys have fewer words at all points in the distribution.

At twenty-four months, for example, the average girl has about fifty more words than the average boy. By thirty months, the most advanced boys and girls are similar, but there are still large differences at other points in the distribution.

In a series of studies, a researcher named Leslie Rescorla recruited a set of thirty-two delayed talkers from twenty-four to thirty-one months old.4 The children in this delayed cohort—nearly all boys—had an average of twenty-one words at this age. Based on the previous graphs, this is way below average. She recruited a sample of comparison children with similar characteristics but with normally developing language skills.

There are some standard tools to determine child vocabulary size, which you can use on your own. There are also some metrics you can compare.

Girls develop language faster than boys, on average, although there is a lot of overlap across genders.

“When you were twenty-two months old, one day you announced you would now be using big-girl underwear. That was a Friday, and on Monday, I brought you back to day care without diapers.”

Studies from the 1960s and ’80s show an average age of twenty-five to twenty-nine months for daytime toilet-training completion, and virtually all the children were trained (for the daytime) by thirty-six months. In contrast, in more recent cohorts only 40 to 60 percent of children have trained by thirty-six months.

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.

The bottom line is that potty training is really all about what works for your family and your kid. The evidence on changes over time suggests it is possible to train your child at a younger age than is now typical, if you want to. To do this, you’ll probably have to adopt a more goal-oriented approach (rather than a child-led approach).

A common piece of advice to address this issue is that the child be given a diaper to poop in, perhaps in the bathroom. Although it may seem like a step backward, the theory is that it lowers the chance of constipation and subsequent negative feedback.

There is not much evidence on this in either direction. In at least one small prospective study, children who were put back in diapers were virtually all trained within three months.

Staying dry at night—or effectively waking up to use the bathroom—is a skill fundamentally different from using the toilet during the day. Manychildren will remain in a pull-up or diaper at night (and maybe when napping) long after they are fully trained during the day.

Doctors generally do not worry about lack of nighttime dryness until a child is six years old.

Older than that, it is common to begin to consider some interventions—waking the child to pee, limiting fluids before bed, a wetting alarm. These continued issues affect perhaps 10 percent of children (mostly boys) and nearly all of them eventually resolve. ELIMINATION

Which goes to show, again, that parenting is much more about the child than about the parent. (Sidenote: Stephen is a wonderful and successful adult who was and remains a great brother.)

When I talked to my friend Jenna about this chapter, she said her mom is still angry about a tantrum Jenna had at age four in a Kmart. My nephew once had one in a crowded mall, leaving his mother to walk away (the correct response) while he screamed on the floor and people stopped to try to help. Of course, once a child is in a tantrum, there is really no helping.

Toddlers act out in other ways as well. They can almost seem like scientists—experimenting with what is possible. If I throw this half-eaten cauliflower stem at Mom and say, “I don’t LIKE IT!,” what will happen? If I hit my sister on the head with a book, will she hit back? Will an adult stop me? The constant experimentation can be exhausting and confusing, especially as your kid gets to the point where it is harder to physically restrain them.

When my kid refuses to clean up a mess and I discipline that behavior, it is not really that I want some help cleaning up. 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.

First, recognize that children are not adults, and you usually cannot improve their behavior with a discussion. If your four-year-old is taking their shirt off in the museum, they will not respond to a reasoned discussion about how you actually do need to wear a shirt in public places. The flip side of this—more important—is that you shouldn’t expect them to respond to adult reasoning. And as a result, you should not get angry the way you would if, say, your spouse was stripping in the museum and didn’t stop after you explained why they shouldn’t.

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.

Toddler discipline is, really, parental discipline. Breathe.

Tantrums happen for all kinds of reasons. Working on disciplining the tantrum behavior is the goal.

If they do not think of a tantrum as a way to react, they can work on developing other, more productive ways to communicate their problems.

Second, these approaches all emphasize setting up a clear system of rewards and punishments and followi...

Finally, there is a strong emphasis on consistency. Whatever the system you use, use it every time.

If the consequence of counting to three is a time-out, then there needs to be a time-out every time, including, say, in the grocery store. (The book suggests you find a corner of the store, or bring a “time-out mat” with you.)

One may not be better than the other, but given the importance of consistency, it is necessary to adopt one approach among everyone who is with your kid, not five similar but not identical approaches.

What about the more annoying things? Like, say, your kid insisting on singing the same song fifty times in a row? Just as an example.

One of the main tenets of these parenting approaches is that discipline should be reserved for actual bad behavior, not for things that are merely annoying.

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.

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.

With a six-month-old, trying to teach them facts about the world—or anything about letters or numbers, for example—will seem obviously fruitless. With a five-year-old, it’s clearly not. At early school age, most kids are able to learn letters, some simple reading, and some math.

There remains debate, which I won’t get into here, about whether there is too much learning in kindergarten and whether we should be more like Finland and not teach kids to read until seven.

These questions are really the purview of developmental psychologists, and there are some excellent books on child brain development that will do a much more comprehensive job than I can do here. What’s Going On in There?, for example, is a great primer on how the baby and toddler brain develops.

We can begin with a well-established fact. There is a large body of literature showing that children whose parents read to them as babies and preschoolers have better performance on reading tests later.1 However, one should have significant concerns that this relationship is just a correlation, not a causal link.

This all suggests that reading to your child is probably a good idea. This literature goes further and actually provides some guidance on how to read to your child. In particular, 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?”

It should be said that some cases of this prodigious early reading are associated with autism. Hyperlexia (as it is called) is a trait of some high-functioning autistic children; children can read but do not understand.

At some point, around the age of two or three, you may start thinking of childcare as closer to “school.”

We can look for some evidence on this by thinking back to the chapter on day care. The evidence I discussed there showed that more time in day care after eighteen months or so was associated with better language and literacy development at slightly later ages.

The three philosophies you will most commonly encounter in your preschool exploration are Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf.

Montessori education focuses on a particular classroom structure and a set of materials. There is an emphasis—even in young children—on the development of fine motor skills. These schools generally refer to children’s play as “works.”

The Waldorf schools have a heavy outdoor component and, similar to Reggio Emilia, are largely play-based. The Waldorf principles focus on learning through play and art, and tend to also have some domestic-activity component (cooking, baking, gardening).