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

by Emily Oster

All three methods have a structured day, so kids know what to expect when. They all acknowledge that young kids benefit from being able to explore in a safe environment and to self-direct, to some extent, in what they do.

If your kid struggles to sit still, they may find an environment focused on fine motor skills to be taxing; on the other hand, it may be good for them.

But it cannot escape our notice that when a baby arrives it also magically creates parents.

Being a good parent isn’t about completely subsuming your entire personhood into your children. In fact, if you let your kids rule, it can have the opposite effect.

You and your partner both want the best thing for your child—indeed, you want this more than anything you’ve ever wanted. However, most of the time you have no idea what this “best thing” is. And you’ll sometimes disagree, either due to deep underlying differences or simply because you both have no idea and your best guesses differ.

And it’s notable that women do more housework even if they also make more money. When women bring in more than 90 percent of the household income, they still do almost as much housework as the men in these households.

Although it is not a solution, it is worth noting that couples who are happier in their marriage before kids and who planned their pregnancies tend to have smaller declines and faster rebounds in their happiness.

The second thing to say is that, as is a common refrain in this book, sleep is a key issue.15 Drops in marital satisfaction are higher in couples with kids who sleep less. Lack of parental sleep contributes to depression (in both parents) and correspondingly to less-happy marriages. You need sleep to function, and sleep deprivation affects your mood. If you are cranky, you’re cranky with your partner. If they are also tired, they are also cranky. Cranky, cranky, sad, angry.

The results from the best of these papers generally show that the number of children plays a relatively little role in determining schooling or IQ.2 They do find that birth order matters. Later-born children tend to do (slightly) worse on IQ tests and get less schooling than their earlier-born siblings. This may be due to parents having less time and resources to devote to them. But it’s not the number of children that drives the association. A firstborn child with two siblings seems to do the same as a firstborn child with one.

A second question people (typically not economists) often ask is whether there is some downside to having an only child—will they be socially awkward? Again, this is hard to study, given the differences across families. To the extent that we have evidence, this concern seems unfounded. One review article, which summarizes 140 studies on this broad question, found some evidence of more “academic motivation” among only children, but no differences in personality traits like extroversion.4 Even this fact about academic motivation may be more about birth order—firstborn children score higher on this regardless of whether they have siblings—than about being an only child.

But there is a flip side. Little kids mean mostly little problems. As your kid gets bigger, the number of things you worry about goes down, but they get more important. Is my kid achieving academically? Are they fitting in socially? Most important, are they happy?

We have to grope forward, ideally listening to our kids to see what works for them—if it takes a four-hour conversation, we’ll clear our schedules.

We keep at it, in part because the rewards are correspondingly so much bigger. Seeing your kid do well at something they love, seeing them excited about learning something new, watching them work through a challenge—there is nothing better.

So, yes, it makes sense to take parenting seriously, and to want to make the best choices for your kid and the best choices for you. But there will be many times that you need to just trust that if you’re doing your best, that’s all you can do.