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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
Read between
January 29 - February 4, 2022
How can you identify a good study? This is a hard question. Some things you can see directly. Certain approaches are better than others—randomized trials, for example, are usually more compelling than other designs. Larger studies tend, on average, to be better.
The authors found that the children who nursed longer had higher IQ scores—about a seven-point difference. But the mothers who breastfed longer were also richer, had more education, and had higher IQ scores themselves. Once the authors adjusted for even a few of these variables, the effects of nursing were much, much smaller.
Learning to read before three is a very rare outcome.
Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a serious intestinal complication that is a risk for very preterm babies (it is most common for babies weighing less than three and a half pounds at birth). Breast milk (from either the mother or a donor) has been shown to lower the risk of this condition in randomized trials.
Here is the truth: you are less likely to get pregnant if you breastfeed, but it is not—I repeat, NOT—a reliable birth control method, especially as your child ages and if you ever go more than a few hours without feeding or pumping.
Yes, if you want to breastfeed, great! But while there are some short-term benefits for your baby, if you don’t want to nurse, or if it doesn’t work out, it’s not a tragedy for your baby, or for you. It is almost certainly worse if you spend a year sitting around feeling bad about not nursing.
can perhaps be accused of armchair psychology here, but these struggles seem particularly acute because trying harder—something that usually breeds success—doesn’t always work with breastfeeding. You worked hard to get a job, or to get into college—even to get pregnant—and you were successful! But introduce a new person, and some further constraints of biology, and all bets are off. You may have to accept, as I did, that no matter how hard you try, you will not make quite enough milk.
Some things will increase the risk of mastitis—including not fully emptying the breasts with each feeding, having an oversupply, or not emptying the breasts frequently enough—but its onset is largely random. It is not hard to diagnose—the symptoms are a red, painful, swollen breast and a high fever—and may need to be treated with antibiotics.
If you pump for thirty minutes three times a day—not unusual at all—these are ninety minutes you could be doing something else.
And I quote: “Children who slept less not only tended to be more socially demanding, bratty, and fussy but they also behaved somewhat like hyperactive children. Later, I will explain how these fatigued, fussy brats are also more likely to become fat kids.”
A surprising aspect of vaccine resistance is that it tends to be stronger in areas with more educated parents. For most health outcomes—heart disease, obesity, diabetes—more educated people tend to be healthier. But in the case of vaccines, the correlation often goes the other way. Areas with more educated parents actually have, on average, lower vaccination rates.2 This suggests it is not necessarily lack of information getting in the way of choosing vaccination.
It is not fair to say there are no risks associated with vaccination at all. Your child may well get a fever. It is also possible (although really quite unlikely) that this fever would lead to a seizure. It is also possible (although, again, very, very unlikely) that they could have an allergic reaction. But it is reasonable to say there is no evidence of significant long-term consequences of vaccines for healthy children.
So let’s start by just framing this not as “What kind of mom will you be?” but “What is the optimal configuration of adult work hours for your household?” Less catchy, yes, but also perhaps more helpful for decision-making.
The bottom line from this literature is that these parental-leave extensions have no effect on child outcomes.1 No effects on children’s test scores in school, on income later in life, or on anything else.
Two parents working full time has a similar effect to one parent working and one not.
One thing that is commonly seen is that children in families where one parent works part time and the other works full time tend to perform best in school—better than children whose parents both work full time or who have one parent who doesn’t work at all.
Second, studies tend to find that the impacts of both parents working are positive (i.e., working is better) for kids from poorer families, and less positive (or even slightly negative) for children from richer families.5
A final note is that some people have argued that if both parents work—and, specifically, if Mom works—their daughters are more likely to work in the long run and show less evidence of sex stereotypes.
First, the calculus changes as your child ages. Your kids will get less expensive as they grow up. School-age kids tend to cost less—public schools are free, for example. And if you stay in the workforce, your income will probably go up (this depends a bit on your job, but is true for many people). This means that even if working doesn’t seem like a good deal for the first few years, it may be a good deal in the long run. Of course, you could stop working when the kids are little and then return to work later—many people do—but this is easier to do in some jobs than others. And there is no
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By acknowledging that the choice to stay home or not is just that—a choice, with factors pushing you in various directions—we can perhaps start to move away from the judgmental attitude that seems to crop up on both sides of the aisle.
Having books in your house and reading them to your kid is going to matter much more than what books they have at day care.
Sleep-training methods consistently improve parental mental health; this includes less depression, higher marital satisfaction, and lower parenting stress.
“Cry it out” methods are effective at encouraging nighttime sleep. There is evidence that using these methods improves outcomes for parents, including less depression and better general mental health.
The most important thing is consistency: choose a method you can stick with, and stick with it.
Early exposure to peanuts is now the normal recommendation, especially for children at risk for an allergy. The hope is that with wider dissemination and use of these updated recommendations, there will be fewer life-threatening peanut allergies.
The delay between food introductions is to see if any food causes an allergy. If you feed your kid strawberries and eggs and tomatoes and wheat all in a single day and they have an allergic reaction, it will be hard to know what the source is.
Advocates of baby-led weaning do not typically focus on the lazy-parenting benefits. Instead, they cite benefits to your child: infants learn to regulate the amount of food they eat, leading to less incidence of overweight or obesity; they show acceptance of a wide variety of foods; and you have better family mealtime experiences.
These studies also show that food refusals are more common in families where parents offer an alternative. That is, if your kid doesn’t eat broccoli and then you offer him chicken nuggets instead, he may learn that this is always the reward for not eating new foods. This problem is exacerbated by parents’ concern that their child isn’t eating enough (which, see above, is probably not true).
On the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that exposure to TV—and, more generally, to any screens—is associated with lower cognitive development. Researchers have shown that kids who watch more TV are less healthy and have lower test scores.
The study’s authors noted that the most significant predictor of both how many words the children spoke and how fast their vocabularies grew was whether their parents read them books.
Their results suggest that watching more TV under the age of three lowers test scores; not a huge amount, but by the equivalent of a couple of IQ points. If you are looking in this data for evidence that TV is bad, which is what the authors argue, high watching before age three seems to be an issue.
The main and probably only benefit to potty training a child earlier is that you do not have to change as many diapers. The main reason to wait is that the earlier you start, the longer it takes to complete.
First, recognize that children are not adults, and you usually cannot improve their behavior with a discussion.
The flip side of this—more important—is that you shouldn’t expect them to respond to adult reasoning.
An extension of this your-child-is-not-an-adult observation is that it is probably not a good use of your time to think a lot about why your small child is having a tantrum. There is a strong temptation to try to figure out what exactly is the issue—to try to get them to articulate the precise problems they are having. Even if they can talk, this is likely to be fruitless, since they probably do not know. 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,
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Whatever the system you use, use it every time.
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.
Tennessee sends kids a book each month (thanks to an effort spearheaded by Dolly Parton).
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
Their basic insight was that if you have only one child, you read more to them (since you have more time). The longer you wait to have a second child, the more extra reading time the first child gets.
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.
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.
Reggio Emilia–inspired schools put more emphasis on play, with typically little formal letter or number exposure at preschool ages. (One Reggio Emilia–style preschool I visited told me they explicitly do not spend any time on letters for the three- and four-year-old class, and wouldn’t even display letter cards around the room.
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).
Introducing a child into your life will, similarly, lead to some increase in tension for most people. Less charitably, people will tell you that children will “ruin your marriage.”
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.
Indeed, we certainly see a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that women resent the idea of a “second shift,” and that it crowds out leisure time, which men end up with more of.
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.
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. Being present and happy with your kids is more important than, say, worrying about bees. At the end, let’s raise a glass to using data where it’s useful, to making the right decisions for our families, to doing our best, and—sometimes—to just trying not to think about it.
