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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
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January 14 - January 18, 2025
This economic approach to decision-making doesn’t make a choice for you, only tells you how to structure it.
But it’s also a good idea to remember that most babies who fail this do not have hearing problems; if your baby fails on the first round, it may be a good idea to try again while you’re in the hospital, as a second test can catch some false positives.
if you have the option to send your kid to the nursery for a few hours and you want to do that, you shouldn’t feel shame in doing so. There is no good evidence that you’re disrupting your breastfeeding relationship, if that’s important to you. And if you find yourself falling asleep with your baby in the bed, ask for help.
It’s important to note that the brain injury effects are not on a continuum: at low or moderate concentrations, bilirubin doesn’t cross the blood–brain barrier and is therefore not damaging.
Newborn baths early on are unnecessary, but not damaging. Tub baths are better than sponge baths.
If you have an infant who cries a lot, whether it is true colic by the formal definition or not, the most important thing is to try to take care of yourself.
There are a few things that may improve colic, but since the cause of colic is poorly understood, solutions are hard to develop.
If you’re not sure, ask. If you see a clot and think, Is that the size of a fist, or just a bit smaller?, don’t wait around measuring it for yourself—buzz the nurse.
There are some health benefits to breastfeeding early on, although the evidence supporting them is more limited than is commonly stated.
Despite the warnings, there is simply no evidence that the use of pacifiers impacts breastfeeding success.
no literature suggesting risks to the baby. However, some babies are quite sensitive to caffeine and get very fussy and irritable. If you find this is the case, you may have to avoid it.
The choice of sharing a room, or even sharing a bed, does not seem to affect SIDS risk after three or four months, at least for parents who are nonsmokers.[26] This means there is seemingly no benefit to extending room sharing for so long. There is, however, a real cost: child sleep.
perhaps—perhaps—the data warrants a mild recommendation in favor of very early room sharing. But to tell people they need to keep their child in their room for a year, sacrificing both short- and long-term sleep success with no clear benefit in the process, may not be a good policy.
They hope that if they sit up, they will stay awake, and then they fall asleep by accident. Even with the small risks of bed sharing, you’d be much better off sharing a bed than accidentally co-sleeping on a sofa.
never feed the baby on the couch!!!
Regardless of what childcare you choose, have a plan for who is in charge when the nanny or the kid is sick. Fighting about who will miss work in the moment is a bad idea.
it’s always good to have more data! And yes, it is possible that if we had more data, we would find some small negative effects. The studies we have are not perfect. However, the idea that this uncertainty should lead us to avoid sleep training is flawed. Among other things, you could easily argue the opposite: maybe sleep training is very good for some kids—they really need the uninterrupted sleep—and there is a risk of damaging your child by not sleep training. There isn’t anything in the data that shows this, but there is similarly nothing to show that sleep training is bad. You could also
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There is no evidence of long- or short-term harm to infants; if anything, there may be some evidence of short-term benefits. There is evidence of success for a wide variety of specific methods, and little to distinguish between them. The most important thing is consistency: choose a method you can stick with, and stick with it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (among other sources) has whole websites devoted to transitioning your child to eating solid foods. For the most part, there is little real evidence behind these recommendations.
At best, I would therefore describe these recommendations as logic based rather than evidence based.
If you do want to try baby-led weaning, there is nothing in the evidence to say it is a bad idea. If you do not, there is also nothing compelling to say you should go out and do it.
The reasons to wait until four months are largely physiological—babies really cannot eat before this—but waiting longer than that doesn’t seem like it matters.
Putting this together leads to some general advice: offer your very young child a wide variety of foods, and keep offering them even if the child rejects them at first. As they get a little older, do not freak out if they don’t eat as much as you expect, and keep offering them new and varied foods. If they won’t eat the new foods, don’t replace the foods with something else that they do like or will eat. And don’t use threats or rewards to coerce them to eat.
It is important to introduce some milk-based foods—yogurt, cheese—to avoid allergies. But milk itself is forbidden. The concern is that cow’s milk is not a complete infant nutrition system, and if your infant drinks a lot of milk, it will restrict formula or breast milk intake.
Although the ban on honey has been widely publicized over the past decades, there has been basically no change in the rate of infant botulism.[16] This suggests that other sources of botulism are more important in practice. So maybe this is overkill, but the downsides of avoiding honey are also limited.
Vitamin D supplementation is reasonable, but don’t freak out about missing a day here and there.
iron might also be needed if only breastfed but that's for the doc to say!
You should also invest in a good general pediatrics book, which can do a more complete job at listing childhood symptoms than I can here. There are some references in the back; my favorite is The Portable Pediatrician for Parents by Laura Nathanson.
These studies all focus on TV. But in the current parenting climate, screen time has expanded. Your kid can now watch TV on your phone or iPad, but also play games and apps and do all manner of other things. Is this type of screen time like TV? Should it be limited? We basically have no idea. There are a few studies, but they have pretty big flaws.
Rather than just reading a book, kids benefit from being asked open-ended questions: “Where do you think the bird’s mother is?”
When we start to talk about preschools, people do begin to ask questions like, Is it important that the teachers be trained in early childhood development? Or, going further, does it matter where they trained? We simply do not have reasonable evidence on this.
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?
