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

by Emily Oster

We want our choices to be the right ones. So, after we make the choices, there is a temptation to decide they are the perfect ones. Psychology has a name for this: avoiding cognitive dissonance.

prophylaxis.

For example, when we left the hospital, the doctors told us to keep mittens over Penelope’s hands so she wouldn’t scratch herself. But when my mother came to visit, she told us that if we did this, Penelope would never learn to use her hands.

But you basically cannot defeat a crying baby with hard work. There may be some things that improve this in the moment, but babies cry—some of them cry a lot—and there is often really nothing you can do. In a sense, the most important thing to understand is that you are not alone and that your baby is not broken. How do we know you are not alone? That’s what data is for.

Two treatments have some known success with colic. One is supplementation with a probiotic, which a number of studies have shown to reduce crying. These effects seem to show up only in breastfed infants.9 This treatment isn’t complicated—probiotics are delivered in drops, and Gerber and others make easily accessible over-the-counter versions. With no recognized downsides, probiotics are certainly worth a try.

Please remember, we are two economists married to each other. There is no hope for us. At the two-week visit, we showed our spreadsheet to our pediatrician. She told us to cut it out.

It’s a makeshift ice diaper.

Finally, at one pediatrician visit, we explained our system to Dr. Li, who told us, nicely but firmly, that we should probably cut it out with the checks. When we did this, the sleep training finally took, and Penelope became (and remains) a good sleeper. I wanted to do a better job with sleep training the second time around. With Finn, we would have a plan—one we had written down, agreed upon, and would stick to. We used our family task-management software, Asana, for the planning. Jesse created a task—“Finn Sleep Training”—where we could discuss the details back and forth. (Why, you ask, do you not use email or—heaven forbid—discuss in person? We like to avoid emails for family tasks since they gunk up our work inboxes and it can be hard to find the thread later. And we, at least, have found that it is much more helpful to have discussions like this, especially when opinions abound and emotions run high, in writing rather than in person. It can be easier to fight it out in writing, so everyone gets to quietly think about what they are saying. Then we can save our in-person discussions for such exciting topics as departmental hiring priorities. Fun!)

navel-gazing

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.

paltry