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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
First, parenting matters. Much more consistent than any of the associations in these studies is the association between parenting and child outcomes.
Regardless of what childcare you choose, have a plan for who is in charge when the nanny or the kid is sick.
But it is also not comparable to the experience of most infants whose parents use “cry it out” methods.
named “Extinction” method—the form of “cry it out” in which you leave and do not return—of which seventeen showed improvements in sleep.
where you come in to check on the baby at increasingly lengthy intervals—and all showed improvements.
a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that “cry it out” is an effective method of improving sleep.
included with all intervention approaches. The idea is to have some activities that signal to the baby that it is bedtime: putting on the baby’s pajamas, reading them a book, singing some kind of song, turning off the lights.
sleep interventions seem to be very successful at reducing maternal depression.
Sleep-training methods consistently improve parental mental health; this includes less depression, higher marital satisfaction, and lower parenting stress.
“Cry it out” works, helps parents and kids sleep better, and improves parental mood and happiness.
seemed to increase after the “cry it out” intervention.
On the contrary, infants who participated in sleep interventions were found to be more secure, predictable, less irritable, and to cry and fuss less following treatment.”
Extinction—just leave, and do not return; Graduated Extinction—come back at increasingly lengthy intervals; and Extinction with Parental Presence—sit in the room, but do not do anything.
key. Choosing a method—whichever one—and sticking with it increases success.
working roughly out of the Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child playbook.
Children who were exposed to peanuts were far less likely to be allergic to them at the age of five than children who were not.
However, only 3 percent of the children who were given peanuts were allergic.
This begins, between four and six months, with either rice cereal or oatmeal.
a few days or a week later, you introduce fruits and vegetables, one variety at a time, every three days.
A month or so after that, you introduce meat. All of this is in a pureed form and fed to your baby with a spoon.
you introduce foods the kid can pick up with their hands. This would include, say, Cheerios and rice puffs.
The delay between food introductions is to see if any food causes an allergy.
there is some sensibility behind the idea of waiting between food introductions. Nearly all allergies are caused by one of a few foods—milk, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts—and it’s sensible not to introduce these foods all at the same time.
In this practice, instead of introducing pureed foods and feeding the kid with a spoon, you wait until they are old enough to pick up foods on their own and then have them more or less eat what your family eats.
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.
Parents reported less food fussiness, and the infants in the baby-led weaning group were more likely to eat with their family. They were also likely to be breastfed longer, and the introduction of food was pushed later (i.e., to around six months rather than four).
hazards. A four-month-old shouldn’t have large pieces of hard fruit, baby-led weaning or not.
that children who ate a varied diet—and in particular those who consumed a wide variety of fruits and vegetables—at nine months were also more likely to eat a varied diet with vegetables at age six.
The kids whose moms had eaten more carrots were more likely to prefer the carrot cereal
repeated exposure to a food—say, giving kids pears every day for a week—increases their liking of it.
It reinforces the idea that children can get used to different flavors and that they like familiar ones.
Kids are more likely to try to eat it with what researchers call “autonomy-supportive prompts”—things like “Try your hot dog” or “Prunes are like big raisins,
that parental pressure to try new foods or to eat in general is associated with more food refusal, not less.
offer your very young child a wide variety of foods, and keep offering them even if the child rejects them at first.
The vast majority of allergies result from eight food types: milk, peanuts, eggs, soy, wheat, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish.
Try a little bit at first—only one allergenic food in a given day—and see how they react. If nothing, give them a little bit more. And so on until you get up to a normal amount. And then keep these foods in the rotation.
The evidence says only that you shouldn’t replace formula or breast milk with cow’s milk. As an addition to, say, oatmeal or cereal, it isn’t a problem.
breast milk doesn’t have enough vitamin D and you’d better remember to give your kid these drops every day, or they might get rickets.
Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets. Vitamin C deficiency famously causes scurvy,
The two possible exceptions to this are vitamin D and iron.
there is evidence that if you are breastfeeding, high levels of supplementation for Mom will increase her vitamin D concentration and accomplish a similar goal.
Breastfed infants are also sometimes iron deficient, which can cause anemia. Breast milk is low in iron.
They are funny, playful, exciting to be around. But they also bring resistance.
Early intervention is an excellent government program designed to intervene at young ages to help kids with developmental delays—physical or mental.
unique. In the moment, physical milestones—sitting, crawling, walking, running—take on an outsize importance.
Children who are very delayed on early milestones—head control, rolling over—are more likely (not very likely, just more likely) to have serious developmental issues.
children with serious early motor delays also show some lower spatial skills in later childhood,1 and perhaps even have lower reading test scores as middle-age adults.2
prenatal conditions may also have an effect on whether a child is born with CP.4
widely—it can affect different limbs or body parts, and be more or less severe. At birth, doctors are likely to know if babies are at higher risk for CP—due to birth trauma, prematurity, or other risk factors—but a definitive diagnosis typically cannot be made at birth. Instead, CP is typically recognized later when motor development is abnormal.
Motor development is carefully monitored for children in this group, but we do not expect these conditions to be detected by motor development alone.
