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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
Dr. Li’s suggestion that we wait for 18 months before panicking about walking, and we see the very wide normal ranges on almost all of these.
As the parent of a young child, you will spend the period from October to April drowning in a lake of snot.
Kids younger than school age get an average of six to eight colds a year, most of them between September and April.
About a quarter of kids will have an ear infection by the age of one, and 60 percent by the age of four.9
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.
there is a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that exposure to TV—and, more generally, to any screens—is associated with lower cognitive development.
They recommend no TV or screen time at all for children under eighteen months, and no more than
an hour a day, ideally consumed with
a parent, for older ...
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Kids learn songs from movies and from shows, and can pick up names of characters and basic plot elements. Researchers in the lab have shown that three- to five-year-old kids are able to learn words from television.
early years of the show and compared the kids who got early access to it—because of better TV reception—to those who got later access. The earlier-access kids were less likely to be held back in school at older ages.8
For very young children, what they watch may actually matter less, since they do not learn much from it, although you cannot rely on the TV to make your child a genius.
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.
it does suggest that the recommendation of avoiding TV before age three is warranted.
Children under two years old cannot learn much from TV. Children ages three to five can learn from TV, including vocabulary and so on from programs like Sesame Street. The best evidence suggests that TV watching in particular, even exposure at very young ages, does not affect test scores.
You can subject the iPad to similar logic. A two-year-old who is on an iPad all day: likely bad. A half hour of math games twice a week: probably not bad.
If a child is watching TV, they are not doing something else.
At the two-year-old doctor visit, it is common to be asked whether the child has at least twenty-five words they say regularly.
Language development is clearly associated with parental education. But parental education is also associated with many other outcomes, including early reading and later test scores.
Can you take anything from your child being either a very strong early talker or a very delayed one?
The other two factors relate to poop. Children who were frequently constipated, or who showed resistance to pooping in the potty (formally “stool toileting refusal”—more on this to follow) tended to train later.
What we can see is that the age of potty-training completion is similar starting anytime between twenty-one and thirty months.
The authors suggest that if what you care about is when potty training is done, there is not much point to starting before twenty-seven months or so.
If you start at age three, you finish later, but it’ll likely take you less than six months to fully train.
“endpoint-oriented” potty training.6 These methods are discussed in books like Oh Crap! and 3-Day Potty Training. In general, the idea is to just take the diapers away and start putting your child on the potty a lot.
The bottom line is that potty training is really all about what works for your family and your kid.
The child-led approach to training may take longer, but it also may be more pleasant for you.
that the length of refusal (i.e., the number of months this goes on) decreased with a child-oriented intervention where, among other things, parents made a big deal about the child pooping in the diaper before potty training started.13 This means saying things like, “Wow! You pooped! That’s so great!” and so on. The kids in this treatment were no less likely to have the problem at all, but it lasted for less time.
Doctors generally do not worry about lack of nighttime dryness until a child is six years old.
The constant experimentation can be exhausting and confusing, especially as your kid gets to the point where it is harder to physically restrain them.
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.
All these interventions emphasize not getting angry. Don’t yell, don’t escalate, and definitely don’t hit. Controlling parental anger is the first central part of the intervention.
moments. Toddler discipline is, really, parental discipline. Breathe. Take a second. I once told my children, “I’m so mad right now, I’m going to the bathroom for a while to calm down.”
goal. If they do not think of a tantrum as a way to react, they can work on developing other, more productive ways to communicate their problems.
example, 1-2-3 Magic develops a system of counting (to three, obviously) in the face of disruptive behavior, and if three is reached, there is a defined consequence (a time-out, loss of a privilege, etc.).
Finally, there is a strong emphasis on consistency. Whatever the system you use, use it every time.
parenting approaches is that discipline should be reserved for actual bad behavior, not for things that are merely annoying.
The authors argued that spanking
does have negative long-term impacts, especially on behavior problems. Spanking at age one increased behavior problems at three, and spanking at three increased behavior problems at five.
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.
Children who are read to more as young children achieve greater reading success in school.
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.
Having a kid doesn’t make you stop being a person with needs and desires and ambitions.
on average, women spend more time than men on housework and child-rearing-related activities.
Even if we compare women who work full time with men who work full time, the women spend about an hour and a half more during the day caring for kids, doing housework, and shopping.6
if men do more work, it frees up more time for women, meaning more time for sex!
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
there was an 83 percent increase in the risk of preterm birth for women who got pregnant within six months of their last birth.5
very long intervals between births are unusual, and more likely to be associated with older mothers or fertility problems.
