More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
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.
(aside from the baby) your child’s crib should be empty, with no toys, no bumpers, no blankets or pillows. Nothing.
One is that infants should not have blankets. This conclusion is based on the results of a number of the studies discussed previously. Infants who die of SIDS are more likely to be found with blankets over their heads than control infants.
recommendation regards crib bumpers, which are forbidden by the AAP. In fact, some cities (Chicago, for example) have disallowed the sale of bumpers. The concern is that these can cause suffocation.
If you are going to bed share, start by making sure you are not smoking or drinking and that your bed is not full of covers and pillows.
at around nine months, the third nap disappears; at a year to twenty-one months, the second nap disappears; and at three to four years, the final nap disappears. On these latter two transitions in particular, these ranges are wide. A year to twenty-one months is a long time!
In May 2017, for example, there was a measles outbreak in Minnesota, with at least fifty cases. The outbreak was concentrated in the Somali immigrant community, where antivaccination activists had made efforts to convince the population that vaccines were linked to autism.
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.
In 1986, in response to this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which protected companies from being sued over mandated vaccinations. People who claim to be injured by vaccines can appeal to the federal government for compensation, but they cannot seek damages from the vaccine manufacturer.
The title of this chapter comes from a friend whose son was once asked at school, “What kind of mom do you have? I have a stay‑at‑home mom,” to which my friend’s son responded, “Oh, I have a stay‑at‑work mom.”
Women who work (some of them, anyway) tell me they feel guilty about not being with their child every minute. Those who do not work (some of them, anyway) tell me they feel isolated and resentful at times.
I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing allocation is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day.
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.3 This could be due to the working configuration, but I think it’s more likely due to differences between these families.
Many people in the US have no paid leave at all, and even unpaid leave (say, through the Family Medical Leave Act, or FMLA) is typically capped at twelve weeks and is available to only about 60 percent of working people.
The authors found that attending higher-quality day care strongly correlated with better child language development: kids who went to better day cares seem to talk more.
More months in day care before eighteen months are associated with slightly lower cognitive scores by four and a half years old, but more time in care after that is associated with higher cognitive outcomes.
On the plus side, these early exposures seem to confer some immunity, with children who were in day care for more years as toddlers having fewer colds in early elementary school.10 In
One of the best pieces of parenting advice I got from my friend Nancy was this: 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.
At some point, the pediatrician tells you, “A baby of this size can sleep for up to six hours at a time.” You want to poke them in the eye with a pen.
Broadly, “cry it out” refers to any system where you leave the baby in his crib on his own at the start of the night, and sometimes let him fall back to sleep on his own if he wakes at some point during the night. The name refers to the fact that if you do this, your baby will cry some at the start.
attachment parenting advocates co‑sleeping as well, meaning there is no need for sleep training of any type since there is no goal of getting the child to sleep alone. Proponents of this point out that if your child is in the bed, you don’t really have to get up to deal with them—you just roll over and stick a boob in their mouth and go back to sleep.
These effects persist through six months or a year in studies that can look this far out. This means that children who are sleep trained are sleeping better (on average) even a year after the training.
The bottom line is that there is simply a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that “cry it out” is an effective method of improving sleep.
worth noting that most of these studies—and, indeed, virtually all sleep books—recommend a “bedtime routine” as part of any sleep intervention. There isn’t much direct evidence on this—the review refers to it as a “common sense recommendation”—but it is generally included with all intervention approaches.
But if you do want sleep train, you should not feel shame or discomfort about that decision. The data, imperfect as it is, is on your side.
There is relatively little guidance on the appropriate age to start sleep training. Most studies focus on children in the four‑ to fifteen-month-old period,
Penelope looked at me—very seriously—and told me, “Mom, whatever you do, you can’t go in. He needs to learn to sleep on his own. We have to help him do that.” In the presence of a child who was sleep trained and obviously does not hate you, it is hard to hold on to your fear.
Using a questionnaire, covering about five thousand children in each location and focusing on Jewish children in both Israel and the UK, he found that school-age children in the UK were about ten times more likely to be allergic to peanuts than children in Israel.
The researchers selected a group of children who were more likely to have peanut allergies than the general population—this was important to make sure they could draw strong conclusions even with a relatively small sample size—and they also divided the sample into children who had no sensitivity to peanuts at baseline and those who showed some sensitivity.
The results—I put them in a graph below—are striking. 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.
The finding is especially notable as it suggests that the standard advice parents were given about peanuts up to this point was entirely wrong.
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.
You feed your child with a spoon. Make sure to take some adorable pictures to send to the grandparents! These will also be helpful at your child’s wedding.
Finn thought those cereals were a joke. The only rice cereal he ever ate was congee at our favorite Chinese restaurant.
“baby-led weaning.” 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.
Perhaps it isn’t difficult to produce a child who will eat chicken nuggets and hot dogs, but how do you end up with one who loves sautéed kale and kimchi with squid? Or at least one who will try them?
Related to this, once children are starting to eat solid foods, there is randomized evidence that repeated exposure to a food—say, giving kids pears every day for a week—increases their liking of it. This works for fruits, but also for vegetables, even bitter ones.
you should know that most kids become more picky around two and then slowly grow out of it in their elementary school years. This is sometimes a surprise to parents—your eighteen-month-old eats like a horse, then all of a sudden around two, they start being very selective and just generally not eating much.
It is frustrating to sit at a meal that you know to be delicious with a four-year-old who screams that they hate it and will not eat anything. I don’t have a great solution for this, other than earplugs.
Sleep training, vaccination—you can do these without your child’s cooperation. Potty training, not so much. You can set up a system, you can have stickers, M&M’s, a special potty video. But ultimately, your child will have to decide to use the toilet.
In the past it was believed that CP was exclusively a result of injuries at birth, but more recent evidence suggests prenatal conditions may also have an effect on whether a child is born with CP.4
Although not technically a milestone, baby’s first cold is definitely a moment for a parent. A bad one.
some other illness, literally all the time. If you have two children or, god forbid, more than two, the winter months are a haze of repeated illnesses: you, kid 1, kid 2, your partner, back to kid 2, now kid 1 again. Usually there’s a dose of stomach flu somewhere in the middle (you all get that, obviously).
On the plus side, school-age kids get sick a bit less (two to four colds per year), so this doesn’t last forever.
In seventh grade I finally convinced my mother to let me watch 90210, since without it, I was doomed to social oblivion.
The American Academy of Pediatrics falls squarely in agreement with the second answer. 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 children.
At birth, children are able to learn the sounds from any language, but as they age, they specialize in the sounds they hear regularly.
If some quiet distraction is your goal, then your question is probably not whether TV is a learning opportunity, but whether it is detrimental.
For example, a 2014 study shows that preschoolers who watch more TV have lower “executive function”—meaning less self-control, focus, etc.
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. However, watching TV at older ages doesn’t seem to matter.
