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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
Jesse and Matt found no evidence that more exposure to television at an early age negatively affected later test scores.
If the alternative to an hour of TV is a frantic and unhappy parent yelling at their kid for an hour, there is good reason to think the TV might actually be better.
The moment your child stops having to cry and point desperately at the refrigerator and can instead say, “Milk, please” (or even just “MILK!!”) is one in which you can start to see glimmers of a person in there.
“Boys are slower with language,” warned my more delicate friends. Some less delicate ones said, “You’ll think your son is stupid.” People whose children were born in the opposite gender order told me how brilliant they thought their daughter was.
It is worth noting here that kids who are bi-lingual—that is, their parents or caregivers speak to them in two different languages—tend to be slower to talk, although when they do, they can speak both languages.
associated with later training. The first—and probably the one that explains variation over time—is later initiation of potty training. Children who start training later complete training later.
The generation born in the late 1970s and early ’80s was the first to commonly use disposable diapers, perhaps due to innovations in the early 1980s that dramatically decreased the size of disposable diapers.
If everyone potty trains their child when they turn two, people may feel some social pressure in this direction. If everyone else waits until three, that becomes the norm. This may also affect when, for example, day-care centers push potty training.
The main reason to wait is that the earlier you start, the longer it takes to complete.
A three-year-old has a lot more control over their bathroom functions (also maybe over you, but that is a different story). This is partly physical, and partly emotional.
There is virtually no data on which of these works better or even how well any individual system works.7 To the extent there are studies on this, they are extremely difficult to interpret.
Or maybe this is your last child, you are totally over changing diapers, and you want your twenty-five-month-old to get with the program. If this is the case, your best bet is probably to try an intensive, goal-oriented regime and see if she takes to it.
As weird as it might sound, a lot of kids like to poop in their diaper. Children who will successfully urinate in the toilet will nevertheless refuse to poop there, and unlike urine, bowel movements are something over which even young children do have some control.
Manychildren will remain in a pull‑up or diaper at night (and maybe when napping) long after they are fully trained during the day.
course, once a child is in a tantrum, there is really no helping.
If your kid asks for dessert and you say no, you cannot then later say yes if they whine for long enough. This basically makes sense—what do they learn from that? That
Tennessee sends kids a book each month (thanks to an effort spearheaded by Dolly Parton).
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.
In particular, researchers have found that the benefits are bigger with more interactive reading.6 Rather than just reading a book, kids benefit from being asked open-ended questions:
this is an age at which people often explore part-time “preschool” options, designed (in general) to increase socialization, and possibly to start teaching school-type skills. If your child is in day care, their older classrooms will often be a more structured form of school.
Again, we can hark back to the day care chapter. Day care and preschool at this age are distinguishable largely by the length of time: people tend to think of “preschool” as a half-day activity and “day care” as an all-day activity.
Reggio Emilia-inspired schools put more emphasis on play, with typically little formal letter or number exposure at preschool ages.
Becoming a parent is challenging. I think in some ways it is more challenging for this generation than the last. On one hand, we have a lot of stuff they didn’t (disposable diapers, Amazon Prime).
It is probably an exaggeration to say you’ll “hate your spouse,” but people (women in particular) do seem less happy after kids.
a paper showing that between the pre-childbearing period and the period of having school-aged children, the share of mothers reporting low marital satisfaction rises gradually from 12 percent to 30 percent, with an abrupt jump in the first year of the child’s life. The marriage does not recover until parents become grandparents.3
it’s useful to look at two specific things that researchers have speculated play a role in the marital-happiness decline. The first is unequal chore allocation: women tend to do the bulk of household work, even if they also work outside the home. The second is a decline in sex: parents have less sex, and sex makes people happy.
Although it may be surprising, there is speculation (at least on the internet) that these sources of unhappiness are linked. If men do more chores, do you have more sex?
In fact, the effects go both ways. Some studies suggest that if men do more chores, the couple has less sex. Some suggest the opposite—that the couple has more sex.
Due to a lack of maternity leave, my mom attempted to time my brother to arrive over Christmas break, but she got January 11 instead.
But some researchers have done this, generally using a method with “surprise” births. They look at the arrival of twins as something that increases the size of the family while not affecting the number of children you actually wanted.
Later-born children tend to do (slightly) worse on IQ tests and get less schooling than their earlier-born siblings.
some downside to having an only child—will they be socially awkward? Again, this is hard to study, given the differences across families. To the extent that we have evidence, this concern seems unfounded.
