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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emily Oster
flavors increases acceptance. There is not much evidence behind the traditional food-introduction recommendations; no need to do rice cereal first if you do not want to. Baby-led weaning doesn’t have magical properties (at least not based on what we know now), but there is also no reason not to do it if you want to. Vitamin D supplementation is reasonable, but don’t
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.
around to walking normally in a day or two. And then I promptly forgot about my fear that she would never walk and moved on to other neuroses. (There are always more neuroses around the corner when you’re
pounds, but there are some much smaller and some larger. When you go to the pediatrician for your one-year visit, they’ll actually tell you something
the twenty-fifth percentile for weight.” In the case of milestones—physical, and language development—we don’t really talk about distributions. I’m not sure why not; could be lack of data or an unwillingness to assign percentiles in these areas. But whether we discuss them, these distributions are there. And even just knowing this may
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.
with any particular math concept. The one specific thing I do remember is a song—You never reach infinity, you just go on . . . and on . . . .
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.
then a lot between ages three and five to the children who watched little TV before age three and little later, they found their test scores to be no different. If anything, the kids who watched more TV later had higher test scores than those who watched less. This throws some cold water on the idea of avoiding
for a complicated question. It’s also helpful for actual decisions about TV. In the study, Jesse and his coauthor, Matt, took advantage of the fact that television was introduced to different areas of the United States at different times. This variation meant
Jesse and Matt found no evidence that more exposure to television at an early age negatively affected later test scores.
to five can learn from TV, including vocabulary and so on from programs like Sesame Street. 3. The best evidence suggests that TV watching in particular, even exposure at very young ages, does not affect test scores. This may be helpful, but it leaves many questions unanswered. IPad apps—good or bad? Does sports on TV count as TV? Is there any amount of TV that’s really
approaches learning about relationships in data using only the data we have. The second is “Bayesian statistics,” which tries to learn about relationships by starting with a prior belief about
things you know—or think you know—about the world into your conclusion along with the data. Why is this relevant here? I think we have some
week is fine, I have less intuition about “normal” watching—in the realm of, say, two hours per day. For this question, Jesse’s work is quite informative, since it looks at precisely this magnitude of exposure and
before I saw the data—and what we do see from the data to fill in where I was most uncertain. This starts to give us a sense, as well, of where more studies
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.
school and finding an advance copy on the table in the porch. I opened it, eager for some insights into my younger self,
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. We usually remember our children’s first words (Penelope: “shoes”; Finn: “Penelope [Puh-Puh]”), and early on many
“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.
most acute as you get to ages where children know most of the words. It may not really be feasible to distinguish between a child who says 675 of the words and one who says 680. For children who know fewer
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.
range in this distribution at all young ages. DOES IT MATTER ANYWAY? We all enjoy navel-gazing about our own children, so knowing where your child falls in this distribution may be simply a fun fact. But virtually everyone learns to talk. It is natural to wonder, though, whether
they are? Are there any later-life differences between a two-year-old who is at the 25th percentile of the distribution versus the 50th, or the 75th? The largest and most rigorous studies of this focus on whether children who are abnormally late talkers are also delayed in other ways later. In a series of studies,
is among the first cognitive processes that we really see in kids, so it is not surprising that it becomes a focus of comparison. And if you are really curious, it’s definitely possible to use the data here
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.
be when they are closer to three years old or even a bit older. The child-led approach to training may take longer, but it also may be more pleasant for you. 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.
is a wonderful and successful adult who was and remains a great brother.) When my own kids were born, I repeated a similar pattern. Penelope never had a tantrum. When Finn had one, I couldn’t believe it. There was so much yelling!
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
that are useful for very small children. For example, do not let your child use a tantrum to get
involved were looking for help managing their children’s behavior, although none of the children had clinical behavior problems. That is to say, they were just engaging in the standard difficult behaviors. The intervention was fairly light—parents attended three two-hour meetings that discussed the 1‑2‑3
It would be remiss of me to close this chapter without mentioning spanking. Although this has become a less common
outcomes, you’ll overstate the downside. Second, even within the group of parents who spank, it stands to reason that children
as an adult. Kids do not need to learn that if you misbehave, a stronger person will hit you. The Bottom Line There are a variety of programs that have been shown to improve children’s behavior. These focus on consistent rewards and punishments, and
