Earn Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide To Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth To Preschool Developed By Emily Oster Offered In Physical Book

heard rave reviews about this book from clients for years, so decided to check it out,/am f the way in and I am SO frustrated,

The intent of the book is excellent, I am completely behind examining the evidence to see what we actually can demonstrate to be helpful for improving outcomes for parents and babies, However, there are so many issues with this book that really take away from its validity and usefulness,

. The authors biases heavily influence her presentation and recommendations, yet she continually claims to be presenting the information in an unbiased way, Definitely not true.

. In places, shes drawing conclusions from data that arent actually there, Which I find especially annoying considering her continual statements about relying on the data and her expertise,

. She misses SO many other factors in so many of the decisions, Coming from an economics background without birth professional expertise really shows, You dont know what you dont know and she has such large gaps in the decision processes it seriously limits the usefulness of the information.


I would have loved to be able to recommend it, But I cant even stomach finishing it, I knew that there's much shaming against women who are pregnant, but I found out the hard way that the aggression escalates when one becomes a parent, especially a mother.
People do not discuss pros and cons of different choices regarding taking care of their children, When you make any decision, it doesn't matter if you go for option A or option B, There will always be people that will accuse you of abusing your child and destroying her or his future,

The author of this book examines scientific evidence regarding different areas of being a parent, for example sleep training, the method of feeding an infant or how the child is taken care of when parents are back to work.


I read some reviews that claim the this

book is useless, because in many cases the conclusion is: do what you think is right and what works for your family.
I believe, however, that these are some very important conclusions, It means that a lot of pressure and unwanted advice is based on emotions and not on facts, In many cases the child will be just fine as long as you are a loving parent who pays attention both to the needs of the child and to the mental health of all the family members.
Most breastfeeding benefits are manipulated in order to probably force women out of workforce, No, you won't lose a secure attachment, if you sleep train your baby, No, the child will not become a loser because the mother doesn't want to be turned into a house slave,

All in all, the book gave me a peace of mind and be more confident in my own choices, With a few exceptions, the overall gist is that there isn't a ton of high quality research to prove one parenting choice is better than another so you should use your judgement and do what's best for your family.
I do think this is an important message but there was nothing groundbreaking here for me,of the book can be distilled into: the research and data on xyz is inconclusive, so do whats best for your family and itll probably all be fine.
Didnt really learn anything super significant, except that apparently economists think that having a higher quantity of children means they will be lower quality, Not really my style of parenting book Just before our son arrived, I assured my wife that as an almostpaediatrician I knew all about babies.
While she could help herself to parenting books, I'd be fine, Then, of course, I discovered that taking care of one well child can be an entirely different challenge from managing a hospital full of sick ones.
My pride wounded and my shirt pukestained, I went in search of a book that would touch on the stuff we don't learn much about in medicine, wouldn't retread basic concepts too much, and was evidencebased.


The title that kept coming up when talking to physician friends was Cribsheet by Emily Oster, Oster and her husband are economists and their way of thinking about problems of infancy aligned quite nicely with our scientificallyminded household, Rather than tell me I needed to do X in order to get my two month old to sleep, Oster provided the evidence for different approaches and allowed me to draw my own conclusions.
For me, and many other parents, this is what we're after, Judgementfree data that allows us to choose what is best for our children and family,

It helps that Oster's writing is clear, easy to read, and never feels like a heady academic text, Cribsheet is full of anecdotes about parenting, but they read as an offering of solidarity rather than a bookasvictorylap, On a personal level, this was very much the right parenting book for me, It touched on topics I don't discuss every day sleep training! while doing a fine overview of the literature on the stuff I do spend my days rambling on to parents about safe sleeping, introduction of solids, neonatal infections.


This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're looking for an easy solution to parenting, here's my advice: avoid having kids.
In all seriousness, Cribsheet is the best bang for your buck for someone looking for hard and fast data to guide parenting, I'll be gifting and recommending this one in the future! Like I mentioned before, Im not pregnant, I just dig science, And this is a pretty good compilation of research related to baby stuff, though a lot of the advice boils down to do what works for your family so both baby and parents are in a good mental head space to deal with the stress of having a new person.
Also, vaccinate your kids, obviously, Mostly not relevant for me anymore with amonth old, I've already made most of the infant and toddler decisions discussed in this book, But, I love her approach and agree that data is interesting and empowering, I identified with her very much, My favorite chapter title: "Wait, you want me to take it home" which is exactly how I felt when discharged from the hospital with aday old infant.
Despite a frustrating lack of conclusions, this book was interesting, and might have made a bigger impact on me if I had read it before having my first kid.


Reading ityears into my first and with a second on the way, it just confirmed a lot of what I have gathered and gleaned over the lastyears: Data for MOST Mommy Wars subjects are inconclusive, and parents should ultimately do whats right for them and their families.
Glad the economist agrees. : Cirbsheet summarized the studies, or lack of studies, that guide the advice we received on a wide range of parenting topics, I like Oster's writing, and her summaries of findings changed my perceptions around some of the early parenting decisions we made let alone understanding better what science backed up certain recommendations.
It's also a good jumping off point to further reading for areas to go deeper, I think my main takeaway from this book is that most data is inconclusive so just do whatever feels right for you and your family and don't sweat it.
The kids will be fine, As long as you vaccinate them that is,

I suppose Emily and I differ mostly on the issue of sleep training, But at the same time I don't judge anyone who decides to sleep train good luck to you and your baby, I hope you get some sleep.


My approach to my baby's sleep is hope for the best, prepare for the worst and be zen about it she is a baby.
As soon as I stopped believing all this online nonsense that "mostmonth old babies can sleep through the night", I felt much better, Maybe those babies CAN sleep through the night, but mostly they WON'T,

All my friends in Poland seem to have a similar approach, while most of my British and American friends seem to desperately try to 'fix' their babies' sleep.
And as I'm typing this my baby just woke up afterhour andminutes of sleeping, lol, I think the difference in attitude might come from the how shit maternity leave in the UK and US is in the UK it is better, simply because it exists, but the second half of it is unpaid and the first pays peanuts, whereas in Poland you get a year off onof your salary.
So you have plenty of time and a peace of mind to just let your baby figure things out at their own pace, That's my theory.
Here I'm being bombarded with ads for sleep coaches, sleep training programs, sleep consultants, whereas my friends in Poland have no idea what I'm talking about.


Anyway, I went off on a tangent here, I think what went slightly wrong with this book was the Oster want to approach parenting as hard science, but parenting is half science, half art, half chaos.
Yes, it has three halves,
OK, bye, my baby is sleeping again and I have a million things to do in this short window, Now that Sultan and I are expecting, we decided to do much reading on parenting and by that I mean i do the reading, he does the listening.
This is my first parenting book, and I can say it passed with flying colors as a perfect starter!
Emily Oster writes about early parenthood, how to manage and deal with all the little stuff that nobody tells you about as a firsttime parent, and she supports all of that with "excellent" data.

She also goes beyond the early months until preschool, Shedding light over concepts that have been mistaken or falsified, All you need to know about cognitive development, physical development, lanaguage senseiitvety, and all that matters after your child steps out of toddlerhood,
I'd give big thumps up to Oster's incredibly fluid style of writing, It only tells me what a great professor she is, and how lucky her students are! she has the ability to simplify everything and make it understandable and easy to catch.


Thank you Emily Oster,
Overall I appreciate this book SO MUCH for its sensible, nonjudgemental, and calm approach to parenting in the early years, In the intro Oster writes:

"We know being a parent means getting a lot of advice, but this advice is almost never accompanied by an explanation of why something is true or not, or to what degree we can even know it's true.
And by not explaining why, we remove people's ability to think about these choices for themselves, "

For those two sentences alone, I am pretty much willing to marry this woman,

Oster is an economist and, as the subtitle says, applies a datacentred approach to figuring out how to tackle common early parenting decisions.
Major focuses include breastfeeding, sleep training, sleep and SIDS, transition to solid foods, potty training, vaccines, and child care and preschool choices,

She is explicit about her framework and how she evaluates the legitimacy and usefulness of the studies she looks at for example, favouring studies with randomized trials and large sample sizes.
She discusses major studies and interprets the data, but she never tells you that you have to take any course of action, How refreshing! She also has a fun dry sense of humor that is sprinkled throughout "Some things about a second child are harder, the main one being the presence of the first child.
"

Her approach works great for some topics: those that lend themselves to that kind of analysis she values, This means issues that have a significant medical/scientific/biological component, She shows, for example, that many claims about the health/medical benefits of breastfeeding such as better longterm health, IQ, and immune system for the baby are not supported by the data.
Lower lifetime rates of breast cancer for the breastfeeding parent are though!,

The chapter on vaccines is excellent too Oster is careful to include information about adverse effects that are scientifically proven and their severity and rarity, and concludes that unless your kid is immune compromised, the data overwhelmingly supports early combined vaccinations.


As the book goes on into issues relevant to toddlers such as philosophies of different preschools and discipline programs, Oster's approach becomes a lot less useful.
There simply isn't good data to help you make those kinds of decisions because there are too many variables, What type of preschool will be best for your kid depends on what type of kid you have,

She does share a few concepts she uses as an economist that can help with decision making on the more nebulous, which I thought were fairly useful.
It's good to be reminded that you can approach emotionally loaded decisions systematically, I liked her insistence that what you want to do as a parent is an important factor you should consider,

In the last section, Oster begins to sound like a broken record because she keeps repeating that there is no universally relevant data on suchandsuch issue, so make the decision that works best for your family.
I guess this might be helpful if you were convinced you had to do a certain approach for a reason other than it was what you thought was best for your family.


If you decide to read this book and I do think it's overall worth it I'd recommend reading at least the first section before your kid is born, as it offers guidance on decisions you'd be taking into action right after childbirth most importantly, breastfeeding but also others like common practices in hospitals such as "rooming in" aka the baby staying in your recovery room/and routine vitamins and antibiotics given to newborns.
From the author of EXPECTING BETTER, an economist's guide to the early years of parenting

With EXPECTING BETTER, awardwinning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they needed to make the best decision for their own pregnancies.
By digging into the data, Oster found that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong, In CRIBSHEET, she now tackles an even great challenge: decision making in the early years of parenting,

As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of oftenconflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and the internet, From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost, There's a ruleor threefor everything, But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the tradeoffs can be profound, How do you make your own best decision,