I became a father for the first time last year. I am now an uncle for the sixth time this last week on May 1. As any parent knows, there are big questions that do not come with easy answers like how to get your child to sleep through the night, do I have to breast-feed my baby, or is it okay to vaccinate. We struggled with the same questions. The good news: you eventually get through these tough decisions. The bad news: there are more questions. Education. Childcare. Potty training. TV usage. There are so many questions.
The internet is a helpful place and we have used it plenty in solving some of our baby questions. But how do you know who you can trust? This is/was a difficult question. Fortunately, a couple of our friends brought us a meal a few weeks after T-Bone was born and gave us Cribsheet: a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting, from birth to preschool by Emily Oster. I always love receiving books, but especially books that were clearly well-considered. Unsurprisingly, Cribsheet was definitely my kind of book, and the book that I am reviewing.
What You Need to Know
Before you crack open Cribsheet, there are a few things you should know:
First, you may not be happy with some of the results. All parents believe in their own child-rearing strategies. There are some strategies that I have found effective myself, but I definitely had to re-consider my position. What’s more, she is only using academic research. You may be able to find some sort of article with other information, but she is using only the highest quality data.
Second, it is a book of statistical analysis that includes charts and graphs. This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Even if it isn’t, I would suggest you at least give it a try.
Third, Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is also married to an economist. And if that wasn’t enough, both of her parents are economists. I mean I couldn’t even come up with something that connects my spouse and both of my parents other than characteristics that we had nothing to do with.
What I Want You to Know
As I mentioned, Cribsheet is a book of statistics. As an economist, she obviously likes numbers and the story they tell. As you go through the book, she even gives you a bit of a statistical education in how to read the data appropriately. However, despite having a lot of data, Cribsheet does not always have a straight answer. It is possible that there just isn’t a straight answer in the topic of conversation, but Oster will definitely break down the essential items and often give you her leanings.
Cribsheet is not a book that intends to tell you WHAT to think. It is a book that intends to show you HOW to think and from that point, make the best decision for your family. As Oster points out regularly, people have opinions on all sorts of parenting strategies and some of them are completely contrary to the other. This can obviously create confusion. Fortunately, Oster is there to help clean up the mess.
Even if Cribsheet does not sound like your type of book, I would suggest giving it a try. Oster doesn’t write how you would expect a second-generation economist would. Her writing is lively and contains plenty of her own stories that show you that when she says she’s sympathetic, she is. She’s been there too.
How I Scored It
Here is my rating breakdown for Cribsheet:
I am going to blog about my rating system and welcome some intense debate about it. Hopefully you will all join in on said intense debate. Worse case, I will blow up my own comments section.
How About a Taste
“I’m going to argue that you can simplify this whole [childcare] thing, though, by taking a page from the decision-theory playbook. More specifically, you need a decision tree… In economics, we teach people to ‘solve the tree.’ To do this, you work backward from the bottom… So there is your theory. Of course, theory doesn’t tell us the right answer, only how to think about the problem. To get to the answer, we need to combine theory with evidence—specifically, evidence on different childcare options, and how to compare them.”[1]
“While much of the popular discussion of sleep training focuses on its possible harms, much of the academic literature focuses on its possible benefits, including not only improvements in infant sleep but also benefits to the parents… Obviously, we want to think carefully about any possible risks to babies, but the fact that sleep training is good for parents should not be ignored. And sleep is also beneficial to development for babies and kids. Settling into a good sleep routine—one that will ensure longer and higher-quality sleep—could have long-term positive effects for children.”[2]
“In conclusion, your baby cannot read.”[3]
[1] Emily Oster, Cribsheet: a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting, from birth to preschool (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2019), 160-61.
[2] Ibid., 177.
[3] Ibid., 263.