Originally published on The Whole Sky
Several people I know are expecting a first baby soon, and I wrote up notes for one of them. Might as well share here too:
Other sources along the lines of “scientifically-minded parent writing about topics of interest”:
Parent Data by Emily Oster — note that she’s more slanted to pleasing her audience than I think is ideal. E.g. she apologized for correctly saying that unvaccinated children were at less risk from covid than their vaccinated grandparents, and her post on factors that influence children’s outcomes doesn’t even mention genetics.
Parenting Science has writeups on a lot of topics, but it seems more like a grab bag of citations than thoughtful analysis.
Techno Sapiens
Medical:
Scott Alexander’s old Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting is an interesting read, and some parts are actionable. Part 2 is Obscure Pregnancy Interventions.
If you live in an old building (pre-1978 in the US), here’s my writeup on lead paint.
If breastfeeding, KellyMom is my go-to for advice on whatever is going wrong.
On childbirth, I read several books but The Birth Partner is the only one I’d use again. It’s written primarily for the partner rather than the person giving birth, but it’s the best one I read even for the person giving birth. The advice for working out your attitude to pain relief and medical interventions felt more balanced than some of the other more obviously pro- or anti-intervention stuff I read.
Even if you’re not expecting a c-section, read about what aftercare will be like if you do get one. For example, figuring out what pain meds you’d be ok with during recovery if breastfeeding.
The Happiest Baby on the Block techniques are well worth learning for dealing with fussy babies. The actual book is needlessly fluffy, but there’s a video version that covered the important stuff in an hour, or there’s a 9-minute version.
Emily Oster’s Expecting Better and Cribsheet have some good info, and enough of your friends have read them that you’ll hear about her opinions no matter what. At least on her blog, I feel like her brand is now “don’t worry, studies show your child probably won’t be harmed by X.” I think she’s overly cavalier in a few cases (for example claiming that light drinking during pregnancy won’t hurt; this rebuttal by an epidemiologist specializing in fetal alcohol syndrome was pretty convincing to me.) There are cases where there’s no conclusive evidence that X is bad for your child, but often she’s only looking at one particular type of harm, or it seems like there’s just not enough data to answer the question. For example she convinced me that caffeine is not likely to cause a miscarriage, but that’s not the only harm I care about, and common sense is that you don’t give psychoactive drugs to developing brains.
Now that you can google everything, I don’t feel like a comprehensive baby guide is that important if you have a decent sense of what babies are like. If you’ve never spent much time around babies, it’s probably worth skimming a baby development type book to get a sense of what happens when. I skimmed Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child and T. Berry Brazleton’s Touchpoints, which were both fine.
Another part of why I didn’t feel like I needed a book that explained every last medical situation you could encounter with a baby is that our pediatrician’s office has a 24-hour phone line where they answer your questions about the baby’s rash or whatever. I definitely recommend finding a practice that offers this.
When figuring out what to do about common childhood health problems (including when you have a relative who’s sure you should be doing something different), I find that children’s hospitals often have good written guides. Example on fever.
Behavior:
On sleep training, my take is that people have a pet method they prefer and will tell you the other methods are terrible. But different families do succeed with completely different methods, and if one method is a terrible fit for your family you can switch to another. We used the Weissbluth cry-it-out method and will do it again. If you run into other sleep problems the Ferber book might be worth getting because he’s an actual pediatric sleep expert, while the other authors are usually generic pediatricians. The Ferber book covers a bunch of other sleep stuff like sleepwalking and bed wetting, so it might be worth consulting later even if you don’t use it for sleep training.
Aside from nighttime sleep training, read something about nap schedules. One example. If your baby is in daycare, you can ask the daycare what they do and do the same at home.
On potty training when the time comes, the Oh Crap method worked well for us. The third time around we didn’t adhere to the “watch your child every second for the first few days” part.
On other behavior stuff, Jeff’s main thoughts are here and mine are here. I talk a lot in that post about How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, but a lot of it is about older kids. For younger kids, I’d start with How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen.
Other life stuff:
On time management, Laura Vanderkam is about the only productivity person I can stomach anymore, because she has 5 kids and most other authors seem to write for people with no commitments aside from work. Her book I Know How She Does It is based on time tracking by mothers who earn at least $100k and are presumably pretty busy. The time logs indicate you can work a lot, have some personal time, and spend quality time with your kids if you organize things well and pay for a lot of childcare.
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is based on a bunch of twin and adoption studies. He argues that they show parenting doesn’t make that much difference and mostly your kid is going to come out how they were always going to come out based on their genetics, so you might as well just focus on enjoying time together instead of shaping them into a star achiever. I thought I was going to be a really relaxed parent after buying these arguments, but there’s still a bunch of environmental stuff like lead exposure that I managed to be anxious about anyway. And there’s still a lot to figure out about how to make life pleasanter in the meantime.