Souvenir Press Ltd Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool

Highly recommended. It's no "in my opinion" or "my grandma told me" nonsense you read elsewhere. This is evidence-based talk deeply grounded in science. Cheery on the cake, it's very well written, easy to digest, and very hard to put down once you start chewing through the pages.

Too much hay. Very minimal data and facts.

Es un libro que si buscas ser madre en EUA te ayuda pero te sirven pocos capítulos si no vives allá. Aún así, es interesante aprender las dinámicas y estadísticas del proceso de criar hijos desde el embarazo hasta que son infantes.

A well written book that breaks down common topics around parenting and caring for your newborn/infant. There’s a lot of chatter and anecdotal information that gets thrown at you and it’s overwhelming. This summarises and presents facts using statistics in a way that’s digestible, less biased and easy to understand.

This has been my "Bible" (besides my actual Bible) for parenting. I really appreciate how she breaks down topics into easy chapters, and has a TL;DR at the end of each chapter for easy reference. She also cites ALL her sources, which is very reassuring. This book is full of helpful, data-backed advice from a fellow mother.

I haven't read Expecting Better, Emily Oster's previous book, but had high hopes for Cribsheet. Each chapter addresses a different area of parenting "dilemmas", relating to a topic that parents often worry about - like, how to feed baby (breast/bottle), is baby's sleep normal and what to do about it, are vaccines safe, etc etc. Oster's writing is snappy and digestible, but she takes a very cool-headed, neutral approach, trying to look at what the scientific evidence says about each topic rather than present a particular "way of doing things", as many parenting books do. She steers clear from giving recommendations, unless there is overwhelming evidence for benefit and very little risk, like in the vaccines chapter. There are occasional personal anecdotes which liven things up, although sometimes I think she goes overboard a bit on this. The breast/bottle feeding chapter will probably raise quite a few hackles, because Oster's summary of the scientific evidence is very different from what the "orthodoxy" says - she basically notes that there is solid evidence that breastfeeding helps prevent infections, and may have some other benefits too, but many of the longer-term proposed benefits of breastfeeding aren't proven (in her opinion). Therefore, in her view, if you choose to not breastfeed, or switch from breast to formula milk, you aren't choosing a course of action that is depriving your baby of important developmental benefits. I felt some of the chapters, like on development, language, and use of TV/ipad were a bit thin, and not as fleshed out as they could be, but maybe that is because the evidence in these areas really is inconclusive. But it would have been nice to have more to say, or to delve into the data a bit deeper to address additional questions (eg, the often claimed suggestion that kids who grow up with more than one language in the home, have other advantages in their development or learning process). The final chapters, on the relationships between parents, and how the adults adjust to becoming parents, was really interesting because so few books on parenting, ironically, actually address this. I felt this was really useful and prescient, and actually validating in a lot of ways. Being a parent can be very stressful at times, and it's nice to have someone (an academic "someone") recognise there is real objective data that marital relationships do, on average, suffer when two people have kids. But there are ways to help things, and it does get better (mainly). All in all, I feel this is *not* a how-to manual at all, nor some kind of treatise on parenting philosophy (as so many of these books are), but rather a book that really takes the heat out of parenting - it tells you that there are many different ways to be a great and loving parent. Headlines abound in the media telling us how new scientific studies have "proven" that those of us who didn't choose X, or Y, or Z, have ended up failing our kids, but this book tells us that this really isn't so (or isn't proven to be so): it's about understanding your options, and what is right for your family in your circumstances.

This is a brilliant scientific analysis of all those questions we have about bringing up kids (very small ones). Not every question has a clear answer - the science isn’t strong enough. But that’s still good to know. This is essential reading for parents.