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The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

206 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

phalangion 9y ago
I think the real secret of many advice books, baby or otherwise, is that nobody knows what they're doing. It's especially hard for baby and other parenting advice, though, because the goals are so varied. What is the aim? A quiet baby? A happy baby? A hard working child, a smart child, a well-behaved child, a happy child? A well-adjusted (whatever that means) adult? A driven and successful adult? A good relationship with the kid? Any of thousands of others? It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  In my view, its even misguided to try and 'make' your baby into any of these things. You can help them develop, but its largely up to them to be smart or hard-working or happy later in life. We can at most give them good examples, and try to socialize them?
  - tartuffe78 9y ago
    You try that, I'll try the other way and we'll see whose baby gets into Harvard!
    - titanix2 9y ago
      That does not takes the genetic lottery into account.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      My three Eagle Scouts are respectively a Sargeant, an Engineer and a Musician. The Engineer went to CMU and works at a startup in Redwood City. The Sargent did his tour of Iraq in transportation (doing vehicle recovery) and returned a little busted up; now has a MechE degree and is a process Engineer. The Musician studied at Cleveland Institute, but turned to the dark side and now works IT.
      - opwieurposiu 9y ago
        Great work dad!
    - toomanybeersies 9y ago
      My brothers and I were brought up in much the same way. However, we have not all ended up in the same place. One of my brothers managed to spend over half a decade in and out of odd jobs, spending all his money on drugs (thank fuck none of the hard stuff). Me and my other brother have managed to carve out a good life for ourselves, at least by society's external measure. People will go their own direction in life. You can prod them and help them on their journey, but you can't fundamentally change who they are.
      - cm2012 9y ago
        On a tangent, the ability to delay reward is largely determined by the time you are 5ish years old, but unlike height and IQ, people don't think of it that way. See the Marshmallow experiment, which has been succesfully replicated a few times. It is a big reason why life is unfair.
    - unit91 9y ago
      You've assumed that Harvard is, or should be, the goal of healthy parenting. If you have kids, stop doing this to them. You're their father/mother. Love, nurture, train, and instruct them to be good people. If they go to Harvard, good for them. If not, Harvard be damned, they're your kids. If you don't have kids yet, mature before you do.
      - tartuffe78 9y ago
        My comment was meant as a joke, I needed the /s tag I guess. I've got a 3 month old, and we went through the experience of reading the very contradictory child raising books. We're not going to try to manipulate our kids every moment or be tiger parents.
        mcv 9y ago
        I guess it's a dangerous thing to joke about. Some parents really to try to push their children to what the parents want them to become. On the other hand, my son aspires to become a lazy couch potato and gamer. He's actually quite successful on that front, but I admit I was hoping for something more.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    > up to them to be smart or hard-working or happy later in life > give them good examples As far as I’ve heard, the former largely depends on the latter. You can do a lot of shaping of what someone will become through the examples you expose them to. I remember ads when I was a kid: “Always obey traffic signals when walking. Your child is learning from you”. This was on every pedestrian traffic light around the first few weeks of school when it is encouraged to teach your first grader how to walk to school every morning. There’s also that famous anti smoking ad based on the same principle.
  - orev 9y ago
    One of the primary struggles of modern humanity is the battle against our base instincts. We instinctively seek out sugar, fat, and salt. We instinctively do things that give us dopamine hits. We instinctively want to do things that are fun and easy and avoid things that are dull and hard. Modern parenting is largely a battle against these things, as modern society makes them so easily accessible. The very concept of allowing kids to choose what they want is so completely flawed, as kids are driven more by instincts as they don’t have other more modern mental structures to rely on. Learning stuff is hard because it actually changes the brain, and kids need to be pushed because they will avoid it otherwise, as per the instincts mentioned above.
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      My experiment with my son will be to take advantage of lack of understanding of false dichotomy. Allow him to choose from preselected options with controlled outcomes. Then hold him accountable for that choice, whatever it means. I base this on the idea that decision making is a skill, and you build skills by practicing. Well, not necessarily decision making itself, but rather the mental constructs that surround decisions -- weighing alternatives, short- vs long-term planning, etc. Hopefully, then, when he starts coming up with his own options and breaking the false dichotomy, they'll be well-considered.
      - softawre 9y ago
        Like a variation on the marshmallow experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
        laumars 9y ago
        We do this all the time with our kids. eg Halloween: you can eat <large percentage> your sweets now but we will eat the rest when you've gone to bed, or you can have <smaller percentage> now but have some left for tomorrow and the rest of the week. Our eldest (he's 4 now but we've been doing it for a couple of years) responds really well to that. In fact a 100% pass rate so far. Which is unusual for a boy of that age from what I've read.
- jandrese 9y ago
  My wife was given/bought at least a dozen baby books when she got pregnant. Skimming through several of them it became clear that everybody was making it up as they went along. Some were far more neurotic than others for sure, but even among the ones with the same temperament and written around the same time the advice varied wildly. The one constant was an underlying fear that if you get this wrong you're going to ruin your child somehow, maybe even kill them. In the end I took their advice with a grain of salt and mostly went about figuring it out as I went, like most parents do. The one piece of advice I can give is to not worry so much. Kids won't be ruined because you didn't pay attention to them once, or did pay attention to soon, or attempted to engage, or were disengaged, or whatever. Also, every kid is different so blanket advice is of only marginal utility. Final bit of advice is to try not to bring up the subject of breastfeeding. Everybody knows it is the best, but some people are absolutely nuts about it and will go as far as tell you you're poisoning your child if you ever try to bottle feed them, practical concerns be damned.
  - laumars 9y ago
    > Kids won't be ruined because you didn't pay attention to them once, or did pay attention to soon, or attempted to engage, or were disengaged, or whatever. That depends on who you ask. Pretty much every kid will claim their parents have "fucked them up" and it will be in totally unpredictable ways. Either a specific toy you refused to buy them or that time you didn't let them play in the park. Ultimately the most you can hope for is that they have kids themselves one day so they can watch themselves make the same "mistakes" you made.
    - creep 9y ago
      That's also one of the beauties of parenting. One does everything one thinks is right, considering various limits, and accidentally makes a mistake the child will always remember. The child grows up, perhaps has his/her own children, and tries not to make what he/she thought were their parents' mistakes. Depending on what kind of mistake that happened to be, parenting should evolve from generation to generation, in a non-linear way of course. I also really ascribe to the idea that when a person decides to be an adult, they decide to begin taking full responsibility for their actions and thoughts. This means that, even if a person were in an abusive situation as a child, it's fundamentally their responsibility to find help and take care of themselves. This is empowering and healing, for anyone, and one of the most important reasons I believe that parents who are loving have nothing to worry about. One day your child will be free, and on that day he or she will take on the responsibility of their own life. You are there for your child as a learning and growing being yourself, and you are there up to the moments you see them off as they release themselves into the world. You can instill in them your values, but in the end they get to choose. All you have to do is let them know they get to choose, and let them know they are loved for existing. How the child best understands those lessons is the grand experiment.
- tremendulo 9y ago
  >It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them Yes and even if there somehow were credible, reproducible studies that addressed all aspects of parenting and all childhood outcomes then these still couldn't tell one how to parent because there's a moral component.
ukulele 9y ago
I like that they started with comparison to other animals, with humans being born "sooner" in the development cycle due to our larger brains. To me, this sets up a nice mental model for the first ~18 months of parenting: your child is still developing the extreme basics, in particular its brain, which is forming pathways based on your actions. So set to work forming those pathways with lots of talking, face time, and letting your child observe the world. After all, it came out to get an "early" start!
- jimktrains2 9y ago
  Many call the first 3 mo the "Fourth Trimester" for that very reason. The baby is still basically a fetus in many regards. It's around that 3 mo point that they start to really respond to external stimuli in more than basic ways and start to be able to explore their environment.
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  Here's a fun point of applicable biology terminology (by way of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  Except that there are plenty of other altricial animals. Many birds, rodents, cats, dogs, other primates, etc. It's not unique to humans.
IntronExon 9y ago
Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. You could replace “Attachment Parenting” with so many different ideas, from anti-vaxxer ideology to AGW denialism. It’s painful to think about just how broadly applicable the observation of the author is beyond the realm of this article. As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power, profit, or comfort. In particular New Age-ism, political identity, and alternative “medicine” are hotbeds of this.
- pcmaffey 9y ago
  > As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power, profit, or comfort. I believe this is the driving motivation behind 'attachment parenting' (what a weird term) and general movements to rely on personal knowledge.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Personal knowledge is the source of these issues; it’s a fallacy that we’re some kind of wise and insightful creature which is only led astray in groups. Tribes, cults, and the misinformation they produce are just the result of our collectivized fantasies about ourselves and our environment. At least as a group we can start to produce something which can be tested.
ada1981 9y ago
Just because there is a lot of bad advice. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Attunement and Attachment is real and worth investing in.
cdubzzz 9y ago
> There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none. Yeah... no. As a new father of a now five-month old boy, I very highly recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father by Armin A. Brott. They are a far cry from a "wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer". It's unfortunate that this (so far) otherwise interesting article is doing what so many of the books it is criticizing do... giving little attention to the fatherhood side of parenting.
- ourmandave 9y ago
  Weighing on every new dad I ever met (at least in the background) is, "How the hell am I gonna pay for all this?"
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - taeric 9y ago
    That isn't limited to dads. Nor is it not recognized by single people. There is an XKCD that jokes about being able to have a treasure chest where some cars have families posted.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Brott writes about this a bit in his books - mostly about the societal expectation of father as "bread winner" who should be concerned about the fiscal side of child-rearing because that is his (some might say sole) responsibility vs. mother as care-giver and nurturer. You can count me as at least one new dad you've, well, not necessarily met, whose primary concern is more along the lines of, "How the hell am I gonna be involved with my son's life?" (:
    - navbaker 9y ago
      >>"How the hell am I gonna be involved with my son's life?" I’m actually in the process of changing careers due to the realization that remaining on my current track would put me at work before they get out of bed and home from work after they’re in bed for the next 15-ish years. I refuse to miss my kids growing up during this one shot at life I have.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Every single baby guide book is 100% absolutely garbage. I encourage every single one of you that are about to have children to never EVER buy one. All they do is talk about the "average" baby, and you'll soon find that you and your spouse feel entirely inadequate because your baby isn't sleeping as much, eating as much, moving as much, interacting as much, etc. What the books never tell you is that sure, there may be average numbers available, but the STANDARD DEVIATION is HUGE. No baby is average. My wife was convinced our first child had sleeping issues because he slept 2 hrs less than average. It turns out that's just who he is, he sleeps a lot less than most kids, but still at the bottom of the range of healthy. All it does is fuck with your head, so just take a cue from other parents around you.
- arethuza 9y ago
  When our kids were babies everyone we knew here in the UK seemed to have an obsession with getting their kids off to sleep as early as possible (about 7pm usually - mostly by putting them in a separate room and ignoring them) and then were amazed that their kids woke up really early. We let our kids stay up until they went to sleep at their own pace and then they seemed to wake up at a relatively civilized time.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    My 1 year old went to bed at 11pm and just got up today at 8AM. We are cosleeping, so our habits matter a lot, but he just likes to stay up later and we haven’t been able to push his bedtime earlier (and if he doesn’t get his 3 hour nap in the afternoon, god help us. I’m not too worried about it.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    I had the same experience as you. My hypothesis is that all the nonsense about kids needing 12 hours of sleep/"more than adults"/early bedtime is just that, started by parents who wanted some time to themselves at night and perpetuated through convention. Our kids started sleeping, waking up and generally behaving better once we stopped enforcing arbitrary bedtimes.
  - 9y ago
jankotek 9y ago
Hm, not even mention of genital mutilation, that is truly diabolical side of this industry :-(
- jstarfish 9y ago
  From my recent experiences with childbirth over the last decade or so, the topic (for non-religious purposes) seems to be becoming progressively more taboo. For our most recent child, the only times I ever saw it come up were when indecisive parents asked about it on bulletin boards and when the delivering doctor asked us our decision on the matter. The books barely mentioned it, much less advocated it.
eli 9y ago
Surprised they don't mention economist Emily Oster's book Expecting Better, which is an imperfect book but takes a data-driven Freakonomics-style approach to pregnancy. I enjoyed it. The real challenge is that there's so little good data to begin with.
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blowski 9y ago
An absolutely wonderful read. I read three widely recommended books, which diametrically opposed each other on almost everything. So I decided to ignore most of the advice, and rely on friends, family, medical experts, and my own intuition. Anything the books mostly agreed on, I did tend to follow. The three books I read: * The Contented Little Baby - https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-ebook/dp/B006K26BPU/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-eboo... * The Fourth Trimester - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Protecting-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B00AQDIP6M/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Prot... * The Baby Whisperer - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Communicate/dp/0091857023/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Comm... The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that every parent develops nostalgia." Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of 8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning', who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of love from their parents.
- laumars 9y ago
  When we had our first born, advice was to wake the baby for feeding so they get used to regular routines. We did this once and he screamed for the entirety of that day so we just fed him at irregular intervals but tried to ensure he still got the right number of feeds in a day. When we had our second we were told not to wake her. But when she did wake she was so hungry she would have a screaming fit so we learned she preferred to get woken for lunch. Moral of the story: try as hard as you might to generalise child rearing, they'll always find a way to contradict good advice.
  - amag 9y ago
    I have two kids and they are about as different as two kids can be. They are truly the inversion of each other in every way. There's no way to generalize, what works/worked on one would never work on the other. The only exception (sounds corny but it's true) is loads of love. But I don't need a book to tell me that, though sometimes a reminder..
ksk 9y ago
How is this any different from all the 'advice' we get on programming topics, how to write code, how to be a good leader, how to interview well, how to hire, how to fire, and on and on..
- taeric 9y ago
  It is almost like self help is a difficult topic that has a large market of people looking for prescriptive help. Snidely, I can't help but muse on the traps and fallacies that are abound in this sort of "looking for answers" method of searching. Does make me wonder, do folks have collections of "experiments that failed" with speculation or answers as to why? A journal of "the experiments that failed replication this year."
arnarbi 9y ago
If you enjoyed the article, I'd recommend his book "Help", which picks apart self-help books on other subjects.
flarg 9y ago
My wife, an expert in early years education, was mightly impressed with raising boys by steve biddulph.
dzink 9y ago
It's not just baby advice that is fuzzy, it's baby products as well. Every baby business that is ads-based (from blogs, to registries) festers insecurities in parents, so they can sell ridiculously expensive basic products to make you feel a little better: I just bought the "best" (most expensive) rocker on the market, I will be ok. Google also prioritizes the wrong things in content as well (word count and recency) - so most of the searches lead to the same crap - the same shallow ideas, reiterated with as many words and ads as possible. As a parent with the skills to build, after seeing all of these problems with my first child, I started building a private, actually safe baby registry and vetted ads-free recommendation engine under https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com . The books industry leans on extremes. If it doesn't trigger controversy and insecurity in you, in some way, it doesn't sell. Every child is different and every pregnancy is different. The best source of information so far are medical studies, wherever you can dig them out.
peterwwillis 9y ago
When I reached the age of reason, I asked my boomer parents (a mental health practitioner and a corporate V.P.) if they really thought there was a book that had every answer they'd need as parents. "Of course," they replied. But as a former subject of the material, I can tell you they definitely didn't have all the answers. As privileged and intelligent as they were, they still fucked up. But I'm also not dead, and on the whole I'm only mildly traumatized by the unnecessary drugs and suffocating restriction on personal freedom and privacy. So I really don't care about what kind of baby advice they intoned, and I don't think parents should care either. Just keep the little bastard alive until it can move out on its own, so you can have a whole new world of worries to consider.
ThomPete 9y ago
When my first son was born, my wife subscribed to a website called something along the lines of "The Net Midwife". A former midwife answered health questions from parents. All her answers were available online for free but if you wanted her to answer your questions, you would have to pay for the subscription. Why would you want to pay for something which was freely available to you? Well as it turns out, even though 99% of the questions parents asked were already answered parent's had this idea that their child was unique and they would ask questions like "my child coughs and it says a little noise everything she inhales right after" The only group of people more naive and easy to persuade are modern dog people.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  It's easy to be persuaded by answering services when you're dealing with what's arguably the thing you will ever be most responsible for. Plenty of people/businesses take advantage of that.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Yup. One thing I have never done though is read other peoples advice on how to raise my kids. That's too important to leave to others :)
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      There is something darkly funny and deeply meta about how this is being down voted.
      - ThomPete 9y ago
        Yeah, perhaps because people thought I meant I would never use an advice given. What I meant was that I would never buy a book to get advice. Anyway...
        lostlogin 9y ago
        The trick is getting people to give advice when you ask for it. Having advice fired at you by every human you meet seems to be a thing. Even wearing headphones doesn’t stop them.
pnathan 9y ago
After spending a little too much time on advice books, I put them permanently on the shelf, dispensed to used book stores as time went on. Particularly awful were the "What to Expect" books, which were doctrinaire and promised great ills if the doctrines weren't kept. I kept a couple anthropological books, including Lancy's, and the Mayo Clinic's medical guides to pregnancy and the first year. Too, a developmental book "Touchpoints" which seemed to have a pragmatic style and gave some understanding of typical development. For specific baby management concerns, we were trained by the nurses at the hospital, and visits to the doc addressed things that came up otherwise. Thing is - what the anthro and historical views of baby raising taught me - If your kid has Issues, that will be a medical situation, and should be addressed medically. If your kid does not have Issues, then largely they will turn out as they will, if you treat them decently and well, for the first year. Feed em, clean em, read to em, put em to bed, and it'll be largely okay. As they come to more reasoning and thinking, influence increases, but the first year is sort of a wash in many ways. There are huge variations in how different groups treat the first year, and it doesn't seem to matter in turning out functional humans. Behavior issues can be mitigated by routine and structure, but not avoided. The idea of each kid being this special & unique flower is sort of a 20c development. That's important to remember and contemplate.
tremendulo 9y ago
If you read with your kids and don't get divorced then you've already done a great job I think.
- module0000 9y ago
  Ouch, sounds like an actual experienced parent left that comment... People underestimate the difficulty of not getting divorced when you have kids - more so if you have twins etc.
  - mslate 9y ago
    Mind elaborating?
- cloverich 9y ago
  I grew up w/ divorced parents and generally most of my friends also had divorced parents. I don't think the divorce as such is such a big deal, its really whether or not both parents keep "showing up". I'd take divorced parents that show up vs married-absentee's any day. EDIT: I realized you might be meaning -- if you don't let the struggle of parent-hood tear apart your relationship with your spouse, you're doing a good job. In which case I agree 100%.
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    I agree, didn't grow up with divorced parents, and I'm not a divorced parent, but it seems - especially in this day - this just isn't as much as a bad omen as it used to be. I see more cooperative parents (whether they're living together or not) than un-cooperative ones. Married or not. It's just a title to a lot of these people. Also, if that's what the child grew up with, it's probably less likely to affect them negatively (assuming all positives everywhere else).
  - BLKNSLVR 9y ago
    Not sure if I agree re: divorce. Mummy and Daddy are the most basic, rock-solid concepts for a child, and a divorce can't be anything but world-redefining for any child not yet old enough to have an understanding of the complexities of human relationships. Yes, this does depend on the "showing up"-ness of each parent. My kids are strongly attached to their mother. She's the primary go-to, but if I'm away for work, or late home for whatever reason, they're surprisingly happy and comforted when I return home. If we got divorced, the kids would be shattered and it would affect them forever. The scale depends on their resilience, but they would be changed for the worse in the immediate. Future-wise, maybe it would better prepare them for the challenges of life and instill them with some kind of resilience, but I think there would be a part of them permanently broken. It's all shades of grey though, it all depends on the healthiness of the parents relationship. A divorce can be a better option for kids if the parents' relationship is unhealthy.
bennesvig 9y ago
I've found baby advice books to be 85% fluff/filler and 15% actionable advice. But that 15% can dramatically improve quality of life / the amount of sleep I get each night.
J-J 9y ago
As we are born so helpless; "who or what raised the first human baby?" is the first thought that comes to mind!
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  That development didn't happen overnight. Our species gradually evolved into one where babies are born helpless because it apparently made evolutionary sense. Logic dictates that it was a gradual change enforced by the survival of the fittest.
sago 9y ago
A business mentor of mine once gave me this wisdom: The best selling diet books don't contain the best diet advice. The best selling dating books don't contain the best dating advice. The best selling business books don't contain the best business advice. I think this is logical, to some extent, i.e.: Advice books are optimised for excitement and the illusion of inspiration. Because results take a long time to demonstrate, massive aggregate data, and the elimination of countless other factors, nobody can possibly work out whether the advice in a book is any good before they buy it. Instead they look to reviews, which are based on enjoyment and inspiration. Someone will read it, and coincidentally find success, and you have your testimonial. Someone will read it, and fail, and nobody will know. So to make your book sell, the quality of the advice is mostly irrelevant, it is the engagement that makes the sale. Exciting truisms and unfalsifiable chattiness sell advice books, not good advice. Reading advice books 'just in case' you come across good advice, is like reading a string of random numbers 'just in case' you come across the lottery results. Personally I'm a bit less sceptical, but only a very small bit.
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206 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

I think the real secret of many advice books, baby or otherwise, is that nobody knows what they're doing. It's especially hard for baby and other parenting advice, though, because the goals are so varied. What is the aim? A quiet baby? A happy baby? A hard working child, a smart child, a well-behaved child, a happy child? A well-adjusted (whatever that means) adult? A driven and successful adult? A good relationship with the kid? Any of thousands of others? It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
In my view, its even misguided to try and 'make' your baby into any of these things. You can help them develop, but its largely up to them to be smart or hard-working or happy later in life. We can at most give them good examples, and try to socialize them?
- tartuffe78 9y ago
  You try that, I'll try the other way and we'll see whose baby gets into Harvard!
  - titanix2 9y ago
    That does not takes the genetic lottery into account.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    My three Eagle Scouts are respectively a Sargeant, an Engineer and a Musician. The Engineer went to CMU and works at a startup in Redwood City. The Sargent did his tour of Iraq in transportation (doing vehicle recovery) and returned a little busted up; now has a MechE degree and is a process Engineer. The Musician studied at Cleveland Institute, but turned to the dark side and now works IT.
    - opwieurposiu 9y ago
      Great work dad!
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    My brothers and I were brought up in much the same way. However, we have not all ended up in the same place. One of my brothers managed to spend over half a decade in and out of odd jobs, spending all his money on drugs (thank fuck none of the hard stuff). Me and my other brother have managed to carve out a good life for ourselves, at least by society's external measure. People will go their own direction in life. You can prod them and help them on their journey, but you can't fundamentally change who they are.
    - cm2012 9y ago
      On a tangent, the ability to delay reward is largely determined by the time you are 5ish years old, but unlike height and IQ, people don't think of it that way. See the Marshmallow experiment, which has been succesfully replicated a few times. It is a big reason why life is unfair.
  - unit91 9y ago
    You've assumed that Harvard is, or should be, the goal of healthy parenting. If you have kids, stop doing this to them. You're their father/mother. Love, nurture, train, and instruct them to be good people. If they go to Harvard, good for them. If not, Harvard be damned, they're your kids. If you don't have kids yet, mature before you do.
    - tartuffe78 9y ago
      My comment was meant as a joke, I needed the /s tag I guess. I've got a 3 month old, and we went through the experience of reading the very contradictory child raising books. We're not going to try to manipulate our kids every moment or be tiger parents.
      - mcv 9y ago
        I guess it's a dangerous thing to joke about. Some parents really to try to push their children to what the parents want them to become. On the other hand, my son aspires to become a lazy couch potato and gamer. He's actually quite successful on that front, but I admit I was hoping for something more.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > up to them to be smart or hard-working or happy later in life > give them good examples As far as I’ve heard, the former largely depends on the latter. You can do a lot of shaping of what someone will become through the examples you expose them to. I remember ads when I was a kid: “Always obey traffic signals when walking. Your child is learning from you”. This was on every pedestrian traffic light around the first few weeks of school when it is encouraged to teach your first grader how to walk to school every morning. There’s also that famous anti smoking ad based on the same principle.
- orev 9y ago
  One of the primary struggles of modern humanity is the battle against our base instincts. We instinctively seek out sugar, fat, and salt. We instinctively do things that give us dopamine hits. We instinctively want to do things that are fun and easy and avoid things that are dull and hard. Modern parenting is largely a battle against these things, as modern society makes them so easily accessible. The very concept of allowing kids to choose what they want is so completely flawed, as kids are driven more by instincts as they don’t have other more modern mental structures to rely on. Learning stuff is hard because it actually changes the brain, and kids need to be pushed because they will avoid it otherwise, as per the instincts mentioned above.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    My experiment with my son will be to take advantage of lack of understanding of false dichotomy. Allow him to choose from preselected options with controlled outcomes. Then hold him accountable for that choice, whatever it means. I base this on the idea that decision making is a skill, and you build skills by practicing. Well, not necessarily decision making itself, but rather the mental constructs that surround decisions -- weighing alternatives, short- vs long-term planning, etc. Hopefully, then, when he starts coming up with his own options and breaking the false dichotomy, they'll be well-considered.
    - softawre 9y ago
      Like a variation on the marshmallow experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
      - laumars 9y ago
        We do this all the time with our kids. eg Halloween: you can eat <large percentage> your sweets now but we will eat the rest when you've gone to bed, or you can have <smaller percentage> now but have some left for tomorrow and the rest of the week. Our eldest (he's 4 now but we've been doing it for a couple of years) responds really well to that. In fact a 100% pass rate so far. Which is unusual for a boy of that age from what I've read.
jandrese 9y ago
My wife was given/bought at least a dozen baby books when she got pregnant. Skimming through several of them it became clear that everybody was making it up as they went along. Some were far more neurotic than others for sure, but even among the ones with the same temperament and written around the same time the advice varied wildly. The one constant was an underlying fear that if you get this wrong you're going to ruin your child somehow, maybe even kill them. In the end I took their advice with a grain of salt and mostly went about figuring it out as I went, like most parents do. The one piece of advice I can give is to not worry so much. Kids won't be ruined because you didn't pay attention to them once, or did pay attention to soon, or attempted to engage, or were disengaged, or whatever. Also, every kid is different so blanket advice is of only marginal utility. Final bit of advice is to try not to bring up the subject of breastfeeding. Everybody knows it is the best, but some people are absolutely nuts about it and will go as far as tell you you're poisoning your child if you ever try to bottle feed them, practical concerns be damned.
- laumars 9y ago
  > Kids won't be ruined because you didn't pay attention to them once, or did pay attention to soon, or attempted to engage, or were disengaged, or whatever. That depends on who you ask. Pretty much every kid will claim their parents have "fucked them up" and it will be in totally unpredictable ways. Either a specific toy you refused to buy them or that time you didn't let them play in the park. Ultimately the most you can hope for is that they have kids themselves one day so they can watch themselves make the same "mistakes" you made.
  - creep 9y ago
    That's also one of the beauties of parenting. One does everything one thinks is right, considering various limits, and accidentally makes a mistake the child will always remember. The child grows up, perhaps has his/her own children, and tries not to make what he/she thought were their parents' mistakes. Depending on what kind of mistake that happened to be, parenting should evolve from generation to generation, in a non-linear way of course. I also really ascribe to the idea that when a person decides to be an adult, they decide to begin taking full responsibility for their actions and thoughts. This means that, even if a person were in an abusive situation as a child, it's fundamentally their responsibility to find help and take care of themselves. This is empowering and healing, for anyone, and one of the most important reasons I believe that parents who are loving have nothing to worry about. One day your child will be free, and on that day he or she will take on the responsibility of their own life. You are there for your child as a learning and growing being yourself, and you are there up to the moments you see them off as they release themselves into the world. You can instill in them your values, but in the end they get to choose. All you have to do is let them know they get to choose, and let them know they are loved for existing. How the child best understands those lessons is the grand experiment.
tremendulo 9y ago
>It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them Yes and even if there somehow were credible, reproducible studies that addressed all aspects of parenting and all childhood outcomes then these still couldn't tell one how to parent because there's a moral component.

ukulele 9y ago

I like that they started with comparison to other animals, with humans being born "sooner" in the development cycle due to our larger brains. To me, this sets up a nice mental model for the first ~18 months of parenting: your child is still developing the extreme basics, in particular its brain, which is forming pathways based on your actions. So set to work forming those pathways with lots of talking, face time, and letting your child observe the world. After all, it came out to get an "early" start!

jimktrains2 9y ago
Many call the first 3 mo the "Fourth Trimester" for that very reason. The baby is still basically a fetus in many regards. It's around that 3 mo point that they start to really respond to external stimuli in more than basic ways and start to be able to explore their environment.
EvanAnderson 9y ago
Here's a fun point of applicable biology terminology (by way of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial
SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
Except that there are plenty of other altricial animals. Many birds, rodents, cats, dogs, other primates, etc. It's not unique to humans.

IntronExon 9y ago

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. You could replace “Attachment Parenting” with so many different ideas, from anti-vaxxer ideology to AGW denialism. It’s painful to think about just how broadly applicable the observation of the author is beyond the realm of this article. As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power, profit, or comfort. In particular New Age-ism, political identity, and alternative “medicine” are hotbeds of this.

pcmaffey 9y ago
> As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power, profit, or comfort. I believe this is the driving motivation behind 'attachment parenting' (what a weird term) and general movements to rely on personal knowledge.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  Personal knowledge is the source of these issues; it’s a fallacy that we’re some kind of wise and insightful creature which is only led astray in groups. Tribes, cults, and the misinformation they produce are just the result of our collectivized fantasies about ourselves and our environment. At least as a group we can start to produce something which can be tested.

ada1981 9y ago

Just because there is a lot of bad advice. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Attunement and Attachment is real and worth investing in.

cdubzzz 9y ago

> There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none. Yeah... no. As a new father of a now five-month old boy, I very highly recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father by Armin A. Brott. They are a far cry from a "wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer". It's unfortunate that this (so far) otherwise interesting article is doing what so many of the books it is criticizing do... giving little attention to the fatherhood side of parenting.

ourmandave 9y ago
Weighing on every new dad I ever met (at least in the background) is, "How the hell am I gonna pay for all this?"
- deleted 9y ago
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- taeric 9y ago
  That isn't limited to dads. Nor is it not recognized by single people. There is an XKCD that jokes about being able to have a treasure chest where some cars have families posted.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Brott writes about this a bit in his books - mostly about the societal expectation of father as "bread winner" who should be concerned about the fiscal side of child-rearing because that is his (some might say sole) responsibility vs. mother as care-giver and nurturer. You can count me as at least one new dad you've, well, not necessarily met, whose primary concern is more along the lines of, "How the hell am I gonna be involved with my son's life?" (:
  - navbaker 9y ago
    >>"How the hell am I gonna be involved with my son's life?" I’m actually in the process of changing careers due to the realization that remaining on my current track would put me at work before they get out of bed and home from work after they’re in bed for the next 15-ish years. I refuse to miss my kids growing up during this one shot at life I have.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Every single baby guide book is 100% absolutely garbage. I encourage every single one of you that are about to have children to never EVER buy one. All they do is talk about the "average" baby, and you'll soon find that you and your spouse feel entirely inadequate because your baby isn't sleeping as much, eating as much, moving as much, interacting as much, etc. What the books never tell you is that sure, there may be average numbers available, but the STANDARD DEVIATION is HUGE. No baby is average. My wife was convinced our first child had sleeping issues because he slept 2 hrs less than average. It turns out that's just who he is, he sleeps a lot less than most kids, but still at the bottom of the range of healthy. All it does is fuck with your head, so just take a cue from other parents around you.

arethuza 9y ago
When our kids were babies everyone we knew here in the UK seemed to have an obsession with getting their kids off to sleep as early as possible (about 7pm usually - mostly by putting them in a separate room and ignoring them) and then were amazed that their kids woke up really early. We let our kids stay up until they went to sleep at their own pace and then they seemed to wake up at a relatively civilized time.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  My 1 year old went to bed at 11pm and just got up today at 8AM. We are cosleeping, so our habits matter a lot, but he just likes to stay up later and we haven’t been able to push his bedtime earlier (and if he doesn’t get his 3 hour nap in the afternoon, god help us. I’m not too worried about it.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  I had the same experience as you. My hypothesis is that all the nonsense about kids needing 12 hours of sleep/"more than adults"/early bedtime is just that, started by parents who wanted some time to themselves at night and perpetuated through convention. Our kids started sleeping, waking up and generally behaving better once we stopped enforcing arbitrary bedtimes.
- 9y ago

jankotek 9y ago

Hm, not even mention of genital mutilation, that is truly diabolical side of this industry :-(

jstarfish 9y ago
From my recent experiences with childbirth over the last decade or so, the topic (for non-religious purposes) seems to be becoming progressively more taboo. For our most recent child, the only times I ever saw it come up were when indecisive parents asked about it on bulletin boards and when the delivering doctor asked us our decision on the matter. The books barely mentioned it, much less advocated it.

eli 9y ago

Surprised they don't mention economist Emily Oster's book Expecting Better, which is an imperfect book but takes a data-driven Freakonomics-style approach to pregnancy. I enjoyed it. The real challenge is that there's so little good data to begin with.

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blowski 9y ago

An absolutely wonderful read. I read three widely recommended books, which diametrically opposed each other on almost everything. So I decided to ignore most of the advice, and rely on friends, family, medical experts, and my own intuition. Anything the books mostly agreed on, I did tend to follow. The three books I read: * The Contented Little Baby - https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-ebook/dp/B006K26BPU/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-eboo... * The Fourth Trimester - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Protecting-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B00AQDIP6M/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Prot... * The Baby Whisperer - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Communicate/dp/0091857023/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Comm... The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that every parent develops nostalgia." Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of 8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning', who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of love from their parents.

laumars 9y ago
When we had our first born, advice was to wake the baby for feeding so they get used to regular routines. We did this once and he screamed for the entirety of that day so we just fed him at irregular intervals but tried to ensure he still got the right number of feeds in a day. When we had our second we were told not to wake her. But when she did wake she was so hungry she would have a screaming fit so we learned she preferred to get woken for lunch. Moral of the story: try as hard as you might to generalise child rearing, they'll always find a way to contradict good advice.
- amag 9y ago
  I have two kids and they are about as different as two kids can be. They are truly the inversion of each other in every way. There's no way to generalize, what works/worked on one would never work on the other. The only exception (sounds corny but it's true) is loads of love. But I don't need a book to tell me that, though sometimes a reminder..

ksk 9y ago

How is this any different from all the 'advice' we get on programming topics, how to write code, how to be a good leader, how to interview well, how to hire, how to fire, and on and on..

taeric 9y ago
It is almost like self help is a difficult topic that has a large market of people looking for prescriptive help. Snidely, I can't help but muse on the traps and fallacies that are abound in this sort of "looking for answers" method of searching. Does make me wonder, do folks have collections of "experiments that failed" with speculation or answers as to why? A journal of "the experiments that failed replication this year."

arnarbi 9y ago

If you enjoyed the article, I'd recommend his book "Help", which picks apart self-help books on other subjects.

flarg 9y ago

My wife, an expert in early years education, was mightly impressed with raising boys by steve biddulph.

dzink 9y ago

It's not just baby advice that is fuzzy, it's baby products as well. Every baby business that is ads-based (from blogs, to registries) festers insecurities in parents, so they can sell ridiculously expensive basic products to make you feel a little better: I just bought the "best" (most expensive) rocker on the market, I will be ok. Google also prioritizes the wrong things in content as well (word count and recency) - so most of the searches lead to the same crap - the same shallow ideas, reiterated with as many words and ads as possible. As a parent with the skills to build, after seeing all of these problems with my first child, I started building a private, actually safe baby registry and vetted ads-free recommendation engine under https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com . The books industry leans on extremes. If it doesn't trigger controversy and insecurity in you, in some way, it doesn't sell. Every child is different and every pregnancy is different. The best source of information so far are medical studies, wherever you can dig them out.

peterwwillis 9y ago

When I reached the age of reason, I asked my boomer parents (a mental health practitioner and a corporate V.P.) if they really thought there was a book that had every answer they'd need as parents. "Of course," they replied. But as a former subject of the material, I can tell you they definitely didn't have all the answers. As privileged and intelligent as they were, they still fucked up. But I'm also not dead, and on the whole I'm only mildly traumatized by the unnecessary drugs and suffocating restriction on personal freedom and privacy. So I really don't care about what kind of baby advice they intoned, and I don't think parents should care either. Just keep the little bastard alive until it can move out on its own, so you can have a whole new world of worries to consider.

ThomPete 9y ago

When my first son was born, my wife subscribed to a website called something along the lines of "The Net Midwife". A former midwife answered health questions from parents. All her answers were available online for free but if you wanted her to answer your questions, you would have to pay for the subscription. Why would you want to pay for something which was freely available to you? Well as it turns out, even though 99% of the questions parents asked were already answered parent's had this idea that their child was unique and they would ask questions like "my child coughs and it says a little noise everything she inhales right after" The only group of people more naive and easy to persuade are modern dog people.

EADGBE 9y ago
It's easy to be persuaded by answering services when you're dealing with what's arguably the thing you will ever be most responsible for. Plenty of people/businesses take advantage of that.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Yup. One thing I have never done though is read other peoples advice on how to raise my kids. That's too important to leave to others :)
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    There is something darkly funny and deeply meta about how this is being down voted.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      Yeah, perhaps because people thought I meant I would never use an advice given. What I meant was that I would never buy a book to get advice. Anyway...
      - lostlogin 9y ago
        The trick is getting people to give advice when you ask for it. Having advice fired at you by every human you meet seems to be a thing. Even wearing headphones doesn’t stop them.

pnathan 9y ago

After spending a little too much time on advice books, I put them permanently on the shelf, dispensed to used book stores as time went on. Particularly awful were the "What to Expect" books, which were doctrinaire and promised great ills if the doctrines weren't kept. I kept a couple anthropological books, including Lancy's, and the Mayo Clinic's medical guides to pregnancy and the first year. Too, a developmental book "Touchpoints" which seemed to have a pragmatic style and gave some understanding of typical development. For specific baby management concerns, we were trained by the nurses at the hospital, and visits to the doc addressed things that came up otherwise. Thing is - what the anthro and historical views of baby raising taught me - If your kid has Issues, that will be a medical situation, and should be addressed medically. If your kid does not have Issues, then largely they will turn out as they will, if you treat them decently and well, for the first year. Feed em, clean em, read to em, put em to bed, and it'll be largely okay. As they come to more reasoning and thinking, influence increases, but the first year is sort of a wash in many ways. There are huge variations in how different groups treat the first year, and it doesn't seem to matter in turning out functional humans. Behavior issues can be mitigated by routine and structure, but not avoided. The idea of each kid being this special & unique flower is sort of a 20c development. That's important to remember and contemplate.

tremendulo 9y ago

If you read with your kids and don't get divorced then you've already done a great job I think.

module0000 9y ago
Ouch, sounds like an actual experienced parent left that comment... People underestimate the difficulty of not getting divorced when you have kids - more so if you have twins etc.
- mslate 9y ago
  Mind elaborating?
cloverich 9y ago
I grew up w/ divorced parents and generally most of my friends also had divorced parents. I don't think the divorce as such is such a big deal, its really whether or not both parents keep "showing up". I'd take divorced parents that show up vs married-absentee's any day. EDIT: I realized you might be meaning -- if you don't let the struggle of parent-hood tear apart your relationship with your spouse, you're doing a good job. In which case I agree 100%.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  I agree, didn't grow up with divorced parents, and I'm not a divorced parent, but it seems - especially in this day - this just isn't as much as a bad omen as it used to be. I see more cooperative parents (whether they're living together or not) than un-cooperative ones. Married or not. It's just a title to a lot of these people. Also, if that's what the child grew up with, it's probably less likely to affect them negatively (assuming all positives everywhere else).
- BLKNSLVR 9y ago
  Not sure if I agree re: divorce. Mummy and Daddy are the most basic, rock-solid concepts for a child, and a divorce can't be anything but world-redefining for any child not yet old enough to have an understanding of the complexities of human relationships. Yes, this does depend on the "showing up"-ness of each parent. My kids are strongly attached to their mother. She's the primary go-to, but if I'm away for work, or late home for whatever reason, they're surprisingly happy and comforted when I return home. If we got divorced, the kids would be shattered and it would affect them forever. The scale depends on their resilience, but they would be changed for the worse in the immediate. Future-wise, maybe it would better prepare them for the challenges of life and instill them with some kind of resilience, but I think there would be a part of them permanently broken. It's all shades of grey though, it all depends on the healthiness of the parents relationship. A divorce can be a better option for kids if the parents' relationship is unhealthy.

bennesvig 9y ago

I've found baby advice books to be 85% fluff/filler and 15% actionable advice. But that 15% can dramatically improve quality of life / the amount of sleep I get each night.

J-J 9y ago

As we are born so helpless; "who or what raised the first human baby?" is the first thought that comes to mind!

Freak_NL 9y ago
That development didn't happen overnight. Our species gradually evolved into one where babies are born helpless because it apparently made evolutionary sense. Logic dictates that it was a gradual change enforced by the survival of the fittest.

sago 9y ago

A business mentor of mine once gave me this wisdom: The best selling diet books don't contain the best diet advice. The best selling dating books don't contain the best dating advice. The best selling business books don't contain the best business advice. I think this is logical, to some extent, i.e.: Advice books are optimised for excitement and the illusion of inspiration. Because results take a long time to demonstrate, massive aggregate data, and the elimination of countless other factors, nobody can possibly work out whether the advice in a book is any good before they buy it. Instead they look to reviews, which are based on enjoyment and inspiration. Someone will read it, and coincidentally find success, and you have your testimonial. Someone will read it, and fail, and nobody will know. So to make your book sell, the quality of the advice is mostly irrelevant, it is the engagement that makes the sale. Exciting truisms and unfalsifiable chattiness sell advice books, not good advice. Reading advice books 'just in case' you come across good advice, is like reading a string of random numbers 'just in case' you come across the lottery results. Personally I'm a bit less sceptical, but only a very small bit.

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