I don’t feel like exactly the proper audience for this book, as I’m not a new parent or planning for kids in a soon time frame, so I’m not sure how helpful a review is from me. I wouldn’t have read this book at all if it weren’t this month’s pick for a book club, but what was interesting to me about this book, vs just any early life parenting book, is the author’s background in economics and her focus on sharing data surrounding all the questions of early childhood, from breastfeeding to sleep training to development milestones. Her hope is that armed with data, the reader will be able to make the best informed decisions for their family and ease the anxiety surrounding some of the biggest, most polarizing questions of early parenting. ⁣
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Oster does a great job of packing in a ton of info into a brief section on two dozen topics. She distills down a comprehensive boatload of inquiry into the available research, and explains to the reader what studies she thinks are trustworthy or not, and what measures she’s looking at to make that decision. The only thing I would have wanted at times was even more information, but also then the book would have been huge. I also didn’t read the footnotes, because I assumed they were just citations, and then belatedly realized she includes additional commentary in there at times, so it’s possible that would have solved my more-info-please issues. ⁣
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This book is quite informative and well done! But also I wasn’t totally engaged, which was of course due to my own fault of reading a book on a topic I’m much less invested in. ⁣