If you are trying to decide whether to take the time to read Emily Oster’s (author of Expecting Better) new book Cribsheet, then you probably aren’t the type to just take my word for it. It’s definitely worth reading, but will not solve all your parenting problems and debates as some reviewers have said. It’s amazing how many high profile reviews I found of this book before I sat down to write this review. This is a very reviewed book, but not all the reviewers seem to have really read the book.
For example, The Atlantic led with the headline: “Parenting Like an Economist Is a Lot Less Stressful” which makes little sense at all in the context of the book. I’m assuming the headline was just added by an editor and not the reviewer/interviewer. In the introduction to the interview, the writer says “Reading Cribsheet has a soothing effect, for it stresses that there is not a single optimal set of choices about child-rearing”…well, that may soothe you, but I really wanted there to be more definitive evidence about anything/everything/some things. It’s a good interview though.
To be fair, Emily Oster does find some evidence for some potential causation for a few things (note all the qualifiers here), but her main message is that the evidence for most parenting decisions isn’t strong enough to base a decision on. This is certainly comforting when second guessing decisions already made, but it doesn’t help us with future decisions which Ms. Oster stresses are really all about what is preferred by your family.
While I do immensely appreciate her neutrality when it comes to breastfeeding (this is one of the chapters with lots of interesting evidence), despite her best efforts she is not neutral on sleep training. I think she tries. She talks a lot about how there is not enough evidence either way for the sleep training debate, but because sleep training worked for her, she finds it difficult not to endorse it. Her point that she finds nothing proving harm with sleep training has made a vocal minority angry because obviously not being able to prove harm doesn’t mean there isn’t any–but she isn’t saying they proved it causes no harm either. She knows, as we do, that anything might be causing harm and we can’t function if we are scared of everything.
There are so many amazing details and facts in this book that it is impossible not to read something that you just have to tell your spouse or friend. For that reason, it is a great addition to your collection even if you don’t have any guilt that you need to assuage with Oster’s insistence that there is no good evidence you did anything wrong (or right).
Like Expecting Better where she tells us that a sip of wine won’t kill our fetus (and the moral authorities freak out because they all believe if someone has a sip they will think it is ok to drink the bottle), Cribsheet doesn’t come down super hard on co-sleeping if you do it right…commence with the screaming.