Hacker News Books

I highly recommend the book Cribsheet on this topic (https://www.amazon.com/Cribsheet-Data-Driven-Relaxed-Parenti...). The author is an economist at Brown and applies research techniques to determine where there are causal relationships between parental behavior and child outcomes.

For example, she looks into the research behind breastfeeding vs formula – a very hot topic where I already see the pitchforks coming out in this thread. Her conclusion if I'm recalling correctly is that there are only relatively minor direct benefits to breast milk over formula. But there are significant benefits to being the type of parent that is intense + dedicated enough to breast feed despite how unpleasant many mothers find it to be, and that dedication explains why studies turn up larger differences in outcomes between breastfed vs formula fed babies (it's just correlation vs causation).

Emily Oster's books and recently her newsletter. They're not for everyone but they are definitely for the type of person who asks for parenting advice on Hacker News :P

She's a professor of economics and her main shtick is that she evaluates the academic literature behind a lot of the big decisions facing new parents during pregnancy and early childhood. Personally the parts I found most useful are areas where people have extremely strong opinions about what parents should do while in reality the data is too weak to justify any strong views.

Her first book, Expecting Better, is mostly about pregnancy. Her second book, Cribsheet, is about early childhood (through pre-K).

She also started doing a newsletter recently that I've been enjoying. https://emilyoster.substack.com/

Since I'm a skeptical nerd I started getting more and more cynical about all the anecdotal stories from friends, books, and on the web. Then I found Emily Oster's books.

Wikipedia snippets: "Emily Oster is an American economist and bestselling author. After receiving a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She later moved to Brown University, where she holds the rank of Professor of Economics. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology.... She is the author of two books, Expecting Better and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting."

In short they are meta-research papers on pregnancy and parenting in the form of fun readable books.