I haven't read Oster's books yet, but I am trained in economics, worked for the national statistics body, work with data and tell people how to collect evidence and reach conclusions, and now have a 6 month old at home.
what I have heard through the grapevine is that her conclusions are very similar to my own doing similar reviews: breast feeding is probably good for some minor things (gastro etc), but its hard to separate it out from education, income, and risks from other sources (ie bad drinking water) and there's probably no long term effects from not doing it if you're smart, rich and clean.
A lot of the diet stuff during pregnancy sounded nuts, and the advice (and subsequent stats/research/ recommendation s) seemed culturally affected and based on extremely unlikely/ minimal outcomes.
And then I'd see other parents stressing about co sleeping, but not even give the faintest thought or worry to living a life with car dependency and strapping kids into them: apparently culture changes your perception of relative risk.
The other things that became apparent to me:
-just how dodgy the evidence base is for a lot of claims on parenting
- a lot of modern western parenting is pretty anti- woman/parent IMO. so little regard for the idea of taking care of baby by taking care of parents.
- the number of people and pop resources abusing and misquoting science, sometimes to reach the opposite conclusion to the one I reached when reading the actual papers/original sources. And yet you have pundits and salespeople repeating 'study found X' ad nauseam.
I agree overall, but I think we should err on the side of rejecting whatever has corporate or other conflicts-of-interest.
Thus, be skeptical of all sorts of safety products (especially since they are sold by spreading fear).
But we should also be skeptical of those dismissing the significance of breast feeding because the baby formula producers are where the conflict-of-interest lies on that topic there (and that played out massively and horribly in recent history).
I'm sure formula is okay overall, and there are so many factors to health and success. But it's also far too easy for formula producers (historically mainly Nestle) to happily support the narrative that breast-feeding is an irrational privilege of the elite. But I find such arguments comparable to those saying that access to natural open space like woods and parks is an elite privilege. That many people lack these privileges isn't an argument that they aren't extremely valuable. It's a grotesque injustice that any kid anywhere grows up without access to a healthy outdoor environment.
Somehow we need to tease apart all these things. The hypersensitive shaming of parents (mothers especially) is so awful and wrong, as is the paranoia about perfect safety and reducing all risk. That stuff needs to die. But breastfeeding, play time, outdoor access, the trends toward positive parenting (and not corporal punishment) — those things are positive!
> But it's also far too easy for formula producers (historically mainly Nestle) to happily support the narrative that breast-feeding is an irrational privilege of the elite
I'm intrigued, and I think I've missed this narrative - from what I understand, aristocrats didn't much bother with breast-feeding their own children, and hired it out to wet-nurses. So common people would have been more apt to breastfeed their own children, particularly since there is at least some contraceptive effect.
I don't think there's a shred of evidence that it matters who breastfeeds the kids. Tons of cultures have situations where someone other than the mother does some (sometimes all) the feeding. The physical bonding is surely positive and the milk is the primary thing mammals have evolve to grow up on initially.
The simplistic impression I have is that in many places (U.S. included, but most tragic in poorer countries), there was a strong marketing campaign against breast-feeding in the mid 20th century, driven entirely by formula producers. I personally find this appalling even if formula were equally healthy. I find it comparable to the bottled-water advertising that is about ripping people off by getting them to avoid resources they already have on hand (in the case of bottled water, the resource of clean tap water in all the places that have it).
The corporations here are more than happy if communities lose their capacity fo function independently. Dependence on the corporate products is the goal. And that's also the source of some of the safety products and other stuff being pushed through fear now.
you're right about the wet-nurse history, so in some places breast feeding is taken to be culturally lower class (and many of the WHO type materials and studies imo on breast feeding are effectively predicated not on the benefits of breast feeding per se, but on the avoidance of not- breast-feeding substitute risks in a particular context).
but then there was a 'formula movement' just as large scale manufacturing of formula was invented and became viable, focusing on the 'sciencism' and benefits of formula (i.e. you can measure and ensure exactly how much baby is drinking, which can't be done as easily with breast).
then there was a counter- counter: a movement away from the cold/corporate providers and the science of formula to the warm/maternal side of breast feeding and a new science of breast feeding.
breast feeding then became associated in those places with the upper class, typically sharing some aspects/ popularity of attachment parenting, because in those cultures a woman being able to stop work (and spend their entire day breast feeding) is a sign of class.
which of these aspects one experiences depends on where one lives, and honestly there's probably even more breast feeding and nursing narratives out there...
> "and many of the WHO type materials and studies imo on breast feeding are effectively predicated not on the benefits of breast feeding per se, but on the avoidance of not- breast-feeding substitute risks in a particular context"
Very quick summary, so apologies if my previous sentence or this one isn't sufficient or well put together: most studies tend to be statistical/high-level correlation searches.
With something like breast- feeding, an effect-size for breast-feeding must be taken implicitly in the context of what happens when you 'don't breast feed', given that basically everyone is still going to feed the baby, and there can't be a third state of neither breast feeding and not breast feeding.
I don't mean just statistical attempts to control for demographics, education, etc, although these also have a complex effect/interaction.
I mean here things like 'if you're not breast feeding, you're doing something else', and the mechanics of that something else are not constant throughout the world.
So for instance, do you have to earn a wage (be away from baby) to buy formula to feed the baby, does the formula at a shop nearby and within its used-by date, what is the quality of it, do you have maternity leave and is there an inherent opportunity cost between breast feeding and work and providing the baby other things, do you have running and sanitary water, are they in day care/familial care, what foods are you giving baby, etc.
All those things effect whether breast feeding will show a statistical positive/negative effect.
Even something like "increased/decreased infections" isn't easily straight-forward: for instance, if the number of infections is related to the number of people baby is exposed to, and baby is in day care, then maybe its day care or N family members looking after baby that's the full story. And then even once you've got THAT, there's a real question as to whether the total number of infections a person gets is statistically static over their lifetime. Early day care could substitute infections earlier into the babies life. This too would appear in a basic study as a positive for breast feeding at home, because they don't measure the increase in infections after the breast feeding period ends once the baby starts to socialise.
Most studies are not vaguely done at this level of investigating or answering these questions/mechanics around why or how the effects are mechanically operating, so many of the findings are likely reporting on these.
I think the GP is trying to say that the studies look at the benefits of avoiding the alternatives to breastfeeding. For example, breastfeeding is a good way to avoid feeding your infant the tainted water required to make formula.
That's pretty much what I thought as well. Most of the parenting advice is unsubstantiated claims written to make women feel guilty (over what, who knows?). As if your joy of having a kid needs to be tempered by giving up sushi. (What do people do in Japan?)
But generally the books don't even say where the claims are coming from, and everything is like you suspect, quite small effects if any, a priori.
Even the co sleeping thing seems to be fearmongering. Unless you're drunk, you're not gonna squash your kid to death. Plus the sleep benefits of letting the kid have boob on tap are enormous.
Depending on the stage, they actualy give up sushi ...
Apart from pregnancy/breast-feeding, Japan’s relation with raw fish is interesting, in that most people understand one day they’ll be unlucky and get food poisonned, but that’s just a fact of life, and nobody usually avoids raw fish just because of the risk.
The co-sleeping seems to stem from all the SIDS research / literature which when you go and read seems especially questionable. The topic of SIDS was hit so hard by our hospital and pediatrician. It scares the shit out of you. And then you go read the sources, and it's... well underwhelming at best.
That's why they tend to talk about Sudden Unexpected Infant Death these days.
My understanding is that the primary concern is the ability of the child to breathe normally. Anything which restricts that ability can be life threatening.
Having their face covered (very easy to do when they sleep between two adults who pull the covers up when they're cold) or pushing their face up against a non-breathable material (windproof bassinets, pillows, soft toys) leads to a lack of air circulation which can lead to CO2 buildup. This is particularly a problem when their muscles aren't strong enough to turn their head or roll over.
"sleep benefits of letting the kid have boob on tap are enormous" this cannot be overstated. We co-slept with my youngest and the difference between that experience and our first who was strictly bassinet/crib can't be put in words.
Like most things parenting related, this is probably up for debate. Many leading baby sleep books suggest that co-sleeping leads to a baby who nurses all the time, long past the point where Mom wants the bed to herself. My own child sleeps 8ish hours in a row at 3 months, which I attribute to feeding him on a flexible schedule instead of on-demand. Not to say that your experience is invalid, just that it’s hard to draw any conclusions from the limited data we have.
My wife has an extremely difficult time going back to sleep if she is fully wakened. Our kids co-slept. She could feed them at night without having to get up, and still be able to mostly get some sleep.
As an additional benefit, she didn't have to pump for overnight, and I didn't have to get up to bottle feed. Which, I would have done! But I'm happy not to have to have done that.
I am a very hard sleeper. I can sleep through anything. But I can sleep in bed with a little kid next to me just fine. I think our unconscious minds/nervous systems must have enough awareness of those little blazing furnaces.
As the article itself points out, there is much debate about Oster’s claims and many physician scientists disagree with her claims. Personally, having reviewed much of the same source material - around pre-natal diets in particular - I disagree with her conclusions as well. I’m not questioning her motives but it feels to me like there’s a certain amount of pop-sci hubris in her work.
I think there’s a difference on the local and global level here. From my point of view, if we ignore some doctor’s recommendation for pregnancy or child rearing, there’s a minuscule chance of an adverse effect. From the health experts point of view, a minuscule chance multiplied by billions of people is thousands or even millions of unnecessary birth defects or deaths.
A pregnant woman can rationally and morally choose to have a drink every once in a while —- there’s almost no chance there will be a problem, while at the same time, it’s a rational and moral for doctors to recommend not drinking at all — millions of lives are at stake potentially.
Thank you for pointing this out. Public health advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics is different than 1 person's lifetime of probabilistic events.
I haven't read her work, so its hard for me to comment on the individual. I think one area where i would disagree is alcohol, but that's because I'd include desire/normalacy of regular alcohol consumption as a cultural effect from our own societies (there's really not much evidence for positive effects of alcohol in anything, period). of course, this ignores the question of the value of the parents wants and wishes though.
On my own review of pre-natal diet recommendations, in my view the issue is about risk management rather than etiology of disease. for instance, my wife and I often joked that if we ate according to our countries health recommendations, we'd never eat out and only eat heavily processed foods, because it was the only place where the risk of various poisonings were near 0. But in practice, home kitchens aren't risk free, nor is or own non professional food prep or diet selection. And the mother needs to balance off sufficient variation in diet to be balanced and healthy, opportunity cost of other beneficial actions towards her and the child, etc, all of which are not accounted for, because science and medical research are not policy oriented documents. And it must be said that the relative risk of many of these things is very small from a clinical point of view.
There's a great study using the NLSY data, where they first demonstrate 10 of the 11 oft-cited advantages to breastfeeding... And then do a sibling study with the same data and watch the effects disappear.
What bothers me most reading the source studies though, is that even if you take them as a 100% true - and this is a very rosy interprétation indeed - the effects they identify are tiny compared to the well documented effects of an emotionally stable home environment with a positive parental relationship. There may be a 95/5 chance of boosting the kid's IQ by 2 points, but that's nothing next to the boost they get with parents who can sleep 8 hours on alternating nights. It seems like most of these recommendations miss the forest for the trees.
There is an irony that some of the biggest breastfeeding supporters are so-called "attachment parents", taking a pop-sci view of early attachment theory... When real, grown-up attachment theory is clear that a healthy parental relationship is exactly the most important thing to show the child in the first year. That's where they learn healthy "attachment", hence the name of the whole theory!
Further, it really just smells like the patriarchy calling. The la leche League was founded to support traditional family roles - meaning mothers stay home. All of it is set up to force the mother into the primary caregiver role, which comes with a huge attendant career/income penalty.
So I say: Fuck the patriarchy. Show your kids a healthy, emotionally stable environment. Choose between bottle and breast based on your practical family life needs.
Unfortunately not sure how to help counter the enormous pressure put out by groups like LLL in hospitals, pop press, etc. They cause a lot of unnecessary suffering and guilt. Maybe https://fedisbest.org/ ?
> the effects they identify are tiny compared to the well documented effects of an emotionally stable home environment with a positive parental relationship.
To be fair the same selection bias that confounded the breast milk study probably confounded this study as well.
What do you mean 'anti-woman'? Do they say that we should get rid of woman and have an all male society or to strangle girl babies? Just curious since the phrase 'anti-woman' and 'misogynistic' seems to be loosely thrown around these days as a synonym for 'something more or less loosely related to the subject of women that I don't like'.
I mean they implicitly/explicitly give an image of child rearing that is neither factual, nor often physically possible: I joked that if we actually did everything that was recommended, we'd have no income, have no activities, and still fill all 36 hours in a day.
I call it anti-woman because the implicit philosophy underlying the advice is to view the woman as a failure, because she must inevitably break some of the rules and parenting is framed in a 'how far are you from a mythical optimal', even though this optimal is rarely empirically measured, stated or demonstrated, and often assumes an implicit (read diminutive and insulting) view of womanhood/motherhood roughly analogous to domestic housekeeper willing to sacrifice everything.
lastly, it downplays the validity of the woman's own desires, and the utility of her experiences, skills, hobbies, feelings, desires into a cult of 'physical and emotional devotion to the child'. The number of women at our parent group and that we've met on our short journey undergoing sleep deprivation and psychological issues, calling out for help, was eye opening to me, especially because from my own perspective from the data point of view was simply 'empirically that's barely an issue, if its causing your family that much distress, just change and do this instead', whereas there is an undercurrent in parenting that says a mother's role is to suffer...
Our experience back in 2000 was of be breast police forcing my Wife to feed a sleeping 4 hour old baby, telling her that if she didn't feed it it the baby would die then standing over her and telling her that everything she was doing was wrong. Not a good start.
This is after a 36 hour labour and I'd run away home for some sleep.
This was our first baby so everything was new and unfortunately everything in the hospital was high pressure with an undercurrent of "why don't you know how to do this?".
After a few days we managed to escape the hospital. Once we were home the pace slowed down and amazingly enough we started to discover what made this little fella tick.
Feeding was still a lot of pain and tears, so we finally in desperation purchased some bottles and formula. Was amazing how much of a difference taking the stress of feeding away was. The baby was happy, the mother was happy, I was happy and we never looked back.
He's now a healthy 6 foot 18yr old working his first job.
It was amazing how much of a different reception we got on subsequent babies. The midwifes tended to just leave us to it. In both subsequent times we managed to get out of the hospital within 24 hours of the birth, allowing us to get to know the new member of the family without everybody trying to tell us how to do it.
I agree with the anti-woman sentiment as a father, and I will give you a few examples. As soon as a woman is pregnant, there are countless things off the table: no cheese, no caffiene, no wine or drinking of any kind, no deli meats, no sushi, etc. Some of those are nebulous and out of date - deli meat and cheese in particular. They are recommended to be avoided because of listeria risks, but how often have you heard of listeria outbreaks in cheese or deli meat? This was more common in the 50s when standards were lower. Now I see listeria outbreaks more often in packaged salads that are processed en masse. But the restrictions never go away, just added. The reigning idea is "why risk it"? This applies to almost everything from day one of pregnancy through childhood.
Pregnant women are told to avoid countless things (including most medication) and heavily modify their behavior (avoid milk, tomatoes, grains etc.) for infinitesimal or non-existent benefits. When you dig into the source of the advice, most of the time it comes from the fact running studies on pregnant women is very litigious so drug companies simply recommend "avoid" and wash their hands of the problem. Other countries have very different guidelines and procedures.
that's just the tip of the iceberg in the U.S. The entire birthing experience is built around saving the baby and the mother is an afterthought. This is shown in statistics where the death rate rate of mothers is higher than in many 3rd world countries. We keep finding more ways to keep babies alive (healthy or not) and force babies to be born (wanted or not). Very little thought is given to the holistic and human goal of the entire enterprise of having children and that is extremely damaging for not just mothers but fathers and the extended family and communities in general.
I don't think there is a law against eating cheese while pregnant, though. Not even drinking alcohol seems to be illegal?
Everybody is free to google and make up their own mind.
Not sure about the listeria, btw, if the risk is simply higher for embryos, or if the concern really is a general listeria infection like any adult could get?
Maybe you don't hear a lot about listeria infections because for non-pregnant people it is not a big deal that would be newsworthy?
Depending on the parents, even small risks to the unborn may be deemed unacceptable. Like a three in thousand risk of miscarriage? I've seen many doctors recommend a blood test with those risks, and many parents deciding against it because of the high risk.
To me personally, a risk of 1:1000 of dying would seem rather extreme, too. I guess it depends on how you think about unborn life.
I read it as meaning that women are expected by a “western” culture to sacrifice their happiness or sanity and the GP disagrees, saying that parental happiness is associated with infant happiness.
If their happiness depends on drinking alcohol and eating raw cheese, that is. Not all cheese is raw milk based, so you don't even have to give up cheese completely.
I was at Home Depot buying some stuff with my kids and the 5 year old was hanging of the handle of the cart like a monkey. It was one the low to the floor carts for heavy stuff and the handle was a bit lower than a normal shopping cart. One of the idle cashiers, an older woman, came over said he shouldn’t do that because he might fall and bump his head. I said “that’s how he’ll learn”. She gave me a frown and walked away. He didn’t fall or bump his head, that lesson was saved for another day.
Edit; she expressed her concern, she did not cite any company policy or appeal to authority. The handle was low enough such that I wasn’t concerned about a concussion. I wasn’t rude or snarky in this exchange although some seem to read it as such. Wow judgmental reader! I think this was mentioned in the fine article!
Since I am in a phase of my life where I am perpetually angry when I read the exchange in my head the response becomes rude of snarky, and of course I am at the best of times not apt to adopt a breezy happy tone that makes disagreements sound wonderful.
I think many engineers don't do the happy tone. Maybe that's the problem.
For every person giving a minimum-wage employee trying to help an unnecessarily snarky response, like you chose to do, there is someone else who'll sue them. So they can't win. The best thing you could have contributed would have been to be polite to the employee.
> For every person giving a minimum-wage employee trying to help an unnecessarily snarky response, like you chose to do, there is someone else who'll sue them. So they can't win. The best thing you could have contributed would have been to be polite to the employee.
Someone would sue a minimum-wage employee personally because they didn't say something to their kid playing dangerously? I know America is litigious but that sounds like it would never happen. They would sue the store owner if anything. The best thing would have been for the employee to keep their comments to themselves, which the snarky response probably reinforced.
But you're missing the point. People have to be cautious, because their employers require it. Don't be mean to people who don't control what they have to do.
It's not mean to express boundaries. Strangers offering unsolicited advice, regardless of intent, crosses a boundary for many people. And since the employee making the comment would never be personally liable in the case of a lawsuit, such advice boils down to misplaced concern or simple nosiness/bossiness. People should mind their own business unless their is a clear and present danger to thselves or the public. A kid horsing around on a hauling cart does not match that description IMO.
Yes in the street. But you’re in their shop, and the horsing around is being done in their property on their equipment. You're a guest there. Either leave or politely comply with what they ask.
It is extremely unlikely in this case that the employee was also the proprietor, so there is no "their". It was an individual decision, not a business decision.
That’s not how any of this works. The company would be sued and would most likely settle. The employee making 11$ a hour would be fired. The employee not reinforcing store policy is a dereliction of duty.
Why is it taken for granted that the company will be sued? Would you personally sue them in such a case? It feels quite strange to me as a European. Not sure if it's just a distortion of the internet but it seems like Americans are constantly afraid of getting sued and pondering about who to sue for (to me) ridiculous reasons. I mean a store is not kindergarten, the parent should be responsible and they should have enough common sense to know how a shopping cart works. Unless the shopping cart is seriously damaged and, I don't know, has sharp edges or similar unexpected danger, I don't see how the company has anything to do with it.
Is this sue-happiness due to the high medical costs?
I think the sue-happiness is due to high medical costs and no social safety net.
Imagine some kid falls and hits his head. The injury is so bad that the kid will be mentally disabled for the rest of his life and require full time care. You're a juror and you have the power to take away a couple of million dollars from a large company that'll make 11 billion that year in order to make sure this family's future is just a little less terrible. That this kid can get sometime of care and therapy so maybe he can talk again or just pay off some of the million dollars in medical bills they racked up on trying to save his life. I can see why it would be hard to side with Home Depot despite the fact they're not at fault.
Take a look at the number of ads you'll see for personal injury lawyers in the United States. Unfortunately it's a huge, thriving industry. I believe the "sue-happiness" is a symptom of the overall legal landscape and public mindset rather than a consequence of high medical costs.
It seems the general idea in the US is that people are assumed to be idiots, so the burden is on companies to disclaim negligence or liability over accidents that might conceivably be unforeseen (by an idiot). Unless some kind of warning is placed on the cart itself (pointing out that it could tip over), it's not a stretch to think Home Depot might be found liable for a child hurting themselves in this situation[1]. All the carts in normal grocery stores are covered in similar warning signs.
Of course, some other countries tend to place a lot more confidence in the public's level of intelligence (and that's generally a good thing), but it can also be taken too far. The optimal legal landscape would probably use something in the middle of the "bubble-wrap everything" approach and the "jump at your own risk" approach.
[1] To answer your question "Would you personally sue them in such a case?": The answer is almost always "no". But those few rare cases where someone does sue can be incredibly costly for everyone involved. The only winners are the personal injury lawyers who often make money either way.
META: I know HN discourages commenting on voting, but there seems to be some odd downvote behavior going on that I haven't seen here before. I really can't imagine why this comment would get downvoted so much. To get this number of downvotes (let alone any votes this deep in a thread) in a short time smells of abusive behavior. I don't care about the points per se; it just makes me less inclined to contribute to discussions on HN when this stuff happens.
It's difficult to understand America. On the one hand it's supposed to be individualist and emphasize everyone's own responsibility for their lives, and then there's this stuff, where everything needs to be full of warnings, otherwise people cannot be assumed to act reasonably. (The story of the woman comes to mind who microwaved a cat to death, with the intention of drying it and sued the manufacturer and won.)
why is it unfortunate when citizens exercise their rights afforded to them under the constitution? Do you have a similar problem when corporations sue each other? I've never before seen so much compassion for insurance companies.
I didn't say anything about insurance companies, and I'm not referring to cases where a person sues their insurance company for failing to cover expenses, but rather when they sue a store or manufacturer directly for negligence.
It's unfortunate that personal injury law firms make so much money by encouraging people to be "sue-happy" over dubious claims brought against companies that have little choice but to settle - not because they're doing anything seriously negligent (unless you subscribe to the bubble-wrap mentality), but because it costs less to settle and pay the plaintiff's fees than to properly defend the case in court.
I have no problem with the constitutional rights that allow these things to happen (that's not the unfortunate part). The truly unfortunate part is that the success of these types of legal threats has gone beyond just protecting the innocent; it has quite literally changed the public's mindset from one of seeking justice to one of seeking gain at the opportunity provided by an accident.
And from Home Depot's point of view, the employee thankfully helped the company avoid a potential lawsuit. I'm sure the 5-year-old will have plenty of other chances to bump his head in similar situations, and assuming he's human, he has the amazing capacity to generalize from lessons learned in other distinct ways. Nothing was lost in your encounter.
EDIT: Love the (numerous) downvotes coming here on all responses to your comment, but in the spirit of promoting healthy discussion, a reasoned argument would be better.
I'll upvote you just because that was a trend that I explicitly called out to my wife: "it seems half of the official guidelines seem written around the goal of avoiding blame being shifted outside of the family-unit/potential to be sued rather than any empirical basis, measurement, or cost/benefit trade-off.
On the other hand, I and literally everyone I know would have probably left the store with a crying kid and some slight embarrassment had one of ours actually gotten hurt. Lawsuits would be not be something coming to mind. In that light, is it not rude to treat someone the same as some of the least reasonable worst-case 'unable-to-parent-without-a-store-policy' types of people in society?
I'm not entirely sure, but an immediate jump to compliance solely to allow an employee to save face may not be a good position to promote.
I think people change their minds when they're faced with a ridiculous hospital bill for treating the injury. Their insurance pays the hospital bill and then sues the store for the amount paid. The parent isn't even really the one suing; it's their insurance company.
That being said, it's not so terrible for the parent to push back a little. The company reduced their liability with the warning. Having the parent acknowledge the risk is a success for the employee.
I think the complaints of parents about outsiders giving advice are way overblown. Yes it happens, but why not simply shrug them off? Everybody is entitled to their opinions. And in a store, presumably the employers or owners make the rules. You can always teach your kid about concussions somewhere else (not saying you should have acted other than you did, as the employee only voiced an opinion, not a rule - but if the rule was "no hanging from carts", I think it should be heeded).
Our favorite is parenting advice from the childless aunt. We just ignore it, problem solved.
"Oster now finds herself brainstorming punishments that a four-year-old will find “devastating.”" (on 1-2-3 Magic)
So she found it "just works". But how does she define "it works"? The child becoming obedient? That's not exactly what many parents want, but it would be the classic approach to child rearing (teaching kids obedience)...
Her book may be a good thing, for people who find it difficult to dig their way through all the information online. Personally I am wary of that type of public science book of outsiders of the field digging through hundreds of articles. At the end of the day, they might still fall prey to confirmation bias or only consider research that supports their thesis.
Any why is it so important to drink alcohol during pregnancy? There really weren't that many rules - no alcohol, no raw cheeses or meats, no honey. It's not an impossible toll on mothers, although my wife still has high respect from me for being extremely consistent about all those rules during pregnancy.
It seems like her general cause is a good one: to ease parents to relax a bit on what some perceive as apparently harsh recommendations on health and parenting.
But it also seems like she misses the point on what public health bodies are for (minimizing risk on large scale) versus clear advice to individuals. Take alcohol for example, if the actual evidence is flimsy on whether 1 drink is bad or not, it's an easy choice if I'm speaking to millions of people: play it safe. That's not the same as claiming that low alcohol consumption is bad, and it's certainly not an attempt to shame.
One of my pregnant friends talked to their doctor about having a glass of wine once a week. Her doctor said that was fine but when she ordered one at the restaurant it was terrible. The waiter was visibly uncomfortable serving it, other people in the restaurant stared. The intent might not have been to shame but the effect has been that lots of women feel way shittier about themselves than they need to.
And the science might say something like 3 glasses of wine are terrible but we can't really statistically tell the difference between 0 and 1 glasses of wine. But what has filtered down to the masses is "if you have a glass of wine while pregnant you're a terrible mother."
Sure, but that's because it's easier to say have no glasses of wine, than to try and explain to every person that having some is still within tolerance (and then also why one is decent, but two maybe not).
what I have heard through the grapevine is that her conclusions are very similar to my own doing similar reviews: breast feeding is probably good for some minor things (gastro etc), but its hard to separate it out from education, income, and risks from other sources (ie bad drinking water) and there's probably no long term effects from not doing it if you're smart, rich and clean.
A lot of the diet stuff during pregnancy sounded nuts, and the advice (and subsequent stats/research/ recommendation s) seemed culturally affected and based on extremely unlikely/ minimal outcomes.
And then I'd see other parents stressing about co sleeping, but not even give the faintest thought or worry to living a life with car dependency and strapping kids into them: apparently culture changes your perception of relative risk.
The other things that became apparent to me:
-just how dodgy the evidence base is for a lot of claims on parenting
- a lot of modern western parenting is pretty anti- woman/parent IMO. so little regard for the idea of taking care of baby by taking care of parents.
- the number of people and pop resources abusing and misquoting science, sometimes to reach the opposite conclusion to the one I reached when reading the actual papers/original sources. And yet you have pundits and salespeople repeating 'study found X' ad nauseam.