Parenting by the Numbers
I haven&#x27;t read Oster&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s probably no long term effects from not doing it if you&#x27;re smart,  rich and clean.<p>A lot of the diet stuff during pregnancy sounded nuts,  and the advice (and subsequent stats&#x2F;research&#x2F; recommendation s) seemed culturally affected and based on extremely unlikely&#x2F; minimal outcomes.<p>And then I&#x27;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.<p>The other things that became apparent to me:<p>-just how dodgy the evidence base is for a lot of claims on parenting<p>- a lot of modern western parenting is pretty anti- woman&#x2F;parent IMO.  so little regard for the idea of taking care of baby by taking care of parents.<p>- 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&#x2F;original sources.   And yet you have pundits and salespeople repeating &#x27;study found X&#x27; ad nauseam.