
The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry - anarbadalov
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/16/baby-advice-books-industry-attachment-parenting
======
blowski
An absolutely wonderful read. I read three widely recommended books, which
diametrically opposed each other on almost everything. So I decided to ignore
most of the advice, and rely on friends, family, medical experts, and my own
intuition. Anything the books mostly agreed on, I did tend to follow.

The three books I read:

* The Contented Little Baby - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-eboo...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-ebook/dp/B006K26BPU/)

* The Fourth Trimester - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Prot...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Protecting-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B00AQDIP6M/)

* The Baby Whisperer - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Comm...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Communicate/dp/0091857023/)

The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child
before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that
every parent develops nostalgia."

Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of
8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning',
who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of
love from their parents.

~~~
laumars
When we had our first born, advice was to wake the baby for feeding so they
get used to regular routines. We did this once and he screamed for the
entirety of that day so we just fed him at irregular intervals but tried to
ensure he still got the right number of feeds in a day.

When we had our second we were told not to wake her. But when she did wake she
was so hungry she would have a screaming fit so we learned she preferred to
get woken for lunch.

Moral of the story: try as hard as you might to generalise child rearing,
they'll always find a way to contradict good advice.

~~~
scoggs
This might sound a bit callous (and I know it's more left field than callous
but it's my only entry point to this topic) but your story kind of reminded me
of a time I visited friends for a weekend at college. A friend of theirs had a
new born litter of 1/2 Black Lab 1/2 Pit Bull puppies (the cutest, jet black
pups) and my buddy and his girlfriend adopted one, Kujo.

Their goal was to get their new puppy used to being and sleeping alone by
making sure it slept outside of their bedroom every night. This was the second
weekend they had the dog and I, of course, was outside of their bedroom on the
floor. The cold carpet. The living room was the only other room besides the
bathroom, which we all wanted to keep dog free for everyone's convenience, in
their small college apartment. I was told to try not sleep / cuddle with the
dog overnight, but not sternly.

I'm a light sleeper as it is and after about 15 minutes of listening to the
little guy cry and whimper I caved in figuring one night of sleeping cuddled
up with me couldn't ruin a K-9's entire life of attachment. Plus I was on the
floor and as you can tell I'm soft as it comes with animals and children.

I'll never know whether my softness that night ruined Kujo's sense of
attachment but I will tell you right now, as someone who has always wanted
kids I can't imagine I'll be able to keep my own flesh and blood at a distance
while they are crying and calling out all night long :*(.

I have so much respect and am in awe of parents of all types. Keep kicking
butt!

~~~
laumars
It's not easy sometimes but you do learn the difference between kids crying
because they're in distress and crying because they're just being stubborn.
The real difficulty is when they're distressed but "tough love" is exactly
whats needed (eg you're example of getting them to sleep in their own bed).

What I struggle the most with is when they actually put a logical argument
forward to get their own way. My eldest is not long 4 and he has already been
putting some pretty intelligent counter arguments for why he should get his
own way for about two years now. Sometimes I cave even if I know he is just
arguing because his points are so well formed that I simply cannot argue back
(plus I never want to stifle a kids ability to examine and deconstruct the
world). My wife often calls me a big softy for that.

Ultimately though, my wife and I compliment each other in different ways so
where I struggle with parenting she excels; and visa versa. I don't even know
how single parents cope because I know for a fact I wouldn't.

------
phalangion
I think the real secret of many advice books, baby or otherwise, is that
nobody knows what they're doing. It's especially hard for baby and other
parenting advice, though, because the goals are so varied. What is the aim? A
quiet baby? A happy baby? A hard working child, a smart child, a well-behaved
child, a happy child? A well-adjusted (whatever that means) adult? A driven
and successful adult? A good relationship with the kid? Any of thousands of
others?

It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and
the relationships between them.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
In my view, its even misguided to try and 'make' your baby into any of these
things. You can help them develop, but its largely up to them to be smart or
hard-working or happy later in life. We can at most give them good examples,
and try to socialize them?

~~~
tartuffe78
You try that, I'll try the other way and we'll see whose baby gets into
Harvard!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
My three Eagle Scouts are respectively a Sargeant, an Engineer and a Musician.
The Engineer went to CMU and works at a startup in Redwood City. The Sargent
did his tour of Iraq in transportation (doing vehicle recovery) and returned a
little busted up; now has a MechE degree and is a process Engineer. The
Musician studied at Cleveland Institute, but turned to the dark side and now
works IT.

~~~
opwieurposiu
Great work dad!

------
ThomPete
When my first son was born, my wife subscribed to a website called something
along the lines of "The Net Midwife". A former midwife answered health
questions from parents.

All her answers were available online for free but if you wanted her to answer
your questions, you would have to pay for the subscription.

Why would you want to pay for something which was freely available to you?

Well as it turns out, even though 99% of the questions parents asked were
already answered parent's had this idea that their child was unique and they
would ask questions like "my child coughs and it says a little noise
everything she inhales right after"

The only group of people more naive and easy to persuade are modern dog
people.

~~~
EADGBE
It's easy to be persuaded by answering services when you're dealing with
what's arguably the thing you will ever be most responsible for.

Plenty of people/businesses take advantage of that.

~~~
ThomPete
Yup.

One thing I have never done though is read other peoples advice on how to
raise my kids. That's too important to leave to others :)

~~~
lostlogin
There is something darkly funny and deeply meta about how this is being down
voted.

~~~
ThomPete
Yeah, perhaps because people thought I meant I would never use an advice
given. What I meant was that I would never buy a book to get advice. Anyway...

~~~
lostlogin
The trick is getting people to give advice when you ask for it. Having advice
fired at you by every human you meet seems to be a thing. Even wearing
headphones doesn’t stop them.

~~~
EADGBE
_Especially_ on the subject of child rearing.

------
ukulele
I like that they started with comparison to other animals, with humans being
born "sooner" in the development cycle due to our larger brains.

To me, this sets up a nice mental model for the first ~18 months of parenting:
your child is still developing the extreme basics, in particular its brain,
which is forming pathways based on your actions. So set to work forming those
pathways with lots of talking, face time, and letting your child observe the
world. After all, it came out to get an "early" start!

~~~
jimktrains2
Many call the first 3 mo the "Fourth Trimester" for that very reason. The baby
is still basically a fetus in many regards. It's around that 3 mo point that
they start to really respond to external stimuli in more than basic ways and
start to be able to explore their environment.

------
sago
A business mentor of mine once gave me this wisdom:

The best selling diet books don't contain the best diet advice.

The best selling dating books don't contain the best dating advice.

The best selling business books don't contain the best business advice.

I think this is logical, to some extent, i.e.:

Advice books are optimised for excitement and the illusion of inspiration.
Because results take a long time to demonstrate, massive aggregate data, and
the elimination of countless other factors, nobody can possibly work out
whether the advice in a book is any good before they buy it. Instead they look
to reviews, which are based on enjoyment and inspiration. Someone will read
it, and coincidentally find success, and you have your testimonial. Someone
will read it, and fail, and nobody will know. So to make your book sell, the
quality of the advice is mostly irrelevant, it is the engagement that makes
the sale.

Exciting truisms and unfalsifiable chattiness sell advice books, not good
advice.

Reading advice books 'just in case' you come across good advice, is like
reading a string of random numbers 'just in case' you come across the lottery
results.

Personally I'm a bit less sceptical, but only a very small bit.

------
eli
Surprised they don't mention economist Emily Oster's book Expecting Better,
which is an imperfect book but takes a data-driven Freakonomics-style approach
to pregnancy. I enjoyed it.

The real challenge is that there's so little good data to begin with.

------
tremendulo
If you read with your kids and don't get divorced then you've already done a
great job I think.

~~~
cloverich
I grew up w/ divorced parents and generally most of my friends also had
divorced parents. I don't think the divorce as such is such a big deal, its
really whether or not both parents keep "showing up". I'd take divorced
parents that show up vs married-absentee's any day.

EDIT: I realized you might be meaning -- if you don't let the struggle of
parent-hood tear apart your relationship with your spouse, you're doing a good
job. In which case I agree 100%.

~~~
EADGBE
I agree, didn't grow up with divorced parents, and I'm not a divorced parent,
but it seems - especially in this day - this just isn't as much as a bad omen
as it used to be.

I see more cooperative parents (whether they're living together or not) than
un-cooperative ones. Married or not. It's just a title to a lot of these
people.

Also, if that's what the child grew up with, it's probably less likely to
affect them negatively (assuming all positives everywhere else).

------
dzink
It's not just baby advice that is fuzzy, it's baby products as well. Every
baby business that is ads-based (from blogs, to registries) festers
insecurities in parents, so they can sell ridiculously expensive basic
products to make you feel a little better: I just bought the "best" (most
expensive) rocker on the market, I will be ok. Google also prioritizes the
wrong things in content as well (word count and recency) - so most of the
searches lead to the same crap - the same shallow ideas, reiterated with as
many words and ads as possible. As a parent with the skills to build, after
seeing all of these problems with my first child, I started building a
private, actually safe baby registry and vetted ads-free recommendation engine
under [https://www.dreamlist.com](https://www.dreamlist.com) .

The books industry leans on extremes. If it doesn't trigger controversy and
insecurity in you, in some way, it doesn't sell. Every child is different and
every pregnancy is different. The best source of information so far are
medical studies, wherever you can dig them out.

------
ksk
How is this any different from all the 'advice' we get on programming topics,
how to write code, how to be a good leader, how to interview well, how to
hire, how to fire, and on and on..

~~~
taeric
It is almost like self help is a difficult topic that has a large market of
people looking for prescriptive help.

Snidely, I can't help but muse on the traps and fallacies that are abound in
this sort of "looking for answers" method of searching.

Does make me wonder, do folks have collections of "experiments that failed"
with speculation or answers as to why? A journal of "the experiments that
failed replication this year."

------
pnathan
After spending a little too much time on advice books, I put them permanently
on the shelf, dispensed to used book stores as time went on. Particularly
awful were the "What to Expect" books, which were doctrinaire and promised
great ills if the doctrines weren't kept.

I kept a couple anthropological books, including Lancy's, and the Mayo
Clinic's medical guides to pregnancy and the first year. Too, a developmental
book "Touchpoints" which seemed to have a pragmatic style and gave some
understanding of typical development.

For specific baby management concerns, we were trained by the nurses at the
hospital, and visits to the doc addressed things that came up otherwise.

Thing is - what the anthro and historical views of baby raising taught me -

If your kid has Issues, that will be a medical situation, and should be
addressed medically. If your kid does not have Issues, then largely they will
turn out as they will, if you treat them decently and well, for the first
year. Feed em, clean em, read to em, put em to bed, and it'll be largely
_okay_. As they come to more reasoning and thinking, influence increases, but
the first year is sort of a wash in many ways. There are huge variations in
how different groups treat the first year, and it doesn't seem to matter in
turning out functional humans.

Behavior issues can be mitigated by routine and structure, but not avoided.

The idea of each kid being this special & unique flower is sort of a 20c
development. That's important to remember and contemplate.

------
cdubzzz
> There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but
> since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and
> beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.

Yeah... no. As a new father of a now five-month old boy, I very highly
recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father by Armin A. Brott. They are
a far cry from a "wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer". It's unfortunate
that this (so far) otherwise interesting article is doing what so many of the
books it is criticizing do... giving little attention to the fatherhood side
of parenting.

~~~
ourmandave
Weighing on every new dad I ever met (at least in the background) is, "How the
hell am I gonna pay for all this?"

~~~
jakobegger
The amount of money that you can spend on a child is virtually unlimited. But
almost all of it absolutely optional.

Sure, you’ll need diapers and a car seat, but beyond that there’s not a lot
that’s absolutely necessary.

There’s so much stuff that people think they need to buy, ranging from special
vitamins during pregnancy to hypoallergenic formula and baby swimming lessons
and educational toys for every age bracket...

And then you realise that people who make half the money you do get along just
fine and their kids are doing fine and somehow they only need half as much
money.

Sure, we do spend a lot of money on semi-useful kids stuff (like those skiing
lessons that our older son didn’t want to continue after the second day...),
but it’s all optional, and if we didn’t have kids I’d probably have a nicer
car, but who cares.

~~~
kcorbitt
In high-cost-of-living areas, there are two other major costs worth
considering. First is the cost of daycare (or equivalently the opportunity
cost of having a stay-at-home parent). My wife watches our son, and we're glad
that she can afford to do that, but that's $100k of forgone take-home pay
we're leaving on the table.

Second is the increased rent/mortgage of a house with an extra bedroom. I pay
~$600/mo more for an extra bedroom and have a substantially longer commute
than most of my coworkers to live in a place that can accommodate our family.

Both of those costs far exceed anything else we've spent on our son, which
mostly falls into the "optional" category you mentioned.

Both of these factors are much more important in high-cost-of-living areas,
which may explain in part why there aren't many kids in San Francisco.

~~~
atourgates
The cost of college is another one that every parent should consider as early
as possible.

It's certainly optional (you may be comfortable letting your kids go it alone
for college tuition), but definitely worth making an intentional decision on
and planning for as soon as you're able.

Also, I'd strongly recommend you use several of the many "future cost of
college" calculators available out there. For example, a college that costs
$35,000/yr today is estimated to cost $56,000/yr in 10 years per Vanguard's
calculator's defaults[1]. The "Worlds Simplest College Cost Calculator"[2]
also provides a reasonably good and easy to understand picture of how much
you'll have to contribute monthly to reach your goals by the time your child
starts college and brings in some reasonable numbers for grants and
scholarships based on your income.

You could certainly "oversave" if the insanely high cost of higher education
manages to correct itself, but pretty much any tax-advantaged educational
savings account can be easily converted to retirement savings.

In my case, it's also provided a bit of extra motivation to support my
children in developing good study habits early on in their education. Once you
understand the likely cost of college in 10, 12 or 18 years, the prospect of
academic scholarships becomes really, really appealing.

[1][https://vanguard.wealthmsi.com/collcost.php](https://vanguard.wealthmsi.com/collcost.php)

[2][https://www.savingforcollege.com/calculators/worlds-
simplest...](https://www.savingforcollege.com/calculators/worlds-simplest-
college-cost-calculator)

~~~
secabeen
> The cost of college is another one that every parent should consider as
> early as possible. It's certainly optional (you may be comfortable letting
> your kids go it alone for college tuition), but definitely worth making an
> intentional decision on and planning for as soon as you're able.

Any parent planning on saving for college needs to have their retirement
savings locked in and fully funded first. You can borrow money to go to
school, but you can't borrow money to retire.

------
peterwwillis
When I reached the age of reason, I asked my boomer parents (a mental health
practitioner and a corporate V.P.) if they really thought there was a book
that had every answer they'd need as parents. "Of course," they replied.

But as a former subject of the material, I can tell you they definitely didn't
have all the answers. As privileged and intelligent as they were, they still
fucked up. But I'm also not _dead_ , and on the whole I'm only mildly
traumatized by the unnecessary drugs and suffocating restriction on personal
freedom and privacy. So I really don't care about what kind of baby advice
they intoned, and I don't think parents should care either. Just keep the
little bastard alive until it can move out on its own, so you can have a whole
new world of worries to consider.

------
pfarnsworth
Every single baby guide book is 100% absolutely garbage. I encourage every
single one of you that are about to have children to never EVER buy one. All
they do is talk about the "average" baby, and you'll soon find that you and
your spouse feel entirely inadequate because your baby isn't sleeping as much,
eating as much, moving as much, interacting as much, etc.

What the books never tell you is that sure, there may be average numbers
available, but the STANDARD DEVIATION is HUGE. No baby is average. My wife was
convinced our first child had sleeping issues because he slept 2 hrs less than
average. It turns out that's just who he is, he sleeps a lot less than most
kids, but still at the bottom of the range of healthy. All it does is fuck
with your head, so just take a cue from other parents around you.

~~~
arethuza
When our kids were babies everyone we knew here in the UK seemed to have an
obsession with getting their kids off to sleep as early as possible (about 7pm
usually - mostly by putting them in a separate room and ignoring them) and
then were amazed that their kids woke up really early.

We let our kids stay up until they went to sleep at their own pace and then
they seemed to wake up at a relatively civilized time.

~~~
jandrese
My kids get up with the sun regardless of when they go to bed, but if they're
not in bed before about 9 they'll be cranky when they get up, especially in
the summer.

With one kid it isn't too bad, but when you have multiple kids they tend to be
up with whomever is the earliest riser, because they make a lot of noise when
they get up and wake everybody else.

~~~
XorNot
At the risk of inexpertly offering bad advice, you could try blackout
curtains?

I'm 33, definitely more of a night owl but if it's sunny out I'm pretty likely
to be wide awake at 6am after going to bed at 1. Black out curtains made all
the difference for me.

~~~
jandrese
The kids don't even like having the regular curtains closed. Besides, having
them used to getting up early is good when school is in session.

------
arnarbi
If you enjoyed the article, I'd recommend his book "Help", which picks apart
self-help books on other subjects.

------
ada1981
Just because there is a lot of bad advice. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Attunement and Attachment is real and worth investing in.

------
flarg
My wife, an expert in early years education, was mightly impressed with
raising boys by steve biddulph.

------
bennesvig
I've found baby advice books to be 85% fluff/filler and 15% actionable advice.
But that 15% can dramatically improve quality of life / the amount of sleep I
get each night.

------
J-J
As we are born so helpless; "who or what raised the first human baby?" is the
first thought that comes to mind!

~~~
Freak_NL
That development didn't happen overnight. Our species gradually evolved into
one where babies are born helpless because it apparently made evolutionary
sense. Logic dictates that it was a gradual change enforced by the survival of
the fittest.

------
IntronExon
_Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that
you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner
resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands
your obedience to his or her expertise._

You could replace “Attachment Parenting” with so many different ideas, from
anti-vaxxer ideology to AGW denialism. It’s painful to think about just how
broadly applicable the observation of the author is beyond the realm of this
article. As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for
power, profit, or comfort.

In particular New Age-ism, political identity, and alternative “medicine” are
hotbeds of this.

~~~
pcmaffey
> As a species we’re drowning in tribes, cults, and misinformation for power,
> profit, or comfort.

I believe this is the driving motivation behind 'attachment parenting' (what a
weird term) and general movements to rely on personal knowledge.

~~~
IntronExon
Personal knowledge is the _source_ of these issues; it’s a fallacy that we’re
some kind of wise and insightful creature which is only led astray in groups.
Tribes, cults, and the misinformation they produce are just the result of our
collectivized fantasies about ourselves and our environment. At least as a
group we can start to produce something which can be tested.

