Opinion: A new generation has its own Dr. Spock — and a very different take on parenting
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Every generation has its parent whisperer.
My mother and father had Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who promoted the revolutionary idea that children should be cherished and held, not whipped or spanked. His landmark 1946 book, “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” became one of the best-selling books of the 20th century.
When I became pregnant, I relied on “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, which dominated the market for years after it was first published in 1984. I gather it’s since fallen into some disfavor for what a number of new parents see as an alarmist approach, leading detractors to call it “What to Freak Out About When You Are Expecting.”
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After my daughter was born in 1992, I relied on T. Berry Brazelton, a deeply compassionate pediatrician whose “Touchpoints” books popularized new ways of thinking about children’s development. Every developmental leap, he wrote, is accompanied by a temporary regression.
Then along came Harvey Karp, who wrote 2002’s “The Happiest Baby on the Block.” His important contribution was the idea that the first three months of life are essentially the “fourth trimester.” He taught us to trigger the baby’s comfort reflex by swaddling, an ancient practice he helped revive, and making shushing sounds. He was also my daughter’s first pediatrician, though by the time he published his mega-best-seller, my daughter was already 10.
And now she is expecting her own child.
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Friends my age who have become grandparents tell me that things have changed. Their children generally take a more structured approach to mealtimes and bedtime, for example. And the parent whisperer for their generation of digital natives, raised with easy access to all human knowledge, is not a pediatrician, psychiatrist or physician of any kind.
She is Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and mother of two whose books “Expecting Better,” “Cribsheet” and “The Family Firm” encourage parents to take a data-driven approach to decision-making. (Her popular website is ParentData.)
Armed with the best and most relevant information from high-quality studies, she argues, moms and dads can make their own decisions about subjects such as breast feeding, sleep training, toilet training and — perhaps her most controversial position — whether it’s OK to have an occasional glass of wine while pregnant, as she did. (I had two glasses of wine on the first night of the Los Angeles riots, when I was four months pregnant, and my daughter has degrees from UC Berkeley and Yale.)
I was glad to have a girl partly because I did not want to face the prospect of circumcision, which was going to be a contentious issue in my home. In “Cribsheet,” Oster outlines its risks and benefits. While some friends told me my concern about inflicting pain on an infant was ridiculous, Oster cites a 1997 study showing infants who experience pain during circumcision have stronger pain responses to their shots four to six months later. The data, in other words, confirmed my fears — although doctors now tend to recommend some sort of pain blocker for the procedure.
“I wanted to approach pregnancy in the way that I was accustomed to in the rest of my life, as a person who loves data,” Oster told me by phone Thursday. “I wrote ‘Expecting Better’ out of that frustration.”
After her first child was born, for example, she made decisions about the evening meal as an economist. Did it make more sense to cook from scratch, use a meal-prep service or get takeout? “How does the cost of these choices compare to meal planning and prepping on my own?” she writes. And what was the value of her time, or “opportunity cost,” as an economist would put it?
“This economic approach to decision making,” she writes, “doesn’t make a choice for you, only tells you how to structure it.”
Dr. Karp once told me that becoming a parent for the first time is like standing on one side of a high brick wall: You can only imagine what is on the other side. “With a first child,” Oster writes, “most of us are prepared to be a bit surprised by the whole experience. After all, you’ve never done it before. Even I, a tremendously neurotic person, knew things would come up that I didn’t expect.”
On her doctor’s advice, for instance, she put mittens on her infant daughter, Penelope, so she would not inadvertently scratch herself. Then her mother told her that would ensure that Penelope would never learn to use her hands.
Oster dived into the research. Though she found no studies on whether mittens prevent babies from learning to use their hands, she did find one showing that over the last half-century, there were only 20 reports of babies being injured by mittens— hardly enough to get worked up about.
“I think there is a lot of ... older-generation advice that I think is often very well-meaning and is not always helpful,” Oster told me. “I think part of the issue is actually — and I say this with love — it’s difficult to remember what it’s like to have an infant.”
Driven by studies or not, each generation comes up with new parenting practices and prohibitions.
“My mom said, ‘Put the baby to sleep on its stomach,’ ” Oster said. “For data-based reasons, we don’t do that any more.”
Babies who sleep on their stomachs, it turns out, are at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome. The current expert advice is that infants should be put to sleep on their backs with nothing but a mattress and fitted sheet in the crib or bassinet. Crib “bumpers” were banned in the United States in 2022 because babies can get trapped against them and suffocate. Co-sleeping with your baby is also considered a no-no.
“It is now absolutely something that you will be told not to do,” said Oster, “and it is also something that a large share of people do and do not talk about.”
Still, says Oster, “what I try to be clear about is that co-sleeping is not without its risks, and that even done as safely as possible, there are some low risks in line with risks that people take every day. No choice in life has no risk, and you have to balance the risk against the benefit.”
Thirty-two years ago, when I was pregnant with Chloe, my Times colleague Bob Sipchen, a father of three, took me aside.
“Listen, Abcarian,” he said. “The one thing you have to know is that no parent thinks any other parent is doing a good job.”
He was so right. One of the great challenges of parenthood is learning to fortify yourself against everyone else’s opinions and advice.
This is where the parent whisperers come in: The best of them give you the confidence to do what’s right for you.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
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