The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years

For the third book in her ParentData series, Emily Oster tackles “the post-toddler, preteen stage—that is, the ages of five to twelve.” Having enjoyed Expecting Better and Cribsheet, and having read every issue of Oster’s newsletter, I looked forward to The Family Firm.

It disappointed. 

Oster is up front about what turns out to be the central problem: When it comes to issues during the early school years, the data largely isn’t determinative. Decisions are more amorphous and individualized. She does her best to pivot, offering some key insights (e.g., “Family dinner and ice skating are one choice, not two”) and providing a decision-making framework (“The Four F’s: Frame the Question … Fact-Find … Final Decision … Follow-up”). But the family-as-a-business schtick feels forced and “be thoughtful” doesn’t seem like it requires a full-length book.

Oster shines most when debunking “the Mozart effect,” the idea that engaging with classical music increases IQ. This is what she’s known for: wading into the data and calling out rules and norms that make no sense. But The Family Firm doesn’t do a ton of that, instead trying to synthesize entire fields of research. Sometimes I agreed with her take (three cheers for considering displacement when it comes to screen time!) and in other places I couldn’t believe how she spun the available research. Take, for example, her treatment of education. Oster correctly concludes that there’s not a huge amount of evidence showing that charter schools and/or private schools are more effective than public schools. But instead of presenting this as mythbusting—since Americans largely assume public school inferiority—she hems and haws a little, writes, “school-specific information may help, but the research-based data probably will not,” and then acknowledges that “whole books have been and will be written on these issues.” 

And that may be the meta point of her book: When it comes to this age group, reasonable minds can differ.

(Case in point: She and I review the same studies on homework showing a very small positive impact that’s even smaller for younger kids, and I conclude it’s ludicrous so much of it is assigned in elementary school with so little justification, and she concludes, hey, there’s a little positive impact.)

But doesn’t this conclusion call into question the book’s existence? How valuable is one mom’s take, even one very smart mom with time to read a bunch of studies? And how does that value change when you realize that Oster too writes mostly for the middle class and above?

Yet her prose flows well, as usual, the wit that suffuses her other books surfaces from time to time (“For older kids … exposure helps with non-bitter vegetables, but for bitter vegetables, researchers show better effects with what they call ‘associative conditioning,’ or what I call ‘dip’”), and I have to admire the woman’s bravery—both for tackling such a huge topic and for putting details of her own family life out there for criticism (“Breakfast has a hard stop at 7:25. This was entered into the family meal policy (right under ‘No carbs for snacks’)”). Oster makes some truly great points in her data-analysis sweet spot (a meta-analysis, she writes, “doesn’t magically fix our correlation-versus-causation problem, but it does give us a more comprehensive view of the correlations”), but The Family Firm still provides parents with less useful information than the first two ParentData books. 

But my real fear isn’t that folks will waste time on a “meh” book. It’s that readers will gloss over the subtleties of her analysis, confusing her personal conclusions with research-backed gospel.

(For Oster’s take on some of these points, check out this Q&A we did for Salon. It’s more evidence of her bravery and truly admirable subjection of herself to critique in the name of a free exchange of ideas.)

Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren’t Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them

Family therapists Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright tackle largely the same subject matter covered in Lisa Lewis’s The Sleep-Deprived Teen, but they focus more on providing advice for making changes in the home.

Turgeon and Wright suggest that a bunch of what we associate with adolescence and smartphone use may be driven by sleep loss: moodiness, apathy, difficulty concentrating, short temper, negative thoughts, relationship conflict, and depression and anxiety. “What if you knew that one simple daily habit would boost your teenager’s mental health threefold, improve their grades and love of school, make them a better athlete, dramatically reduce their stress and anxiety, cut their chances of getting in a car accident in half, and ward off chronic health conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer?” they begin. “The irony is that we have this powerful panacea available to us … and every day we systematically neglect it.” 

Then they coach parents and teens on how to take “a sleep-forward approach” by identifying what’s stealing sleep and creating new habits: “A good rule of thumb for teens is to go outside for breakfast, walk to school if possible, spend the first period outside (hint to schools), and sit outside or go for a walk or a run before 10:00 a.m. on the weekends.”

Suggested changes range from ensuring your child has a pillow they like to improving home life generally with methods the authors debuted in a previous book. And it all culminates in “The Sleep Challenge” tool, a printable version of which can be found at thehappysleeper.com.

The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive

Freelance writer Lisa Lewis was one of the handful of people who led the charge on California’s Senate Bill 328 which moved start times later at middle and high schools across the state. I know, because she emailed me about it at the time. A lot. 

Several years later, her book is packed with data on teens and sleep, including surprising histories, like the fact that no one really studied teen sleep until the 1970s, and that national school start times have crept earlier over the last 100 years from around 9 a.m. to about 8 a.m. Louisiana’s average start time of 7:40 a.m. requires some kids to be ready for a bus before 6 a.m.!

Lewis explains why teenagers today are so sleep-deprived in clear prose that’s well-paced and accompanied by end-of-chapter summaries.

She points to some best practices for individual parents and teens but says: “Being intentional about sleep can only do so much. Even if teens were to chuck their smartphones … it’s likely they still wouldn’t be able to get enough sleep, given how early they have to wake to get to school on time.” 

Opponents of shifting school start times argued that kids would just go to bed later, Lewis writes. And then she drops research showing they don’t; they actually get more sleep. “Shouldn’t teens get used to being able to function while exhausted? Isn’t this good preparation for ‘the real world’?” she asks rhetorically: “No, and no. [It] isn’t like training for a marathon. It’s not as if getting by on too-little sleep builds endurance.” In this no-nonsense manner, Lewis summarizes the science with clarity and efficiency, breaking up the info dump with stories about electrodes hanging off kids at Stanford’s sleep camp and Andre Iguodala upping his points-per-minute by 29 percent after a sleep makeover. 

Essential reading for parents and educators of tweens and teens.

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life

I don’t know Lyz Lenz, and I promise I’m not reviewing her book because it quotes me! I found out about that fact only after I’d pre-ordered this engaging read about a woman who realized, “I could be successful or I could be married.”

Lenz reminds me of Lara Bazelon when she writes, “I don’t have to win a Nobel Prize or be a heart surgeon for my life, my ambition, and my happiness to be worth fighting for.” She describes how those things were all dulled inside a union marked by the “commonplace horror” and “everyday indignities” of an unequal division of domestic labor and childcare. Lenz tried to save her marriage anyway: “I was holding on so tightly to what I had been told was good and right, I could barely breathe.” But when she stopped trying, clarity descended. Lenz concluded: “the better thing I wanted did exist, and it was me.” 

On the other side of divorce, Lenz writes, “I waited to be destroyed by the lusts of the flesh, like my Evangelical childhood promised, but instead my sins rebuilt me.” She joined a “whisper network of women who’d broken their lives apart and found freedom and happiness.” That explains why Lenz crafted a book that is “not gentle divorce apologetics but a full-throated argument in favor of it.”

“[E]ven if we go with the low 40 percent number for the likelihood that a marriage will fail, if 40 percent of Honda CR-Vs had engine failures, Honda would issue a recall,” Lenz writes with her characteristic combo of wit and sass. And yet, culture and government continue to “[f]orce people into marriage in the name of cutting the social safety net…. We need women wedded to their romantic partnerships so much that they’ll quit their jobs and abandon their dreams so that men can pursue theirs.” Once they’re wed, “entire industries … show women how to ask their husbands to do more cooking and cleaning … training a grown man like a horse.” But women shouldn’t have to beg, and a lot of the time it doesn’t help when they do. For Lenz, help “only came when things were dire,” and, she writes, “I didn’t need help; I needed to not carry it all.” Lenz acknowledges that individual women can thrive within marriage, but says, “[T]he system itself will always subsume the female partner.” So “who does telling couples that divorce is the easy way out benefit? It benefits the people who don’t do the work.”

With similar verve, Lenz takes on surname changes, the post-divorce revenge body, and the heart-rending possibility that maybe we’re the problem: “Perhaps spending time with me was like being scrubbed with a Brillo pad…. Maybe if I was calmer, smiled more, contradicted less?” I felt that line in my bones. And I felt like I walked alongside Lenz as she, in her words, “ended up very drunk on a Tuesday night, with my mom friend Kristie at Taste of Cedar Rapids.” 

“[W]e can have it all. So many women have. We just have to find another pathway to get there,” Lenz writes. And though she didn’t set out to do so, her book illuminates that pathway in the negative, like a shadow puppet show, for folks who want to save their marriages. Don’t do what her husband did; don’t tolerate what she tolerated. For those who conclude, like Lenz, that staying would be impossible without sacrificing themselves on the nuptial altar, she offers a hopeful note, even as she sounds the death knell for marriage: “Love and relationships, those are worth keeping. Home and family are worth cherishing. But those things can be accomplished successfully outside of the nuclear unit of husband and wife.”

The Strength Switch

Last week we covered Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting: Developing Your Children’s Innate Talents, the starting point for my articles about strengths-based parenting (for Parents) and strengths-based education (for U.S. News & World Report).

Lea Waters, Ph.D., takes things a step further, teaching parents how to integrate a strengths-based approach into a more general positive parenting philosophy. “Instead of asking what’s going wrong, ask what’s going right,” she says. When it comes to disappointing behavior, say to yourself: “I wonder what underlying strength is motivating them to do that” or “What strength does my child have that could help her handle this differently?” She calls this shift in perspective “the strength switch,” and it comes from having a slightly different take than Reckmeyer.

In Waters’ book, all children have all the strengths (she identifies more than 100, pulling from Gallup’s set and several others), defined as “things we do well, often, and with energy.” While it’s important to identify, name, and foster the ones that come most easily to children, a parent’s positive framing can also influence how they view “what comes hard.” She writes of her own son, “The more I commented on his success in organizing his things, the more he understood himself to be a strong organizer, and therefore the more likely he was to remember to stow the bike.”

But she also echoes Reckmeyer in emphasizing that kids must be made to know that to have weaknesses is to be human, not flawed.

In chapters that read like TED talks, Waters goes on to discuss the nitty-gritty of how to parent from a strengths-based perspective at various stages. That includes supporting concepts such as mindfulness, growth mindset, modeling, scaffolding, emotion coaching, building self-control, effective praise, and more. The book and its website, www.strengthswitch.com, are a veritable treasure trove of positive-parenting guidance. Highly recommend.

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Bonus review: Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them 

For those looking for more, Jenifer Fox, M.Ed., shares strategies acquired as a strengths-based educator (e.g., “Children who are easily verbally excited need channeling, not outright extinguishing”). Your Child’s Strengths includes a workbook and suggested exercises (e.g., “Give your child a choice of three chores … make a note of what he chooses … [and] what he does with ease and what frustrates him [as he does it]”). 

Strengths-Based Parenting: Developing Your Children’s Innate Talents

Years ago, I wrote an article for the now-defunct national glossy Parents about strengths-based parenting. My exploration of the topic began with Gallup’s Mary Reckmeyer, Ph.D.

She is essentially the princess of strengths, her father having championed the concept in modern psychology circles. With an assist from Jennifer Robison, Reckmeyer writes the primer on “encouraging a child to do more of what he does best.” 

The myth of well-roundedness makes us think we should be good at everything, leading us to focus on our deficits. That’s a mistake, Reckmeyer demonstrates, because of a confidence feedback loop; that is, feeling capable increases achievement and achievement makes you feel more capable. “You’ll accomplish a lot more by improving on talent than by trying to fix a weakness,” she says. As a parent, you can help your child be their best by helping them identify their propensities and creating “a positive, supportive environment where your children can apply those talents and build them into strengths.” Parents also need to take a look in the mirror: Are you scheduling weekends that play to your own strengths or what will look good on Facebook? But there’s comfort reflected there too. Your kid can (and should) get what they need from lots of different sources. “You don’t have to play all those roles. You don’t have to be a well-rounded parent.”

Though repetitive in places, Reckmeyer’s book is easy to read, in part thanks to relatable anecdotes—like how Steven Spielberg’s mom reacted to his request to film cans of cherries exploding inside a pressure cooker—and BS-free prose (e.g., “From the Torah to Twitter, there’s always been advice on how to bring up children”). And it includes practical advice on how to get started, including access to StrengthsSpotting, Gallup’s online tool for identifying talents in children. Well worth the read.

A Passion for More: Affairs That Make or Break Us

More than 30 years ago, journalist Susan Shapiro Barash started talking to women, from 20-year-olds to 80-year-olds, about their affairs. She published the first edition of A Passion for More in 1993 and each year since has interviewed around 30 more heterosexual, cisgender sources. It’s not academic science, but it sure is something.

Some of the women’s stories fit societal narratives of who cheats and when: bored housewives, vengeful victims who’ve discovered their husbands’ infidelity and decided to strike back, and damaged children in grown-up bodies—those who were never loved well and don’t know how to love well. But A Passion for More largely tells a different composite story. Some women marry young. They are subsumed by motherhood. They’re ignored and undervalued. Their affairs aren’t initiated because they’re impulsive, reckless, or morally corrupt, and they don’t usually end in fiery balls of consequences and deep remorse. Rather, for the most part, taking a lover in these stories is a radical act of self-care by women who benefit and express no regret.

According to Shapiro Barash: “70% of women will engage in an affair of some kind at some point.” About half will leave the primary relationship and about half will stay. “For some, the lover is a bridge to another life, for others he is a method of renegotiating their commitment. For still others, both lover and husband/partner will co-exist.” 

Quotes from the women reveal additional themes. Alice married a father-figure but then said, “Three years ago I no longer needed a father but a friend, partner, lover. Now I needed someone exciting and fun.” Lucy said, “From thirty-five to forty-five I’ve changed so much as a woman.” What they needed had shifted over the years.

Others never got what they signed up for. Abbie said, “I did love my husband, I really did. Except he was too busy to spend time with me…. He was married to his business…. I needed something now to feel like my old self again, to save myself.” For Eva, “There I was, married with children, financially secure and dead inside” with a husband who “was absorbed with his work, even sports events on TV…. He never listened to me; he never heard what I had to say,” she said. “Jeff, on the other hand, listened to every word…. I was trapped in a good life with something missing at the core.” Randy’s lover too “listens when I speak,” she said. Joanna’s husband traveled often. Susan’s “had little time for me.” Christine’s was a workaholic. So is Robin’s. And Sabrina’s. Priscilla said, “I became lonely…. When he was there, physically and paying some attention to me, it was enough. I was fulfilled. But when he became immersed in business … I really felt rejected and unhappy.” Julie said, “I began to realize that I needed a lot from a man that I wasn’t getting from my husband. Intimacy, communication, sex—I got it all from my lover.” For these women, the affair was a symptom of marital dissatisfaction.

Some found the roles in which they’d been cast stifling. Violet wanted “to be desirable still after being married with little kids.” Stephanie said, “I was the devoted wife, mother, daughter. Except I wanted more out of my life.” Regina said, “I had an obligation to everyone: our child, my parents, his parents, work, running the house.” When Camille’s baby was born, she gave up a career and autonomy. Her lover “brought out the creative, fun side of me, the wacky aspect, a part of me that had been lost for so long, taken over by the role of a doctor’s wife, a mother … not creating a new me but reviving the lost me.” She said, “I deserve more than to feel half-dead. If I hadn’t experienced this love, I would believe most love affairs are really only about sex. But I know how much more it is than that.” Rita said, “I needed affirmation of my womanhood.” Hanna said, “I’ve regained my identity.” 

“He really brought me back to life,” Julie said of her lover. Honey “felt sexier than ever.” Vivien “suddenly felt terrific and really alive.” Anna saw it as “a healthy ego boost.” For Tess, the affair was an exercise in mindfulness, “I am smack in the middle of it while it is going on.” 

For some, the affair reinvigorated or prolonged the marriage: “Sex is better with my husband; the relationship with my husband is better, because of the affair.” For Melanie: “Without the escape of the affair and the pleasure it gave me, I could not have tolerated life with my husband.” Anamarie said, “My mothering skills are even better, because I’m happier.” 

Of course, there’s anxiety and guilt too. Some of Shapiro Barash’s interviewees felt torn. And others admitted they wished they’d sought therapy or an open marriage. As she quotes Dr. Bertram Slaff saying, “If you speak with 100 women, there will be myriad conscious and unconscious reasons for them to take lovers…. [T]he variations are enormous and one cannot generalize.” And yet, the women in her book largely aren’t befuddled Eves succumbing to a seductive serpent and forbidden fruit; their stories are permeated by a sense of entitlement and exploration, of fearless resolve, and often, of confidence and self reclaimed.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans

Michaeleen Doucleff’s central conceit, that American parents have lost touch with universal tools of high-quality parenting, is reductionist, elitist (e.g., unpaid alloparenting is more common at income levels lower than Doucleff’s), and belied by her quotation of Laura Markham and Tina Payne Bryson, who—like other non-hunter-gatherer parenting experts—have been preaching many, if not all, of these same techniques. Doucleff defines positive parenting and free-range parenting in artificially limited ways (as lacking tools and offering kids a Lord of the Flies existence, respectively), reshaping these schools of thought into strawmen for her to attack. “We interfere too much,” Doucleff writes.

While she’s not wrong about trends toward controlling, intensive, and isolated parenting in the U.S., using “we” for all of Western culture renders invisible the oodles of teachers and parents who already do the things Doucleff recommends. They have “the look,” avoid power struggles, use natural consequences, offer re-enactments and do-overs, and take stir crazy kids outside or give them jobs. Their kind, helpful children are also erased in this framing.

It just wasn’t necessary to characterize American parents as a mass of nagging, punitive, and over-praising buffoons without access to good advice in order to say the Maya, Hadzabe, and Inuit cultures (and Doucleff) have value to add: that these methods need to be more widespread and advice scattered across parenting books summarized with the lens of what’s universal. The schtick gets really, really annoying. But please read the book anyway.

Why? Doucleff chooses a successful organizing acronym: TEAM, for togetherness, encouragement, autonomy, and minimal interference. Her anecdotes read well. She hammers home the universal formula for transmitting values and reinforcing desirable behavior: “practice, model, acknowledge.” She brings together lots of fantastic advice: Invite your kids to work together to clean up, find a way to “acknowledge a child’s ideas without actually doing what they ask,” and don’t micromanage. Don’t interrupt your kids. “[T]urn commands, criticisms, and feedback into questions.” 

I’ll discard the advice to ask, “Do whiny babies get to go to Trader Joe’s?” And I’ll also keep encouraging my kids to negotiate. Because, as Doucleff says, it would be a mistake to “romanticize other cultures, believing they contain some ‘ancient magic.’” Not everything she observes is ideal just because it’s traditional. And yet, Doucleff gathers so much wisdom on how to create a calm, cooperative household that new parents will benefit from the information, and any caregiver, no matter how skilled, from the refresher.

Small Fry

My sister gave me Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ bombshell memoir about the author’s father, Steve Jobs, several Christmases ago, and it sat on my bedside table until recently. I didn’t anticipate it being, at its core, a book about childrearing. I’ve written before about “good enough” parenting and how helpful the process of elimination can be in defining it. There are lots of reasonable ways to parent, and then there is this.

Unflinching and eviscerating, Small Fry is replete with cautionary tales. I identified with Brennan-Jobs as she weathered the ‘80s and ‘90s with parents who took to an extreme that era’s propensity to not put children first. Her mother says, “I lost my twenties,” and then, “I want my own friends, my own life,” and Brennan-Jobs remembers feeling, “My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share.”

Of her father, she writes, “We all made allowance for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?” She’s a talented writer, gifted enough to describe what it feels like to be at the mercy of a mercurial externalizer, the way air can change in an instant.

Brennan-Jobs occasionally indulges in pettiness and only a handful of the book’s many characters are ultimately portrayed sympathetically. And yet, Small Fry rings true—deeply, horribly true.

Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood

After experiencing rage as “a constant low-grade buzzing” under her skin, Minna Dubin decided to dig into “what mom rage is, why we have it, and what we can do about it.” Those are essentially the three parts of her book, with the first chunk making the case that “the broader societal landscape … sets up today’s mothers for despair and fury.” Here, Dubin skillfully recounts important phenomena, like invisible labor, and says hard truths, such as, “[s]tuck inside the scam of ‘the best job a woman can have,’ we do not know where or at whom to direct our shamed fury.” Skipping forward to the third part of the book, Dubin covers more familiar ground, including “how mothers can be better cared for by societal systems.” (Think paternity leave and heavily subsidized child care.) Again, essential territory, but well-trodden.

It is the middle where Dubin shines and shows why bedside tables and bookstore shelves needed yet another book.

You don’t have to rage to find the intricacies of the “Mom Rage Cycle” both relatable and illuminating. Think of the phenomenon of rising frustration as a volcano, with even the dormant among us subject to magma churning below: “Before a mom reaches rage, irritation and stress have been slowly building inside of her, possibly for hours, days, or even weeks.” So vividly does Dubin describe one undermining interaction with her son and partner that the scene had the feel of my own memory: “This sort of thing became such a trigger that the thousandth time it happened I shouted at Paul loud enough for the neighbors to hear, ‘NO ONE IS TALKING TO YOU!!!’ Then I had to grovel for my inappropriate outburst.”

She follows description with super helpful “strategies to better understand our rage, identify personal rage triggers, and make allies of our partners.” Maybe you, like me, are far more easily provoked when your bladder is full. Maybe your impulse to rage, like Dubin’s, is “tangled up with” perfectionism and feeling disrespected, unappreciated, powerless, alone, invalidated, afraid (particularly if something sacred is on the line), and robbed of time.

Dubin writes, “I hope Mom Rage provides mothers respite from the shame, the loneliness, and the mean voices — both internal and external,” and I want that too. I very much want that too.

But I worry Dubin’s message will be misconstrued. Once or twice, she mentions the distinction between “rage” and abuse which is “never okay.” And yet, I personally know several parents who perpetrate emotional and psychological abuse. And I know they are likely to find not just absolution, but also justification, in Dubin’s pages, despite her best intentions: “By raging, we’re calling bullshit on the scam of Motherhood,” she writes, “we signal our refusal to be mistreated, undervalued, and uncared for.” I can see them now, nodding their heads.

But two things can be true at the same time. So I wish “Mom Rage” had delved into what distinguishes abusive from non-abusive rage. And I nonetheless recommend mothers click “add to cart” or “place hold” on this important contribution to the motherhood canon.