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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3298 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone have any rigorous, evidence-based resources or knowledge about early childhood development? For example, reading a lot of things like 'more tummy time helps babies learn to crawl/walk sooner' or 'x is correlated with earlier speech development.' Is there any actual evidence to show that any of these things matter for outcomes later in life?

Tangential, but related.

Rick Beato ended up doing a fairly rigorous experiment with the datapoint of 1 on his own child for developing perfect pitch. It used to be thought that you're born with it, can't be learned and is exceedingly rare. While a datapoint of 1 is low, the likelihood of a very-low-probability positive outcome being noise, is also fairly low.

It ties in well with learning seemingly-impossible skills and early age neuro-plasticity at large.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo

Someone did a study years ago that babies in tonal language nations are far more likely to have perfect pitch, which gives more evidence to it being something that can be learned in early childhood. Also as a Pat Finnerty subscriber, I feel obligated to say, BEATO!

Emily Oster always comes up as a good resource in these discussions. I have not read her, however.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I’ve read two of her three books (Expecting Better and Cribsheet) and in general trust her. She digs into the veracity of studies backing certain claims and also understands that there’s only so much bandwidth a parent has when trying to follow strict guidelines that feel overly high stakes.

I read Cribsheet, and while I wouldn’t exactly say I trust her, I can say that she is way more diligent, honest, and scientifically minded than most. She approaches the evidence with appropriate amount of skepticism, and is aware of many common pitfalls in scientific reasoning. I would definitely recommend her, but I still recommend using your own judgement as well, especially in areas where the social desirability bias is particularly strong.

I don't have specific recommendations, but I would advise checking the index for any book you're thinking of getting (the index is often shown for free on Amazon's or Google Books' preview feature) and disregarding any book that doesn't have index entries for something like genes, genetics, heritability, or twin studies. Any non-RCT study of parenting or childhood outcomes that does not control for heritability (and most don't) is literally worthless.

Agreed, thanks.

Brain Rules for Baby was the most honest parenting book I read regarding what evidence there is for their recommendations, but I don't think tummy time specifically came up.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll take a look.

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