Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool (The ParentData Series Book 2)

organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. Prospective parents have no clue what their children will be like; no c

and to learn the meaning of your own baby’s patterns of communications over time. Once the underlying problems that this book discusses are properly addressed, responding sensibly to a baby’s cues makes life (and sleep) easiest for families, now and later.

But just as surely, another part of me wanted to manage the threat of  his  potential independence by subsuming him into myself. It was tempting to treat the baby as a prop for my own narratives of motherhood rather than as an independent person in his own right. But babies give no quarter to our preconceived ideas of what mothering them

“My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don’t jump on your kid at night,” Cohen says. “Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don’t automatically respond, even from birth.”