📚 Advice from Parenting Books, for Everyone

A brief book review roundup of several parenting books and articles I've read lately, with special focus on the advice that seems useful for dealing with grownups, too.

Books like $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No¹ by Alex Hormozi (which is informative and easy-to-read albeit not terribly useful for achieving my actual goals) make it pretty clear that:

You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear

I have no particular interest in being a mommy blogger; I am never gonna be your one-stop-shop for solving parenting problems. But I also do feel quite strongly that

People who help others (with zero expectation) experience higher levels of fulfillment, live longer, and make more money.

is probably true. So bear with me here, because this article is in some ways a favor to a friend.

She recently mentioned that How Children Thrive by Mark Bertin was the parenting book she had read that most closely matched her own experience. She asked for my take on the book, and while I'm generally pretty reluctant to talk parenting philosophy on the internet, at this point enough people have asked for a summary of my parenting research that it feels worth writing out.

Not least of which because, there’s a lot in How Children Thrive and the other books that have informed my parenting philosophy that applies to adult relationships as well. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably (maybe? hopefully? I’ve lost track of how the algorithm works these days) seen some examples there over the last week or so².

This is, therefore, a selection of my thoughts on parenting books I actually got to the end of, sprinkled with links to articles I found particular thought-provoking.

How do children differ?

The first thing I want to do is preface this by saying that I genuinely think that parenting is a tricky topic to discuss. The Readwise database informs me parenting books are four of my top seven most highlighted books, to give you a sense of all the stuff I do with my time that I don't normally write about publicly — because it’s super fraught! Between the hormones, the cultural pressures, the subtle way “I do X” can come across as “and so should you” or worse “you’re terrible for not doing as I do” even if you don’t mean it that way… oof.

Plus, neither “experts” nor parents nor grandparents are really a great source of advice, given our changing world and how every kid is different. It seems like many people’s gut instincts are sort of garbage these day — and I don’t mean this in a critical sense, I mean that a lot of us (at least in my culture) haven't spent time around many children in our lives, so we haven’t had many opportunities to develop good instincts about kids.

A lot of us turn to books, for obvious reasons. My general feeling is that the best source of parenting advice is probably a parent of 4+ school-aged children (at least one similar in age to your own kid) who also works part-time in a child-adjacent field like lactation consultant, midwife, childcare provider, speech & language pathologist, occupational therapist, etc. If you don't happen to have someone in your personal network along those lines, folks like that do sometimes write good books. I mostly just urge you not to overgeneralize based on your own experiences, or overindex on “average” and “normal” children³.

Enough hedging, how do children thrive?

Mark Bertin's foundational claim is that executive function skills (annoyingly associated with a huge grab bag of skills and abbreviated to EF throughout the book) are the most important thing children need help developing — and that parents must help their children manage their brains until they are old enough to do so independently, which takes decades.

The premise and tone is fairly in line with most of the practical parenting books I've liked (my most-frequently shared notes are from Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right) and there weren't many surprises. At this point in my life, I've got a decade of teaching, and four years of raising a kid while obsessively reading parenting blogs and relevant research papers under my belt; it would have been surprising if there were big surprises. But emphasis matters, and Bertin particularly highlighted the need for clear limits, appropriate expectations, guidance, and support to help children develop healthy habits, build independence, and foster resilience.

Take away “children” and it might as well have been management advice for growing a strong team in a young startup.

Quite unlike management and startup advice, though, most parenting books I’ve read try to be reassuring that it's pretty hard to screw up your kid if you’re trying to do a good job, like, at all. How Children Thrive also frames it as “as a foundation, children require stable homes, clear limits, a time to play… and, for many, not much more than that!”

Emily Oster has made a name for herself writing ParentData, which is “evidence-based pregnancy and parenting tips” that mostly sum up to “actually the evidence is almost always garbage, you will probably be fine as long as you read to your kid and don’t spank them” in ways that I occasionally feel falls a little too far on the “tell your audience of upper middle class moms what they want to hear” side of things. For example, Emily Oster’s take is “data shows that divorce is not always bad for children” and she has a pretty similar tone when it comes to things like daycare vs. family childcare even though the data I’ve seen does not align with her breezy “it’s probably all equal, do whatever you feel like doing” stance.

But in Troubled, Rob Henderson also emphasizes the importance of stable homes — although I've only read his newsletter, he’s got a lot of support from other books making the rounds right now. The most popular is probably The Two Parent Priviliege… which I also haven’t read, but I’m pretty sure has a bunch of data saying that having two parents in a stable home is super important for kids. The best review I’ve found of it questions some of the data, but mostly in terms of timeline, not the fundamental point that being raised in a house with two married parents does, in general, lead to better outcomes for kids.

What I find most interesting, though, was Henderson’s claim that guys like Bryan Caplan — who rely on twin studies to say “outcomes are mostly genetics” — are missing that twin studies generally follow kids who are raised in remarkably similiar circumstances. To even be able to adopt in America, you have to have a certain baseline level of stability, decency, and money.

Of course, I imagine that the average reader of Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for Having More Kids is able to meet that baseline of stability, decency, and money.

But how do children learn?

I read to my kids all the time and I like my husband, so frankly the fretting about the societal impacts of modern parenting trends are something I follow out of general cultural awareness, not advice. But as a former teacher and as someone who really enjoys learning, truthseeking, and knowledge — but who hasn’t spent a lot of time around really little kids — I went into How Children Thrive hoping to learn something actionable.

For example, Oh Crap! Potty Training had lots of actionable advice — aside from the obvious stuff like “take your kid with you to the bathroom so they can see you pee,” my favorite thing about this book was that it gave very specific language to use, and was extremely opinionated.

What I find is a lot of parents emphasize the positive end of things (“only pee in the potty”), but they leave out the other part of the equation (“don’t pee anywhere else”). So, yes, you definitely want to stress the positive, but make sure you are being clear about what you don’t want as well.

If you ignore the examples, this seems like great management advice too.

Heck, “Ninety percent of all resistance is caused by overprompting” translates pretty directly to “don’t micromanage your direct reports or they will resent you.”

Check out this article about being a tech lead from

Raviraj Achar

, specifically the line about how some new tech leads will expect everyone in the team to be equally motivated and self-manage their work. They get frustrated when others don’t seem equally diligent with “project management.” It’s remarkably similar to how this Bertin suggests supporting a child developing executive functioning skills.

Model the behaviors you want to see. Provide specific, honest feedback. Give firm timelines. Gradually layer in more opportunities for independence, monitor the situation, and roll back to the previous level of oversight as needed.

It’s as simple (and as hard to do well) as that.

Oh Crap also claims that potty training is a great way to get to know your kid because it’s the first really clear glimmer you get of your kid’s learning style, which sort of sets the tone for the rest of your relationship. I worry I'm at risk of reading too much into this, because potty training my son went stupendously well — more so because we got lucky than any particular method we followed.

And there was lots of stuff from Oh Crap! that we didn’t bother with. For example, “If your child is used to having a big glass of something with dinner, this habit needs to change” was something we ignored, and it worked out fine. Every kid is different!

But Oh Crap and How Children Thrive are both very clear that “young children learn almost exclusively from immediate feedback and not through discussion.” As someone who has sat through a stupendous number of meetings where supervisors and teachers lectured a room full of people about what should and shouldn’t happen, but never individually addressed the people who were not doing the correct things, I rolled my eyes a bit. Adults also learn almost exclusively from immediate feedback and not through discussion!

There were 88,899 new federal rules and regulations between 1995 through December 2016. “Only” 4,312 were laws, but surely you see where I’m going with this. Between federal laws, state laws, social norms, expectations at work, the laws of physics, and soft preferences on the part of our loved ones, the vast majority of our learning must naturally end up being thru experience. Getting “in trouble” can be a verbal reprimand, a sudden loss of all your funds, or being ghosted by romantic prospects, but talking things to death is rarely the best route — unless having to listen to someone talk things to death is, in fact, the consequence⁴.

I’m sure if I’d gotten around to reading Bad Therapy — instead of just relying on publicity tours and snippets from reviews with varying levels of support for the premise and rejection of reading parenting books at all — it would have had something extra pithy to say on the topic as well.

That said, I would have liked more discussion of how stories are a unique method of learning for humans that is not replicated in other species⁵. In fact, it's even more useful than leveraging location connections for memory, as with the Memory Palace technique. Narratives combine capacity for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, with the capacity to invent. This is a really efficient form of learning. For example, story-based e-learning tools help students learn more effectively. They provide context for experiences because of the events in designed stories; it’s similar to how I learned a ton about economics playing Neopets as a teen.

How should children play?

A central premise of How Children Thrive is that:

Kids today are the same as ever: They need to run around, fall down, play with friends, negotiate disagreements, and sort out what to do when their parents say no. They need to have fun and explore their world like all generations before.

This is pretty much what

Peter Gray

has been shouting from the rooftops lately, but I would argue that it’s not just true of children. Adults also need to run around (or in my case walk, alas my hips), take risks, negotiate conflicts instead of ghosting and ostracizing people, and sort out what to do when situations don't go their way.

It sucks when we don’t get what we want! It sucks when things aren’t entertaining! But it’s important to learn to cope with that.

Let children find other ways to entertain themselves when they’re bored—downtime may have as much value for child development as anything else on the weekly calendar.

Based on everything I know about childhood in general and the childhoods of exceptional people in particular, this is totally true. But when it shows up in parenting advice books I find super annoying, because it feels like better advice for older kids and adults — being bored is hugely impactful for creativity, for example. Parenting books never seem to explain at what age this sort of thing is appropriate. Making my infant daughter “entertain herself” and “be bored” feels like a recipe for listening to a screaming baby who feels emotionally rejected, whereas forcing my 4-year-old to play by himself for half an hour without duoABC or one of the handful of YouTube channels I can actually tolerate feels like an obviously appropriate choice. But I had to figure that out basically through trial and error, even though child psychologists have surely figured out when imaginative play starts spontaneously showing up (around 4, for us).

How much should you trust this?

All that said, I do want to note a little bit of caveat emptor on the advice-book front; incentives matter, and most advice books are incentivized to tell the largest practical number of people what they are primed to hear, because that’s how you get lots of people with money to buy enough books to earn back an advance. Highly specialized things like advice about how to raise geniuses or one weird trick for fostering grit tend to stay niche blog posts. So, while I generally get my book recommendations from people I trust, which is hopefully enough of a hedge, I’m always a little worried about books where the message is “don’t worry, be happy” — I’m enough of a philosophy nerd to worry about how hedonism can lead to bad outcomes.

Then I worry that worrying too much could have negative outcomes for my kids.

Then I go back to reading books like Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel :P

1. This is an Amazon affiliate link; I’ll earn money from qualifying purchases made using this link.

2. Actually, I’m curious. What social media do y’all hang out on these days? Anything? I feel like all my old feeds are crickets. Did everybody move to Tiktok? Discord? SMS chats?

3. Incidentally, the “average” American (Jessica from California) is only a little younger than me. She has a child my son's age. Even so, we are definitely very different people.

4. This phenomenon is similar in concept to The Process is the Punishment, though the book itself is more focused on the judicial system.

5. This paragraph is taken from an article I wrote as a thank-you to financial supporters back in 2022, Sensemaking thru Fiction.