Cribsheet Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

You have likely heard the adage that there are ‘a million ways to skin a cat.’ Parenting, while distinctly different from deconstructing felines, should be approached with a similar philosophy in mind. Emily Oster wants parents to take a more relaxed approach in raising their children. While data-driven research can certainly be useful in decision-making processes, parents need to be careful about what kinds of studies and information they are making their choices based upon.

Additionally, many parenting choices can be made based on a personal decision-making framework alone. If you consider what it is that you value most, be it time, money, or quality of care for your child, you can keep these opportunity costs in mind when making decisions while also considering the marginal value in each situation. At the end of the day, there’s not one way to do parenting right. If there was, we would have figured it out a long time ago!

About the Author

Emily Oster was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1980. After receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2006, Oster began her academic career at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Later, Oster’s professional pursuits took her to Brown University where she is currently an economics professor. Oster studies a wide array of concepts spanning from research design and methodology to development and health economics. Prior to publishing Cribsheet, Oster wrote and released Expecting Better in 2014. As of March 2019, Oster’s premier text had sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.

Topics

Parenting

Cribsheet Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

From an outside perspective, you might think it unlikely that an economist would have valuable insight to add to a conversation about early-childhood parenting. However, that’s exactly where you are wrong.

Not only does economist Emily Oster’s second book, Cribsheet, offer a detailed analysis of the interplay between economic trends and behaviors among young children, but the text also provides a practical, hands-on guide for effective parenting in an era of information overload. Oster separates the valuable advice from the ‘clutter’ and parents (or soon-to-be parents) have much to look forward to with this data-driven how-to (and how-to-not) guide.

Why You Need a Crib Sheet

You may have never heard of a ‘crib sheet’ before. Let us enlighten you. A crib sheet is also known as a ‘cheat sheet’ or a piece of paper with helpful hints and notes that a student is allowed to take into their exam for extra assistance.

In the context of parenting, the crib sheet is the set of notes you should always keep handy as you move through the trials and triumphs of becoming a new parent.

So, what sort of information do the most useful crib sheets include?

The answer varies, but here are a few suggestions:

A list of your baby’s doctors and their contact information
A list of baby-related supplies you may need from the store and their prices
Possible nanny options or daycare options and the pros and cons of each
Tracking your baby’s growth and progress towards various milestones

While this note-keeping practice might seem academic in nature, it serves a vital purpose in parenting as well: allowing us, as caretakers for tiny humans, to make competent, informed decisions based on cost and benefit analyses, as we will examine in more detail later on.

How Economics Makes Us Better Parents

Imagine a scenario where you are forced to make a difficult parenting decision: send your child to daycare or hire a full-time nanny. In choosing between these options, you are likely to consider several factors including cost, quality of the experience, and perhaps even the physical distance to the location. By weighing the pros and cons of each option, you are already making economic considerations without even realizing it. Some--like the cost of the service--are monetary while others--such as the quality of the experience--are non-monetary inputs.

The bottom line? We all place a different level of importance on each factor in a decision. For this reason, there is no right or wrong answer from an economic standpoint. Instead, there is variability among the choices we make and we need to accept that what works for our family might be distinctly different from what works for another. Every situation holds variables that are unique.

In the end, our economic decisions are value-based ones. They are dependent on personal priorities. If it is more important to you to have your child raised in your home environment, you might want to hire the nanny. If it is more important to you that your child develop strong social skills with other kids, you may prefer to send...