Book: Cribsheet

Cribsheet was an excellent read. An economist thinking about parenting is an appreciable departure from the normal books. This quote captures the essence best:

Your choices can be right for you but also not necessarily the best choices for other people. Why? You are not other people. Your circumstances differ. Your preferences differ. In the language of economics, your constraints differ.

When in parenting social media groups or reading blog posts, one of the hardest things is disagreement. The best choice for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another depending on circumstances. This book is more about offering how to think about the problems in a way to assess what is best for you and your spouse and your child.

Oster makes good use of showing how her the circumstances for her and her husband changed between their first and second child. So, expectations set by the first one were not necessarily appropriate for the second. And… that is okay.