If your Instagram feed is anything like mine, you hear a lot about “gentle parenting.” It sounds promising. After all, based on the name, it would appear the alternative is something like “harsh parenting,” which I may occasionally veer into but would certainly like to avoid. On the flip side, it’s been hard to miss the pushback. 

As is my general approach to these things, my angle into it is data. What does the evidence say about this trend?

Gentle Parenting

Thank you, and Time 100

Reinfection and Long COVID

Queer parenting, infertility and a gentle approach to cleaning

Three Books You Might Really, Really Need

Breech Delivery, External Versions, and More

A while ago, I published a newsletter on literacy, with education professor Emily Solari. There were big lessons there, and I’m happy to see (not due to me, obviously) that the importance of phonics has come to the fore in the past couple of years. Many people wrote in to ask whether there were a similar set of lessons for math or, more generally, what we know about math learning.

I’m delighted today to talk about these questions with Shalinee Sharma, co-founder of the curriculum development company Zearn. I got to know Shalinee during the pandemic, and I wrote about some of the warning signs on lost learning coming out of the Zearn data as early as spring 2020.

All Kids Are Math Kids

Today the FDA met to discuss emergency use authorization for two vaccines for children six months to 5 years old.  They voted this afternoon to approve the vaccines (the vote was 21 to 0 in favor for both vaccines).  I will not go through all of the meeting details here, although you can read more here in a great “live blog” of the meeting. The meeting held relatively few surprises — they reviewed the data, heard from stakeholders, asked some questions and voted.

Under 5 Vaccines: FDA Decides, I dig into the data

To serve what people need, we have to step back and give people a framework for understanding why and how the vaccines work.

An Under-5 Vaccine Decision Framework

Today I want to dive into two things that, in the moment, you may obsess over even if I doubt they will haunt your dreams later: Cocomelon and balance bikes.

Cocomelon and Balance Bikes

When new guidelines like this are released, a natural question is why and, more specifically, what changed in the data or social fabric to push it forward. I want to talk through that today, for both the breastfeeding and sleep guidelines.

New AAP Guidelines on Breastfeeding and Safe Sleep

The TL;DR is that I do not think this paper makes a compelling case that video games are good for cognitive development, any more than other papers make the case that they are bad. Beyond that, it’s revealing about the big-picture issues in asking this question.

Gentle Parenting

ParentData

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