The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years - THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Description

From age 5 to 12, parenting decisions do not come with the frequency that they do with a baby, but they are almost always more complicated. What's the right kind of school? How do you get them to eat healthily? Should they play a sport? Are you a helicopter parent, a free range parent, a tiger parent, an ostrich parent? Is that last one even a thing? Daily logistical challenges are punctuated by big, consequential decisions that you often have no idea how to think about. Oster outlines a framework and some systems: a way to run your family a bit more like a firm, beginning with the "Big Picture" for your family and going on to explain ways to structure your day-to-day, and how to approach big decisions. People will often tell you parenting is a job, albeit an underpaid one where the employees frequently tell you they hate you and you ruined their life. So maybe it's time to start treating it like one.

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better. She spoke at the 2007 TED conference and has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Esquire. Oster is married to economist Jesse Shapiro and is also the daughter of two economists. She has two children.

'Praise for Cribsheet:' - - 'She has crunched all the statistics on breastfeeding, potty training, working mothers and playgroups and discovered there is no optimal set of choices that will produce the perfect child. Most parents say they want happy, well-adjusted, robust kids and there are myriad ways to achieve those results. She's right' - Alice Thomson 'It couldn't be more relevant ... steers clear of recommendations and cast-iron guarantees, instead promising to arm parents with information to make the decisions that are right for them' - Daily Telegraph 'A huge relief from the scare stories ... Cribsheet is not another call for the end of helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting or whatever kind of parenting is lighting up social media today, and it's not a call to overthrow medical wisdom; it's a call for parenting with context, and it's freeing' - Washington Post 'Both refreshing and useful. With so many parenting theories driving us all a bit batty, this is the type of book that we need to help calm things down.' - LA Times