An economist at the University of Chicago, Oster examines all the admonitions and recommendations pregnant women feel during those (roughly) 38-42 weeks of gestation (or less or more if circumstances dictated it). She divides the book by conception, each trimester and labor and delivery and then reviews the data on everything from miscarriage fears to morning sickness, diet and weight to exercise, induction to epidural and more. The chronological structure is logical, and she pairs it with commentary from her own first pregnancy, during which she sought out much of the information she discusses.
What works especially well in this book is that Oster walks readers through not only the data she reads but what it means and how it should be interpreted. The book is chock full of numbers and graphs and charts, but Oster works hard to demystify these and make the data in all the studies she reads accessible to the lay reader. Sometimes she misses the mark a little with this — I found some of her personal stories distracting and some of the data discussions just dull enough to lose my attention briefly — but I also find myself distracted and my mind wandering when I read too much about any data, even in topics I'm very interested in, so I suspect that experience is more a result of the subject matter than its treatment. Data can be dense, even when you want to read it. Hence Oster's explanations as she carries the reader along — what limitations does each study have, how big or small is a study, how does one tease out cause and effect, what other factors play a role in the results — help in making sense of it all.
My two biggest quibbles are the absence of any discussion of vaccines during pregnancy (the flu and Tdap vaccines are important) and Oster's treatment of alcohol during pregnancy, for which she was criticized when the book came out in 2013. The question of drinking any alcohol at all during pregnancy has always been a fraught one, and Oster does only a surface dive into the evidence that left her coming up short. She found the flaws in studies finding light drinking can cause problems in pregnancy, but she wasn't critical enough about the flaws in studies finding little to no risk of light drinking in pregnancy. Having dug into this data myself, I was disappointed that she wasn't more thorough and critical in this area.
Beyond this, however, Oster is mostly on the mark. Despite the glut of pregnancy books on the market, few take a truly evidence-based approach — Maggie Koerth-Baker has a nice round-up of the ones out there (including Expecting Better) — so Oster's highly readable, sometimes humorous, often reassuring book is a welcome addition.
Named after her excellent, highly recommended blog Science of Mom, Alice Callahan's new book picks up where Oster's left off. Like Oster, Callahan has a PhD, but hers is in nutrition, and she puts it to good use in a book that covers nearly everything you could want to know about a baby's first year. Callahan opens with a chapter called "Show Me the Science" which does an excellent job of explaining how science is conducted. She reviews the types of studies and their relative reliability, causation vs. correlation, what the numbers mean and how to evaluate risk. She's swift yet thorough in covering what amounts to the first semester of an epidemiology class, and she doesn't neglect to explain where science can fall short. "Science continued to be a refuge for me as I worked on the book, even as I recognized its limitations," she writes late in the book, and it's a sentiment I could relate to myself.
Like Oster, Callahan brings in her own personal experiences to break up the density of the material she's covering, and I found her writing a bit crisper, as it is in her blog. She also always leaves dogma behind, recognizing the complexities of incorporating science-based recommendations into real life, where babies don't sleep like we're told they will and refuse the broccoli even on the 17th attempt. Her compassion and empathy for the difficulties of parenting shine through in every chapter, from breastfeeding to vaccines to feeding to sleeping.
It's challenging to cover everything, and Callahan digs deeper into some areas (a full chapter on the umbilical cord) than others, but it's one of the best books out there that reviews the evidence on these topics without telling you what to do. I found her appendices especially valuable because she tackles some of the issues that especially concern parents about vaccines, such as whether kids receive too many vaccines too soon and some of their ingredients, and information on the hepatitis B and vitamin K shots at birth.
Unlike the previous three, Kitchen Lab Science for Kids is not based on research studies, per se, nor is it a "guide" in any sense. Rather, it's the coolest recipe book you could ever buy for your kids and a surefire way to have the most fun ever destroying your kitchen. Pulling from the best experiments and activities on her blog Kitchen Pantry Scientist, Heinecke offers one fun project for each week of the year, laid out beautifully in bright, colorful pages that include a materials list, safety tips, photos, step-by-step instructions, the "science behind the fun" and creative ways to enrich the experience.
She also offers an overview of how to log your experiments — just as real scientists do — to keep track of what kids have done and what they've learned. The activities range in age from preschool through adolescence, though mostly in the elementary and early junior high years, and are organized according to their field: chemistry, geology/crystals, physics/motion, life science, liquids, materials, acids and bases, microbiology, electric energy, botany, sun science and rocket science. It's hard to imagine a better way to arouse children's interest in STEM than conducting experiments at home and in the community, and Heinecke's book makes it easy to pick and choose great activities even for parents who have forgotten everything they learned in science class.
As I warned above, one of these books was my own, co-authored with fellow Forbes contributor Emily Willingham. Rather than rave about everything we covered, I'll tell you instead how and why the book came about. As I wrote more and more about medical research in pediatrics and prenatal health, I realized the mainstream news left out a lot I wanted to know and understand, including the relative strength of study findings and how the research was conducted in greater detail than a 600-word story. That led me to create my blog Red Wine & Applesauce, where I delved into those issues myself. Meanwhile, Emily similarly wrote a great deal about what the evidence actually says on pregnancy, parenting and child issues. With a grant from the National Association of Science Writers, she founded Double X Science, where a team of us often tackled these topics (and where a couple early drafts of sections from our book can be found).
But it wasn't enough. I wanted to know the BIG big picture — as much about the consensus of the research as possible in every area of parenting young kids, all in one place. When I went searching for that book, I couldn't find it. (It's worth noting that Oster's and Callahan's books, which came out later, partly fulfilled this need, though neither covers the ambitious range I was seeking.) What I found instead were dozens of books that told me what to do or how to follow a particular parenting philosophy, sometimes buttressed with cherry-picked evidence and sometimes just tossed out by an authority with letters behind their name.
So, Emily and I decided to write the book we had always wanted and never found. We start in the pre-conception years and go through age 4, covering everything from pregnancy to birth to vaccines to feeding to allergies to circumcision to screen time to reading to autism to essential oils to IVF to toilet training… and more. We could be faulted for covering such a wide range — like Oster and Callahan, we had to make tough choices on what to include, what to exclude and how deeply to dive into each area. But we wanted at least an overview on some of the biggest areas while at least touching on some of the smaller ones, and like Oster and Callahan, we go to pains to explain how science works and how readers can evaluate research themselves. What's nice is that Oster and Callahan go deeper into some areas we skipped, but each of them skipped areas we covered in depth. The conclusion you should draw from that, of course, is that you should buy all three! Our book is due in April 2016 but available for pre-order now.