09 April 2011

The Case for Having Kids

Here's an interview with author of a new book “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”. Read the whole thing, but I agree with all these suggestions to make parenthood more enjoyable:

1. While parents often lose sleep for years, getting kids to sleep through the night is not hard. Real experiments confirm that the Ferber method — let your baby cry in his crib for 10 minutes, briefly comfort him, leave, repeat — works wonders.

2. Improving kids’ behavior isn’t hard either. Experiments confirm that clear, consistent, mild discipline — like putting kids in the “Naughty Corner” — works even on difficult kids. The problem is that if parents stop imposing discipline, kids soon revert to their old tricks.

3. If neither you nor your child enjoys an extracurricular activity, stop doing it. If the alternative is a little more TV or Xbox, that’s O.K.

4. Supervise less. Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids makes the case better than I ever could.

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