The summary of the book "The Family Firm" - By Emily Oster

Key Concepts in this book:

1. The importance of getting adequate sleep for your child's success and well-being cannot be overstated.
2. Working outside the home could have an impact on your children's academic achievement and health.
3. People's tastes remain with them for the rest of their lives, therefore feed your child nutritious foods.
4. Helicopter parenting isn't deserving of its negative reputation.
5. Data can assist us in determining what constitutes a good school.
6. Sport has some long-term benefits for children, but it also has some hazards.
7. The data on children and screen time is contradictory.

Who can benefit the most from this book:

• Parents of children ages five to twelve.
• Educators looking for a fresh perspective.
• Psychology buffs seeking new insights.

What am I getting out of it? Take a business-like approach to parenting decisions.

Parenting and running a business have a lot more in common than you might imagine. When faced with difficult decisions, smart business executives gather facts and analyze data to identify the best course of action.

You'll learn how parents can take a similar strategy in this summary.

You'll learn about the most recent research in the field of child development and what the data really says about the most urgent questions you have as a parent of a child aged five to twelve. This is your how-to guide for optimal parenting, covering everything from how much sleep your child requires to balanced diets and screen usage.

• You'll learn how to convince your kids to eat vegetables.
• The relationship between parental employment and school grades.
• And why helicopter parenting has its advantages in this summary.

1. The importance of getting adequate sleep for your child's success and well-being cannot be overstated.

The author is also an economist in addition to being a parent. She focuses on how we can better use data to make better decisions. But data isn't just for economists. Scientific research, as the author discovered, have a lot to teach us about hot-button parenting matters, including something as basic as sleep.

Everyone on the globe, including your child, requires sleep. Sleep, on the other hand, isn't just for recharging a child's batteries; studies show that it's also essential for their development and well-being.

Children who received less sleep and had later bedtimes also obtained the worst marks, according to a survey of 3,000 high-school students in Rhode Island. Furthermore, these youngsters were more likely to suffer from depression.

The main point to remember is that getting adequate sleep is essential for your child's success and well-being.

The relationship between grades and sleep time isn't straightforward. The most important predictor of academic success, according to a 2010 meta-analysis of 20,000 children's sleep habits, was not the amount of sleep. Instead, it was the amount of tiredness that youngsters experienced during the day. This implies that each youngster may require a different amount of sleep to go through the day without becoming drowsy.

But does a lack of sleep lead to poor academic performance? Is it possible that another element, such as poverty, is to blame for both bad sleep and poor grades? Fortunately, scientists have discovered a solution.

Researchers asked children between the ages of eight and twelve to sleep one hour less each night for a week in one experiment. The children were then asked to sleep one hour longer the following week by the researchers. This may not appear to be much. After all, depending on their schedule, many children may get an hour more or less sleep per night. Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that one hour makes a significant difference. The children fared worse on memory and math exams at the end of the week when they slept less, and they also had more angry outbursts.

Even within the suggested range of nightly sleep time, this study implies that more is definitely preferable. Around 11 hours is an excellent choice for primary school children.

2. Working outside the home could have an impact on your children's academic achievement and health.

What impact will working full-time have on your children's lives? Many parents – and, regrettably, women in particular – wrestle with this issue frequently. But what do the numbers say? What is truly best for your children and you?

Of course, data alone cannot provide all of the answers. It's impossible to determine whether working or staying at home will make your child happier or strengthen your bond with him or her. These things are simply impossible to quantify. However, the data can show us how parental job affects two child outcomes: academic success and obesity.

The main point here is that working outside the home may have an impact on your children's academic achievement and health.

According to studies, when women work outside the home, their children perform better academically. However, the effect is negligible and varies depending on the type of family. Working women from low-income households and families of colour had the greatest positive impact on their children's grades. There's also evidence that daughters benefit more from having a working mother than sons.

When the mother works, however, the research demonstrates a very tiny detrimental influence on academic performance in high-income families. This could be because the mother's time would be better spent performing enriching activities with her children if she didn't work.

The evidence is stronger when it comes to the link between parental work and child obesity: children whose parents both work full-time are substantially more likely to be obese. Again, this is more prevalent among high-income households, though experts aren't sure why. What we do know is that children with full-time working parents consume less healthful food, drink more soda, and watch more television, all of which are obesity risk factors.

But how does working outside the home affect your happiness? If you're a mother, the evidence could be a little disheartening. While the study demonstrates that having a profession and having a family make women happy, it also reveals that the two do not complement each other.

Having a career and a family at the same time, in other words, is a prescription for stress. Full-time working mothers report being more harried, fatigued, and unhappy than stay-at-home mothers.

3. People's tastes remain with them for the rest of their lives, therefore feed your child nutritious foods.

Have you ever pleaded with your child to eat his or her vegetables, or wrestled candy bars from them? For most parents, feeding their children is a source of concern and frustration. What do the statistics say about children's diets, though?

For better or worse, the food that youngsters consume matters a lot more than you might imagine. Why? Because what people consume as children has a significant impact on what they eat later in life. Tastes for specific foods can even form in the womb, which is incredible. Children whose moms ate a lot of carrots while pregnant reported liking carrots far more than other children, according to one study.

The main point here is that people's tastes stay with them for the rest of their lives, so feed your child nutritious foods.

Even as adults, people have strong feelings about the foods they ate as children. According to one research of college students, they not only liked the foods they ate as youngsters, but they also ate them on a frequent basis.

Another study looked at people who grew up in a rice-eating region of India but relocated to a wheat-eating region as adults. Despite the fact that rice was more expensive there and many people were poor, they decided to consume rice.

Of course, instilling a good eating habit in your children is easier said than done. Can the data be of assistance?

It's possible! The evidence reveals that repetition is crucial when it comes to eating vegetables. The more vegetables you introduce to your children, the more likely they are to enjoy them.

In one study, preschoolers were given red pepper and squash and asked to rate how much they enjoyed them. The typical answer the first time was "yucky." However, after six attempts, the average reaction had risen to almost "yummy." Furthermore, by the end of the trial, the youngsters had consumed more than four times the amount of vegetables they had consumed at the start!

So don't just serve food to your child once and then abandon them if they don't like it. Instead, give it to them again the following week, and then again the following week, and so on.

4. Helicopter parenting isn't deserving of its negative reputation.

What kind of parent do you want to raise your children to be? Are you a tiger mom that relentlessly pushes your children to succeed? Or are you a hands-off dad who lets your child roam free like a free-range chicken? We'll be focusing on the helicopter parent in this blink: the type of parent who is constantly hovering over their children, doing everything for them.

What does it mean to be a helicopter parent? For starters, a parent who serves as their child's alarm clock, ensuring that she wakes up on time. The helicopter had already laid out their child's school clothes and was making her breakfast when they arrived. They'll then walk her to school, checking that her backpack is packed.

The practice of helicopter parenting gets a bad connotation. Is it, however, really that bad? No, according to the data.

The main point is that helicopter parenting does not deserve its poor reputation.

According to a recent study, higher parental participation is linked to better academic success among high school kids. Larger meta-analyses that looked at a large number of research, including those involving much younger children, concluded that having more parental participation results in better grades.

This is reasonable. Consider a ten-year-old who gets out of bed on his own every day, packs his own backpack, and remembers his schoolwork. Most of the time, he might be able to do this quite successfully. But, because he's still a child, he'll unavoidably forget things and be late on occasion. On the other hand, the child of a helicopter parent will not. As a result, she may gain an advantage over time.

However, helicopter parenting can easily go too far and result in severe consequences, especially in older children. Several studies of college-aged children have revealed that parents who are overly interested in their children's lives cause them to be less engaged with their classmates and to have higher levels of anxiety and sadness. This means that you should cut back on your hovering in order to let your children develop independence before they leave for college.

Is there a specific form of parental participation that leads to positive child outcomes? According to the research, it's better to regularly support your children and model a positive attitude for them. To put it another way, it's about being extremely supportive and teaching them about the important things in life.

Doing their homework for them, on the other hand, is taking things too far; research has proven that this isn't useful.

5. Data can assist us in determining what constitutes a good school.

How much of your child's time will he or she spend at school? So, if an average school day is eight hours long and he attends for thirteen years, not including holidays, he will have spent about 19,000 hours in school! As a result, choose the school that gives him the best chance of success is certain to be worthwhile.

But how can you know which school is the best? Let's have a look at the evidence, shall we?

Exceptional schools, it turns out, have a few important characteristics, the first of which is great teachers.

The main point is this: Data can assist us in determining what constitutes a good school.

Everyone recognizes the importance of teachers. But how significant is it? You could be pleasantly surprised. People who were taught by experienced kindergarten instructors not only performed better in kindergarten, but also earned more money in their late twenties, according to one study.

Another study, which included older students, discovered that having a good teacher was linked to fewer adolescent pregnancy rates and higher wages later in life. A excellent school is frequently a small school: studies demonstrate that smaller class sizes lead to higher achievement not only in school but also over time.

If you live in the United States, you could be debating whether your child should attend a public or a charter school. It's infamously difficult to determine which form of institution is genuinely superior. That's because families whose children attend charter schools are likely to differ in other ways from families whose children do not, and it's possible that these differences, rather than the schools themselves, have an impact on academic achievement.

In other areas, however, school districts utilize a lottery mechanism to determine which children are eligible to attend charter schools. Children who attend charter schools perform better academically than those who do not, according to data from these school districts. The improvement isn't insignificant though; it's about comparable to six IQ points. This shows that if you have the option, you should choose a charter school over a public school.

6. Sport has some long-term benefits for children, but it also has some hazards.

The dizzying array of sports activities available to the 21st-century child can seem overwhelming. Dance class, soccer practice, tennis lessons: the dizzying number of athletic activities available to the 21st-century child can seem overwhelming. It's easy to feel like you're hauling your child from one sports group to the next for the better part of their lives. But what does the scientific literature say about the advantages and disadvantages of children's sports passion?

For the purpose of their child's health and fitness, many parents report sending them to after-school sports clubs. But how beneficial are sports to children's health? Perhaps not as much as you believe.

The main point here is that sports can provide long-term benefits for children, but they can also pose concerns.

When it comes to obesity, research suggests that participating in sports has minimal effect; it won't protect your child from acquiring too much weight, and studies have even showed that children who participate in some sports, such as American football, are more likely to be overweight.

Of course, overweight children may simply want to play football more frequently, but we can't be certain. While sports activities almost likely do not cause children to become overweight, it is true that children who participate in them eat both more nutritious and junk food.

Participating in sports has additional health benefits. One study looked at Swiss youngsters who participated in extracurricular athletics and those who did not. The youngsters who participated in athletics maintained a greater degree of aerobic fitness two years after the program finished.

Other studies have discovered evidence of another long-term advantage of childhood athletics: participation in sports as a child is linked to increased exercise as an adult.

Unfortunately, there are risks as well as benefits. Some sports, in particular, may enhance your child's body but put her brain at risk of concussion. Repeated head trauma can leave lasting markings on the brain, leading to neurological disorders later in life, according to scientists.

Some of the most popular extracurricular activities include movements that increase the likelihood of this type of harm. Concussions are most common in American football, with soccer – particularly girls' soccer – coming in second. Basketball and wrestling are also high-risk sports. If these possible expenditures seem too great, you may instead encourage your child to participate in low-risk sports like running, tennis, or swimming.

7. The data on children and screen time is contradictory.

Are you concerned about how much time your youngster spends in front of the screen? The majority of modern parents are concerned that their children spend too much time staring at a television or another form of digital device, such as video games, social networking, or Netflix. But how concerned should you be about this?

Undoubtedly, some of the apprehension about screen time stems from the fact that screens are relatively new. Although it's difficult to imagine now, when books first became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, people were concerned that they might have a negative impact.

And, as much as you may be concerned about screen time today, the data on the subject isn't quite what you'd expect.

The main point is this: The data on children and screen time is contradictory.

The average American youngster watches 24 hours of television each week, but it's unclear whether the time spent watching television is harmful to them. While studies have shown that children who do not have access to television receive better scores, this could be due to the fact that these children spend more time doing something else that enhances their academic performance, such as homework or reading.

The evidence is likewise weak when it comes to video games. Children who have just played violent video games behave more aggressively than children who have just played non-violent ones, according to laboratory studies. Furthermore, persons who play violent video games are more prone to engage in violent behavior.

However, experts aren't sure whether people who are predisposed to violence are more inclined to choose violent games, or if video games make people more violent.

Many parents are concerned that their child may get hooked to video games, but evidence reveals that only a small percentage of children who play video games — between two and ten percent – exhibit signs of addiction. Furthermore, there is considerable indication that these children have pre-existing addiction tendencies. If they hadn't been addicted to gaming, they might have turned to booze or narcotics instead.

However, one clear conclusion can be reached concerning the harmful consequences of screen time: it is detrimental to sleep. Children who have a television in their bedroom sleep less and have poorer quality sleep.

Furthermore, research show that youngsters who gaze at a screen in the two hours leading up to bedtime have poorer sleep. This is also true for grownups. So there's one bad behavior you should try to change with your kids - and possibly with yourself as well.

The most important lesson in this summary is that the decisions you make for your child will have an impact on them for the rest of their lives. Focus your efforts on ensuring that your child gets enough sleep, eats healthy foods, and attends a school with excellent teachers and small classrooms. While you may want your child to be self-sufficient, there's nothing wrong with doing their schoolwork and making them breakfast on school days. It will, in fact, assist them in staying on track.

Here's some additional advice that you can put into practice:

Make time for meals with your family.

Try to have dinner with your children as much as possible if you want to give them a better start in life. According to studies, kids who eat family dinners every day are considerably less likely to consume alcohol or use smoke than youngsters who do so just seldom or never. They also had lower rates of depression, are less likely to develop an eating issue, and are more active in school. Family dinners are the way to go, no matter how you look at it.