Literature

Yes that book is mentioned in Cribsheet, though I haven't read it. I'm actually a bit late reading this book, my kids are all past this age now, but it was on my list so I thought I'd read because it sounded interesting, which it has been! Plus we have plenty of friends just starting to have kids so it's good to have a book to recommend when they are stressing about things that it turns out make very little difference. I'm only 1/3 of the way through, though.

Interestingly, a lot of child raising stuff turns out that way. Twin studies are interesting (and admittedly low numbers of subjects, given the need to find identical twins that were separated to different adoptive families at birth and are now much older - there aren't exactly a lot of them running around). They often show that two identical twins each adopted into completely different families raising kids in different ways still end up much the same people later in life. It's the nature vs nurture advice, and largely it seems it doesn't matter what you do your kids end up the same. There are of course exceptions to this (the obvious one being childhood trauma), but it's comforting knowing that if your kid has a largely normal childhood, very few decisions you make about how to raise them will have any significant impact on who they become as adults.