(petty quibble: one of the weird grammatical quirks I really loathe is the use of "baby" as a singular proper noun.
"For the baby's brain..." or "For a baby's brain.." are both perfectly fine ways to start a sentence, but the article-dropping form is everywhere on parent blogs and it drives me up the wall in ways I had not expected. )
That aside: I've increasingly come to understand the urgent need for public libraries for young families. The children's room in your average US public library is probably the most used and most important room in the building, just as a way to provide everyone with access to diverse reading material -- both for your child's sanity, and your own.
I think public libraries are the single best investment any municipality can make in its children. I frequented mine very often from age 4 to 12, dropping off due to advent of the Internet. Even then, I was there often enough through high school. It’s the best way to ensure free and open access to information.
I frequently loaned books abount electronics and programming when I was 10-15 years old, and I try to take my kids to the library every now and then. I worry libraries will barely exist when they are 15 but the libraries seem popular, at least with smaller kids where I live.
GP has a point and the examples you provided are not equivalent, as "Mommy" is a nickname given to every mother, but a child is not nicknamed "Baby" unless, well, Patrick Swayze is ready for the catch.
> "Mommy" is a nickname given to every mother, but a child is not nicknamed "Baby"
I think this is what you're missing: "baby" is indeed becoming / has become just such a nickname. It is used the same as "mommy" (or more often in my experience, "mama") by most folks involved in pre- and postnatal care. I don't think it is actually shorthand for "a baby" or "the baby", but rather for "your baby" (that is: it is more intimate). It's just stylistic (like all slang).
Sure, but that's a particular kind of fake intimacy that's almost exclusively used by marketers and prescriptivists. Hardly anyone talks that way in normal conversation.
I wish there were more concrete advice at the end of this blog. My child will apparently benefit from certain types of books more at her age than others; but what characteristics should I be looking for?
If you want the biggest possible benefit to your baby's brain, read her a book on data science or machine learning: as a result, you will have $100,000 in extra disposible income[1] by the time she's 12. Save that up, and spend it on laboratory equipment for her of whatever kind she wants and is interested in at the time.
(In case it's not clear, I mean only pretend to play with your baby now, while putting that time into improving your career secretly, as I have described.)
[1] I assume you're a programmer, if not, read a read a book on Javascript instead
It might not even be pretending, who says children can't enjoy hearing about the stuff their parents are involved in?
My early memories are a bit hazy, but I still remember my father explaining to me the similarity between a rotating wheel and the vibration of a spring. I'm not sure what explanation he actually gave, but it might have involved gestures.
So you probably shouldn't expect your children to understand and remember everything you tell them, but random bits and pieces might stick to resurface later in the process of learning them "properly".
I was very fascinated by telephone books before I was 5 years old. I also knew that I wanted to work with "data" when I grew up. I was awestruck by how much information was in the telephone book, I just could not understand how so much data could even exist!
This was the early 1980s, I had never seen a computer in my life, but possibly on TV. Not surprisingly I was intrigued by a Basic-manual when I was 9 and started writing small programs.
I definitely had some drive toward... something intellectual? A very vague feeling but I know for sure my brain was already influenced in my fourth year in some way to make me like "data", and reading.
I remember being very interested in my dad's work, and my grandma used to quiz me with basic algebra problems - but mine's 2 years old right now, and she absolutely doesn't want me to read a book about React :P
The difference this is going to make is so meaningless that it doesn’t matter. Read to your kid. Or do something else like play LEGO’s with them, or let them play around on your iPad. Really it doesn’t matter. As long as you spend meaningful time with your kid, they’re going to be fine.
I think people worry too much about reading, honestly.
I’ve watched my toddler spend time taking his toys apart and put them together or play with the magnets on his toy trains, and I think time spent exploring the world is just as valuable. He likes to read, too, don’t get me wrong, but there’s more to education than books.
Reading and Lego are going to stimulate imagination, tablet use doesn't seem as good in this respect, to me. Physical interaction - like taking stuff apart - to me is highly beneficial too, much more than interaction with digital media (though that has some value).
Do people really interact with their kids when the child is playing on a tablet; my observation is that the contrary is the case. The tablet is given to "shut up" the child and avoid interacting with them.
Read (and act out) stuff which you both enjoy. Enjoyment is measured by smiles and laughter. If you're short of material try asking other families and checking the bestseller lists.
So if you read babies boring books for months, then their expectations are that books are boring. (Not boring = named individuals and recognizable faces.)
More importantly, if you force them to read boring, badly written books for more than a decade, crushing any enjoyment out of the experience of reading, they aren't going to take much interest in reading afterwards. JK Rowling, and gulp Stephenie Meyer, have probably done more for western literacy single-handedly than millions of elementary English teachers accomplished.
My folks were more in the Tom Clancy, Louis L'Amour and Stephen King era of pulps, but without those lifelines of more engaging content during the wasteland years of dreck that was pushed 3rd-10th grade...
> After three months passed, the families returned to our lab so we could again measure the infants’ attention to our storybook characters.
The researchers are rash to think that an effect observed after three months have passed will still be observable after five years or twenty. The psychological literature is full of examples of interventions that raise intelligence in the short term and have no long-term effect [1]. To date, I'm not aware of any childhood intervention (aside from adequate nutrition) that has an appreciable effect on adult intelligence.
I don't know about intelligence, but the Perry Preschool Study comes to mind as an example of a controlled experiment that showed dramatic (in terms of practical, if not statistical, significance) outcomes that lasted for many decades. Also ones which matter more than intelligence, at the end of the day, such as income and jail time.
I'm not sure how much better than that you might expect to get, given the amount of effort and money involved in conducting this kind of study for even a small sample size.
The research is very good that, beyond basic nutrition, very little by way of environment has a significant effect on adult intelligence. Outcomes, as you say, are a different thing and you can teach people to have lower time preferences, increase conscientiousness, etc. but, unfortunately, these are typically not what we focus on in todays social interventions.
Lead pollution via cars and paint seems another one that I thought was fairly well supported.
Also Iodine-deficiency, though not sure that's covered by nutrition since it's now added to salt.
People seem very attached to the "you can't do anything" approach though. I find it hard to imagine what a society without education would look like though, even if the people all had high IQs, so presumably there's some benefit to passing knowledge onto the next generation?
Yes, if you poison a child it will have an effect on them.
Contra what you say, people (really, the liberal elite consensi) seem very attached to the "anyone can do anything" approach, but, once you avoid the obvious stuff and give kids enough food, it is simply not the case: raw genetics is responsible for 50-80% of adult intelligence. This is not a popular position, despite the ample evidence, and will get you thrown out of most sociology departments today.
Educational institutions are, generally, an effect of high societal intelligence, rather than a cause.
Yes, avoiding death and horrible diseases in childhood appears to have major effects on adult outcomes. When we speak about these things we are assuming a non-disastrous environment and discussing incremental changes, such as spending more on education.
> Yes, avoiding death and horrible diseases in childhood appears to have major effects on adult outcomes. When we speak about these things we are assuming a non-disastrous environment
But even in the developed world (well, the US at least), the poor very often do not live in a non-disastrous environment, so if that is what you assume, your assumption is flawed.
"Very often" is too vague a statement to respond profitably to. I will say that, broadly, I am against poisoning children.
But, if we are serious about the problem, we need to be honest about the large genetic basis of adult intelligence and then figure out how to humanely encourage eugenic reproductive patterns (or at least discourage dysgenic ones) in the poor.
> But, if we are serious about the problem, we need to be honest about the large genetic basis of adult intelligence and then figure out how to humanely encourage eugenic reproductive patterns
If the problem you are concerned about is "people with a low adult IQ exist" rather than "people are unfairly obstructed by social conditions from realizing their potential", yes, eugenics would seem to be an important part of the solution.
But for many people, the problem is not which people exist, but the degree to which we harm the potential of certain of the people who do exist.
I think we are not as far apart as you might imagine: I am concerned with both problems and, particularly, how the former might interact with the latter, as well as the potential of future people who will exist (who, after all, are far more numerous than the people who currently happen to be walking around.)
I would bet that we could agree on many social programs to help the poor. Where we probably disagree is on the amount that we think these programs would help fix the long term problem of poverty, and I might be more inclined to look to see if the program has dysgenic effects that would compound that long-term problem.
> The research is very good that, beyond basic nutrition, very little by way of environment has a significant effect on adult intelligence.
That's simply wrong; lots of environmental factors beyond nutrition (including pre- and peri-natal environmental factors, as well as post-natal environmental factors) are known which have significant effects on intelligence.
As well as the disease and toxic exposure factors discussed by other responses, this includes things like prenatal maternal stress, and childhood exposure to violence and experience of psychological trauma.
Perry Preschool results still look much less impressive at the age 40 followup (e.g. 36% of those w/ the intervention had been arrested 5 times vs. 55% of the control group). I think almost anyone who's seriously looked at this topic agrees early interventions have some effectiveness and are the sensible/ethical thing to do.
If you agree that we shouldn't expect to do "much better" than 36% being arrested 5 times, 35% not graduating high school and 40% having a job earning less than $20k/year, then you probably agree w/ the parent commenter.
36% isn't great in absolute terms, no. But if you're willing to accept improvement and not demanding utopia-or-nothing, reducing the rate at which members of a subpopulation are being arrested repeatedly by ~1/3 would be a big deal from a public policy perspective.
My criticism of that statistic would be different. Ones that are structured like "X% reduction in Y happening more than threshold level Z" smell of p-hacking. A simple "Gets arrested X fewer times (p=0.15)" is more trustworthy to me than "X% less likely to get arrested more than 5 times (p = 0.03)".
I see they glossed over their variable isolation strategy of pairing named or generic 'characters' with computer-generated pictures of something vaguely resembling a rotting chicken.
I realize that it would have been hard to measure attentive engagement if they had used more visually distinctive and rich graphics like cartoonish or photographic animals, but the randomly-generated pink/green blob shapes are so bad as to undermine the whole thing.
Could we please, please stop trying to micro-optimize our children from birth? Give them love, food, shelter, and a rich environment, but also give them space. Give them room to breathe and explore and learn. Let them be bored sometimes. Let them make their own mistakes and choose their own projects and learn their own lessons. Let them be children.
I grew up the way you describe and in terms of accomplishments I’m decades behind the folks I knew that had structured and rigorous childhoods. Learn from me folks!
Define 'decades behind', please.
Tell us more about your childhood; your account makes it seems less-than-optimal, but I fail to see the connection between the above child-rearing method and something else.
By “decades behind” I mean I’m graduating from a top-50 CS state school instead of HYPSM, have never gotten accepted to YC, never made $10k a month while interning at trading firms, I’m not a crypto millionaire and don’t have a $100k signing bonus from FB, etc. (I know a bunch of really successful people...)
When I was younger my parents gave me a lot of space to explore things I’m interested in, not like most of the folks I know in my folks’ social circle. The problem is when I was younger (middle/high school) I really did not have the discipline to explore my interests fully in a way that would appeal to admissions committees and learned very little about a wide range of subjects that aren’t particularly useful - I wasted at least 5 years of my adolescence like this. Overall it wasn’t bad but I feel like I would have been better off had I been given (and more importantly requested/accepted) more guidance with regard to career and educational/learning opportunities. By the time I got to college I was years behind my peers at top institutions, honestly not sure if I can catch up.
What makes you think you will be better off with more money, and are you sure that your successful peers are not thinking the opposite from you - wishing they could have explored more subjects instead of jumping straight into a career that will give them a better "return on investment"?
There are many things that you cannot experience anymore as an adult. Let's just say that phisically they are decades behind you compared to the time when you were exploring.
It sounds more to me like you know a bunch of really lucky people who were in exactly the right place at the right time. Now, maybe their parents worked hard to procure these opportunities, and I agree that structure and direction at the highschool and university levels are very important, but I don't think we need to extend that to 6-month-olds.
"Upward" and "downward" are concepts existing in your head. I don't have a million bucks, but i've written a book. Nobody is successful by all and every definition of success. What I, personally, wish for my child is: happiness first, enlightenment second, intellectual capability and actualisation third.
It is harder to be happy if you need to work 12 hours a day just to pay basic bills and your kid if your kid breaks hand, you will be in large debt forever. Likewise, it is easier to be happy if your job provides a bit of autonomy and pleasant environment - and those are more likely to be available with right education and background.
Well, it's not that you're not right, but rather that you're going on a tangent and to extremes. It's also hard to be happy if you have a drug problem (alcoholism for example) or live in a place where making a living is hard or are unable to learn marketable skills. But please keep in mind that not all well paying jobs require a PhD - at least I hope that in the US you can be a carpenter without a degree and a crippling debt; but I, like you, digress...
Sounds like you're living a good life, doing a good job at playing the hand you're dealt. Comparing oneself against the luckiest .01% of humanity is a great way to make yourself really unhappy.
And everyone you know who grew up in those circumstances is doing just as well? Or are you committing selection bias and then attributing "fulfillment" according to your prejudice?
I do have sympathy for the position of coveting others financial success, I struggle with that a lot; but I had a highly structured education and was very successful in compulsory education.
Genotype, Fenotype, Upbringing, Selftraining. May be you just cannot succeed in term you described, but you may live 100 years as happy raw vegan and best didgeridoo player.
My friends are successful because they have time. I am stuck working 60 hours a week to make sure I can provide for my family. My counterparts, all with this structured background, work tiny amounts of hours and have 3x as much moneys as I do.
One of my biggest failures is the lack of structure bled into my studies when I needed my studies to propel me forward. These kids did all the same fun things as me, but played a couple less video games (experiences I have forgotten) and took far less time reading Digg.com and Reddit (Yet know just as much as I do about news).
Now, they have propelled so far ahead because the additional time they have has given them it. They get to spend more time with their children. They get to watch every soccer game. They own boats, live on lakes, and spend 6-10 weeks a year vacationing. I can barely vacation because I neither have the time or the money to be able to do so.
>One of my biggest failures is the lack of structure bled into my studies when I needed my studies to propel me forward. These kids did all the same fun things as me, but played a couple less video games (experiences I have forgotten) and took far less time reading Digg.com and Reddit (Yet know just as much as I do about news).
I'm born & brought up in India. I've a brother is US who was born & brought up there, 12 years younger to me. He took mock SATs last year (8th grade), and he was placed in the top 10%. He speaks fondly of MIT, CalTech & Robotics Engineering since he was in 4th grade, and has plans to make it there. Also has backup plans in case he dosen't make it.
I could see of difference between the two of us, because of the huge difference in schooling & educational curricula. He may turn out to be a fantastic Engineer. Have a lot of catching up to do.
Is it unreasonable to want the best for your child?
Being deliberate in what you read to them and when doesn't preclude also giving them love, food, shelter, space and everything else you listed. If there's a significant difference to be realized by adopting these reading habits (I'm not saying there is) one could argue you're ethically obligated to do so. In the same way that not supplying your child with a balanced diet could be considered negligent.
The only thing this way of thinking accomplishes, is insecure and depressed parents. You read to your child every day, but some books have only one character in them? Shame on you!
Children also need parents that are confident in their parenting skills. Parenting is something you do 100% of the time. Being insecure because of a constant barrage of scientific studies micro-correcting your skills will harm your child’s upbringing.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Don’t judge parents who read every day, but maybe not the scientifically perfect book. Judge the parent that never reads at all.
The challenge with the "want the best for your child" way of thinking is that very often you end up micro-optimizing for whatever definition of "the best" was in the latest pop-science article, to the detriment of other important skills that haven't recently been written about.
The experimental results were that reading books with named characters resulted in increased attention to those characters. Is paying more attention to storybook characters a skill you want your child to develop? Maybe? What if further research showed that those same infants showed less attention to their parents? Or that they had stronger verbal skills, but weaker mathematical skills? Would you still consider this "the best" for your child? (These actually would be interesting follow-up studies to do, but I doubt any parent would be able to consider all the relevant results together.)
My dad very much wanted "the best" for me, and as a nuclear chemist, he taught me math and science from a very early age. I got some leverage out of the math skills, but this generation happens to be a singularly shitty time to be a scientist, and it turns out that for skills that are valued by the market at this point in history (selling software, for example), things like emotional intelligence and social skills are actually quite a bit more helpful. Being a math prodigy is far less valuable than knowing when someone's trying to take advantage of you, but I suspect the former is desired by a lot more parents.
I am convinced that there is always a "inertia" of values and goals, and as a result people fool themselves thinking they are getting towards the local/global maximum.
Many times, experience or external fomo/fud from the environment point towards something that is no longer as optimized as while this experience or viewpoint has been coagulating. Parents should be aware of that.
People copy the attributes (sometimes very superficial ones) of the elite of a generation ago. It is similar to how militaries always prepare for the last war.
And not only the elite, it's mostly about coping the aspirations of their socioeconomic stratum (simplyfing there is the general dinamic where rich people seek freedom through biz and middle-class people look to have more money, by working hard in a "good job".
I think people should in general give generous helpings of attention to children including reading and talking with and interacting - especially when they're younger and soak all that in. But I think this article with it's curiously specific recommendations falls more into a category of preying on parent fears then being advice that's well supported science.
That's what I always try to keep in mind. My son is now just over a year old and I have come to realize how hard it can be to let them make their own mistakes etc.
You always want the best for your children and often you have to remind yourself that maybe the best is just doing less.
In hindsight I now am surprised what my parents let me do on my own at very young age. Imagining giving my son this degree of freedom is a little scary I have to admit but I will try my best.
I am also a strong believer that happiness and success are very loosely connected at best.
It is hard to stand by knowing they'll hurt themselves but at some level we need to physically learn for our selves -- my nearly-teen son struggles with this: "are you just going to let him [youngest son] fall over and hurt himself?". Well the alternative is to stop him running around ever, so yes.
Similarly, around the camp fire, "that's hot, it'll burn you [signs for hot and sore-hand]" but he, 16mo, was determined not to keep his hand away from the fire. A minor burn hurts like billy-o, but next time I know he'll keep his hands back from the fire!
80 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadThat aside: I've increasingly come to understand the urgent need for public libraries for young families. The children's room in your average US public library is probably the most used and most important room in the building, just as a way to provide everyone with access to diverse reading material -- both for your child's sanity, and your own.
The noun becomes a contextual nickname or way to address them. Compare:
For baby's brain, do X.
For mommy's sanity, do Y.
So it's:
"For [a] baby's brain, do X"
and
"For Mommy's sanity, do Y."
or
"For a mother's sanity, do Y."
I think this is what you're missing: "baby" is indeed becoming / has become just such a nickname. It is used the same as "mommy" (or more often in my experience, "mama") by most folks involved in pre- and postnatal care. I don't think it is actually shorthand for "a baby" or "the baby", but rather for "your baby" (that is: it is more intimate). It's just stylistic (like all slang).
(In case it's not clear, I mean only pretend to play with your baby now, while putting that time into improving your career secretly, as I have described.)
[1] I assume you're a programmer, if not, read a read a book on Javascript instead
My early memories are a bit hazy, but I still remember my father explaining to me the similarity between a rotating wheel and the vibration of a spring. I'm not sure what explanation he actually gave, but it might have involved gestures.
So you probably shouldn't expect your children to understand and remember everything you tell them, but random bits and pieces might stick to resurface later in the process of learning them "properly".
This was the early 1980s, I had never seen a computer in my life, but possibly on TV. Not surprisingly I was intrigued by a Basic-manual when I was 9 and started writing small programs.
I definitely had some drive toward... something intellectual? A very vague feeling but I know for sure my brain was already influenced in my fourth year in some way to make me like "data", and reading.
I think people worry too much about reading, honestly.
I’ve watched my toddler spend time taking his toys apart and put them together or play with the magnets on his toy trains, and I think time spent exploring the world is just as valuable. He likes to read, too, don’t get me wrong, but there’s more to education than books.
Do people really interact with their kids when the child is playing on a tablet; my observation is that the contrary is the case. The tablet is given to "shut up" the child and avoid interacting with them.
My folks were more in the Tom Clancy, Louis L'Amour and Stephen King era of pulps, but without those lifelines of more engaging content during the wasteland years of dreck that was pushed 3rd-10th grade...
The researchers are rash to think that an effect observed after three months have passed will still be observable after five years or twenty. The psychological literature is full of examples of interventions that raise intelligence in the short term and have no long-term effect [1]. To date, I'm not aware of any childhood intervention (aside from adequate nutrition) that has an appreciable effect on adult intelligence.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284123208_The_envir...
I'm not sure how much better than that you might expect to get, given the amount of effort and money involved in conducting this kind of study for even a small sample size.
Also Iodine-deficiency, though not sure that's covered by nutrition since it's now added to salt.
People seem very attached to the "you can't do anything" approach though. I find it hard to imagine what a society without education would look like though, even if the people all had high IQs, so presumably there's some benefit to passing knowledge onto the next generation?
Contra what you say, people (really, the liberal elite consensi) seem very attached to the "anyone can do anything" approach, but, once you avoid the obvious stuff and give kids enough food, it is simply not the case: raw genetics is responsible for 50-80% of adult intelligence. This is not a popular position, despite the ample evidence, and will get you thrown out of most sociology departments today.
Educational institutions are, generally, an effect of high societal intelligence, rather than a cause.
But even in the developed world (well, the US at least), the poor very often do not live in a non-disastrous environment, so if that is what you assume, your assumption is flawed.
But, if we are serious about the problem, we need to be honest about the large genetic basis of adult intelligence and then figure out how to humanely encourage eugenic reproductive patterns (or at least discourage dysgenic ones) in the poor.
If the problem you are concerned about is "people with a low adult IQ exist" rather than "people are unfairly obstructed by social conditions from realizing their potential", yes, eugenics would seem to be an important part of the solution.
But for many people, the problem is not which people exist, but the degree to which we harm the potential of certain of the people who do exist.
I would bet that we could agree on many social programs to help the poor. Where we probably disagree is on the amount that we think these programs would help fix the long term problem of poverty, and I might be more inclined to look to see if the program has dysgenic effects that would compound that long-term problem.
That's simply wrong; lots of environmental factors beyond nutrition (including pre- and peri-natal environmental factors, as well as post-natal environmental factors) are known which have significant effects on intelligence.
As well as the disease and toxic exposure factors discussed by other responses, this includes things like prenatal maternal stress, and childhood exposure to violence and experience of psychological trauma.
If you agree that we shouldn't expect to do "much better" than 36% being arrested 5 times, 35% not graduating high school and 40% having a job earning less than $20k/year, then you probably agree w/ the parent commenter.
http://library.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/default/files/P...
My criticism of that statistic would be different. Ones that are structured like "X% reduction in Y happening more than threshold level Z" smell of p-hacking. A simple "Gets arrested X fewer times (p=0.15)" is more trustworthy to me than "X% less likely to get arrested more than 5 times (p = 0.03)".
I realize that it would have been hard to measure attentive engagement if they had used more visually distinctive and rich graphics like cartoonish or photographic animals, but the randomly-generated pink/green blob shapes are so bad as to undermine the whole thing.
When I was younger my parents gave me a lot of space to explore things I’m interested in, not like most of the folks I know in my folks’ social circle. The problem is when I was younger (middle/high school) I really did not have the discipline to explore my interests fully in a way that would appeal to admissions committees and learned very little about a wide range of subjects that aren’t particularly useful - I wasted at least 5 years of my adolescence like this. Overall it wasn’t bad but I feel like I would have been better off had I been given (and more importantly requested/accepted) more guidance with regard to career and educational/learning opportunities. By the time I got to college I was years behind my peers at top institutions, honestly not sure if I can catch up.
... is a race to the bottom.
I do have sympathy for the position of coveting others financial success, I struggle with that a lot; but I had a highly structured education and was very successful in compulsory education.
You are mixing up money with success. I do think you know some successful people, you just not realising, who they are.
My friends are successful because they have time. I am stuck working 60 hours a week to make sure I can provide for my family. My counterparts, all with this structured background, work tiny amounts of hours and have 3x as much moneys as I do.
One of my biggest failures is the lack of structure bled into my studies when I needed my studies to propel me forward. These kids did all the same fun things as me, but played a couple less video games (experiences I have forgotten) and took far less time reading Digg.com and Reddit (Yet know just as much as I do about news).
Now, they have propelled so far ahead because the additional time they have has given them it. They get to spend more time with their children. They get to watch every soccer game. They own boats, live on lakes, and spend 6-10 weeks a year vacationing. I can barely vacation because I neither have the time or the money to be able to do so.
Exactly, I have the same regret
I could see of difference between the two of us, because of the huge difference in schooling & educational curricula. He may turn out to be a fantastic Engineer. Have a lot of catching up to do.
Being deliberate in what you read to them and when doesn't preclude also giving them love, food, shelter, space and everything else you listed. If there's a significant difference to be realized by adopting these reading habits (I'm not saying there is) one could argue you're ethically obligated to do so. In the same way that not supplying your child with a balanced diet could be considered negligent.
Children also need parents that are confident in their parenting skills. Parenting is something you do 100% of the time. Being insecure because of a constant barrage of scientific studies micro-correcting your skills will harm your child’s upbringing.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Don’t judge parents who read every day, but maybe not the scientifically perfect book. Judge the parent that never reads at all.
The experimental results were that reading books with named characters resulted in increased attention to those characters. Is paying more attention to storybook characters a skill you want your child to develop? Maybe? What if further research showed that those same infants showed less attention to their parents? Or that they had stronger verbal skills, but weaker mathematical skills? Would you still consider this "the best" for your child? (These actually would be interesting follow-up studies to do, but I doubt any parent would be able to consider all the relevant results together.)
My dad very much wanted "the best" for me, and as a nuclear chemist, he taught me math and science from a very early age. I got some leverage out of the math skills, but this generation happens to be a singularly shitty time to be a scientist, and it turns out that for skills that are valued by the market at this point in history (selling software, for example), things like emotional intelligence and social skills are actually quite a bit more helpful. Being a math prodigy is far less valuable than knowing when someone's trying to take advantage of you, but I suspect the former is desired by a lot more parents.
Many times, experience or external fomo/fud from the environment point towards something that is no longer as optimized as while this experience or viewpoint has been coagulating. Parents should be aware of that.
You always want the best for your children and often you have to remind yourself that maybe the best is just doing less.
In hindsight I now am surprised what my parents let me do on my own at very young age. Imagining giving my son this degree of freedom is a little scary I have to admit but I will try my best.
I am also a strong believer that happiness and success are very loosely connected at best.
Similarly, around the camp fire, "that's hot, it'll burn you [signs for hot and sore-hand]" but he, 16mo, was determined not to keep his hand away from the fire. A minor burn hurts like billy-o, but next time I know he'll keep his hands back from the fire!