You Can't F*ck Up Your Kids

A Judgment-Free Guide to Stress-Free Parenting

Lindsay Powers

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781982110130
• eBook ISBN: 9781982110154

Cribsheet meets The Sh!t No One Tells You in this no-holds-barred, judgment-free parenting guide that sets the record straight on every hot-button parenting topic by longtime journalist and founder of the viral #NoShameParenting movement. What if you could do more for your kids, by doing a whole lot less?Parenting today has become a competitive sport, and it seems that everyone is losing. From the very moment that little line turns blue, parents-to-be find themselves in a brave new world where every decision they make is fraught, every action they take is judged, and everything they do seems to be the wrong thing. Formula feed? Breast is best.
Breastfeed in public? That's indecent.
Cry it out? You're causing permanent harm to your child.
Don't sleep train? Your child will never learn to sleep on his or her own.
Stay home? You're setting a bad example for your kids.
Go back to work? Don't you love your kids more than your job?Lindsay Powers—former editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Parenting, creator of the #NoShameParenting movement, and mom of two—is here to help parents everywhere breathe a collective sigh of relief. This laugh-out-loud funny, accessible, and reassuring book sets the record straight on all of the insane conflicts that parents face—from having a glass of wine while pregnant to sleep training, childcare, feeding, and even sex after baby.Drawing on the latest research and delivered in a relatable, comforting voice, You Can't F*ck Up Your Kids demonstrates that it is possible to take the stress out of parenting and sit back and enjoy the ride.

1 Drink a Little Wine! Why It’s Okay to Break Most of the Pregnancy “Rules”

I was only seven months pregnant, but felt as if I looked a hundred months pregnant, with a bulging belly that was even more pronounced on my petite 5-foot, 2-inch frame. Wearing a navy blue tunic, maternity stretch pants, and rubber Crocs (the only shoes my swollen feet would fit into at the time), I inelegantly plopped down at a tiny wood table on the front patio of a sushi restaurant on a busy thoroughfare near my Brooklyn neighborhood.

“I’ll have the spicy tuna roll,” I told the Japanese waitress, “and a glass of rosé.”

She didn’t bat an eye, despite my ordering not one but two forbidden-to-pregnant-lady items: raw fish and alcohol. I felt defiant. I dare one of these people to judge me, I thought, making eye contact with everyone who passed by. Any person who saw me locked eyes and then quickly looked away. (In hindsight, it was less that anyone was judging me and more that New Yorkers really just don’t care how you live your life.)

The Japanese waitress probably didn’t feel the need to shame me because in Japan, pregnant women eat plenty of sushi. Japanese doctors recommend it as part of good neonatal nutrition.¹ The dietary restrictions Americans put on pregnant women are largely excessive, which I’ll explain in more detail in this chapter.

It feels like there is so much conflicting advice out there: Eat balanced meals, but don’t eat soft cheeses, lunch meat, sushi, or anything, really! Indulge in some wine, but you might be damaging your kid. (The actual guidelines, just for reference, recommend avoiding high-mercury fish, raw or undercooked meat and fish, unpasteurized dairy, more than one cup of coffee a day or too much caffeine overall, any and all alcohol, and deli meats and other food that may be vulnerable to a bacteria called listeria, which can cause late miscarriage and stillbirth.)² You’re eating for two, but don’t gain too much weight! Luckily, you don’t have to be too hard on yourself because you really can’t fuck up your kid if you do all of the above—as long as it’s in moderation.

Bottoms Up! It’s Okay to Drink a Little

Doctors tell pregnant women not to drink because there is a dearth of studies on the effects of light to moderate alcohol consumption while pregnant. Not that I blame science; it would be unethical to tell one pregnant woman to remain sober, another to try one drink a night, a third to consume a couple of glasses nightly, and a fourth to try a bottle a night … and then measure the IQs of all their kids years later.

But as a result of this “careful” science, the few studies that exist are flawed. For example, a frequently cited study of 2,000 women published in 2001 in the journal Pediatrics found that even one drink a day could cause behavioral problems in their unborn children later.³ However, when you delve into the results, you see that 18 percent didn’t drink at all and a whopping 45 percent of women who had one drink a day also reported using cocaine while expecting. Perhaps it was the kind of behavior that would lead a pregnant woman to do illicit drugs—and not the occasional beer—that led to childhood behavioral issues. Yet the cocaine angle is rarely, if ever, mentioned when this study is brought up by the media, doctors, or well-meaning parents on the playground.

However, abroad, where it’s more culturally acceptable to drink while pregnant, large-scale studies have shown statistically insignificant differences in children’s behaviors and IQs between nondrinking mothers and mothers who classified themselves as light drinkers (depending on the country, that’s two to six drinks per week) while pregnant.

I was particularly drawn to a study that got a lot of press attention when it was published in 2016. Some headlines declared that the study proved it was okay to drink while pregnant. Others were more cautious, with a variation of, “Health risks of light drinking in pregnancy confirms that abstention is the safest approach.”⁴ When I dug into the study itself, the results seemed to confirm the former: Up to four drinks a week of either beer or wine, which is the limit recommended by the U.K. Department of Health, is totally fine.⁵

I called up one of the study’s senior researchers, Dr. Luisa Zuccolo, to break it down. She was friendly but guarded, speaking to me from her home base at the University of Bristol. She explained that her team looked at 5,000 prior papers studying the effects of drinking alcohol while pregnant and examined the results of twenty-six relevant studies.

“I think the devil is in the details to be honest with you,” she explained, adding that “communication in this case is really tricky.

“For example, when we talk about limiting eating tuna because of mercury, it’s okay to say, ‘Limit yourself to two portions of tuna a week,’ because people aren’t going to become addicted to tuna.” But booze “is very different. For some people, it’s harder to stop. They feel more relaxed with their friends, and they’ve had three drinks and maybe they’ll have a fourth.

“Some argue this is paternalistic,” she admits. Indeed: It seems that doctors think pregnant adult women can’t control themselves enough to stop after one glass of wine, so they just tell us not to drink at all, like we’re toddlers who need reprimanding. Still, “some people are better at stopping themselves than others,” Dr. Zuccolo concedes. So you should know this about yourself: If you are the kind of person who lets go of all your inhibitions the minute you have a drink and don’t think you’ll be able to stop, then just don’t drink while pregnant. If a glass of wine with dinner or after a hard day helps you relax, well, that’s fine then. The stress relief has major health benefits too.

“Anxiety raises cortisol in pregnancies,” Dr. Zuccolo says. A chronically increased rate of cortisol, otherwise known as the “stress hormone,” has been linked to an increased risk of anxiety, depression, digestive issues, headaches, weight gain, memory impairment, heart disease, trouble sleeping, and more, according to the Mayo Clinic.⁶ This is why, she says, that doctors tend to downplay situations such as a woman finding out she’s pregnant a couple days after going on a bender. (I downed two bourbon cocktails the week before I found out I was expecting my firstborn, Everett.) “We do not want to cause alarm unnecessarily such as that the mom gets really stressed out about alcohol in pregnancy before she realizes she’s pregnant. Demonizing that definitely doesn’t help. A burden or sense of guilt doesn’t help.” (Another friend’s doctor advised her to continue using pot while pregnant to avoid stress. But you should check with your doctor before doing this.)

So why all the caution with Dr. Zuccolo’s research? The study found that up to four beers or glasses of wine a week may very slightly increase your chance of having a smaller baby if he or she is born prematurely—but drinking won’t make you more likely to deliver prematurely. And it’s pretty obvious that your baby may be slightly smaller if delivered earlier regardless of whether you occasionally have a beer with dinner.

This study caused blaring headlines about how alcohol equals smaller babies, but it never said how much smaller the babies could be. A baby born at four pounds faces the potential for many more health issues and longer hospital stays than a baby born at eight pounds. When I asked Dr. Zuccolo about this, she said that the weight difference is so small, it’s negligible, “so you would not be likely to say this baby really suffered from their mom drinking half a glass of wine every month.”

Some research shows that babies born to mothers who have an occasional drink actually have better outcomes than mothers who completely abstain. A 2010 study of 3,000 pregnant women in Australia, another place it’s more culturally acceptable to drink, looked at behavior issues at age two, and then followed the kids until they turned fourteen. It showed that kids of light drinkers (classified as two to six drinks per week) are “significantly less likely” to have behavior issues than children of moms who didn’t drink at all.⁷ Another Australian study found no difference in IQs between children born to moms who had one drink a day compared to those who completely abstained. (That study of 7,200 women also tested the kids again at age eight and found, you guessed it, no difference in IQs.)

As statistician Emily Oster explains in her excellent book, Expecting Better, “researchers tend to find that women who drink moderately in pregnancy have children with higher IQ scores.” This is due to the fact that women who drink moderately tend to be better educated—which plays a much more important role in how kids grow up than the occasional glass of sauvignon blanc. As Dr. Zuccolo says, many studies don’t take into account the life situations of their subjects. Data is only taken on whether the parent drinks or doesn’t drink, but other factors—such as their education, income, marital status, and age—are not considered. And all of these things can skew the research. Then, sweeping generalizations are made for large groups of people based on a small number of people studied who may have exceptional life circumstances.

It’s Okay to Get Your Caffeine Fix

Another controversial drink while expecting: coffee. Some doctors say to avoid it altogether because it can increase your chance of miscarriage. Many of my friends didn’t have any and instead suffered through caffeine-withdrawal headaches. I settled on half-caf for my second pregnancy, with Otto. Oster, the statistician and author, explains this tenuous link to miscarriage: Many pregnant women are too nauseous in the beginning of their pregnancies to drink very much coffee. Those who aren’t nauseous continue drinking it as usual. But women who aren’t as nauseous are more likely to have a miscarriage.

So perhaps it wasn’t the coffee that caused the miscarriage, but the lack of nausea that was a telltale sign of an impending miscarriage. After all, women who drink other caffeinated beverages such as Coke or tea aren’t more likely to miscarry. As with drinking alcohol during pregnancy, we’re looking at flawed research because it would be unethical to conduct an experiment where one group of pregnant women drank an entire carafe of coffee a day, another consumed a couple mugs, and others abstained, and then measure all three groups for miscarriages later. Oster also found no statistical likelihood that women who drink coffee while pregnant give birth to smaller babies, so she decided up to four cups a day was okay during her own pregnancy.

My doctor had me ditch green tea when I was pregnant, which was harder for me than coffee at the time. I dug into the research and determined that she was probably overreacting. Tea contains an antioxidant called catechin, which has been linked to a bunch of health benefits, such as lowering your risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Unfermented green tea has the highest amount of catechin, followed by oolong, and then black tea. Some studies have found that consuming more than three cups of tea with a lot of catechin per day can inhibit your absorption of folic acid. A folic acid deficiency may increase your risk of delivering a baby with a condition called spina bifida (SB), where an infant’s spinal cord doesn’t form properly. So if you want to drink a little tea, go for it—but just don’t drink gallons per day. Using data from nearly 7,000 moms,researchers found the following: “Our data do not support the hypothesis that tea consumption overall increases the risk of SB.”⁸

Why You Should Indulge Those Cravings

The pee stick had hardly turned pink when the cravings for lox set in. Morning, day, and night, I dreamed about smoked salmon. But advice on the Internet was mixed: Was I supposed to eat it or not? It all seemed to depend on whom I asked. My doctor at the time, who was overly cautious in most of her advice, told me with a wink and a half smile that it was okay to consume it. So, on a trip to London, I dug in. And when I got home, I continued to pile it tall atop Brooklyn bagels. And I munched on it as a snack. (To this day, Everett loves to eat lox, and I joke that this probably explains it. He gets all kinds of funny looks when he noshes down on “fishies” as a five-year-old.)

But the idea that I couldn’t find a place that definitively told me whether it’s okay to eat lox points to an issue. Pregnant women are told to avoid a laundry list of foods, ranging from soft cheeses to deli meats to raw fish. There are a number of government agencies in the United States that have released guidelines regarding which foods pregnant women should avoid. One goal of the Food and Drug Administration’s endless list⁹ is to lower the chances women would eat anything that could possibly have been infected with the harmful bacteria listeria.

When you dig into the statistics, as Oster did in Expecting Better, you see that two foods were responsible for 30 percent of listeria outbreaks during the ten-year period between 1998 to 2008: queso fresco, a Mexican soft cheese, and turkey deli meat. Let’s say you’re craving a sandwich, so you choose ham over turkey. As Oster found, eating ham would lower your risk of listeria from 1 in 8,333 to 1 in 8,255. (Meanwhile, your risk of getting in a car accident during the course of your lifetime is 1 in 114—and pregnant women still drive every single day.)¹⁰

The rest of the listeria outbreaks are random, such as pine nuts found in hummus, celery, or cantaloupe. Even ice cream experienced a huge listeria outbreak in 2015. So how can you prevent yourself from getting listeria? Keep your refrigerator below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, don’t eat things that have been sitting in your refrigerator a long time or at room temperature for longer than two hours, do eat pasteurized foods, and wash your hands well and often, says the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.¹¹

In the meantime, why are pregnant women spending so much time anxiously tracking every single ingredient they put in their mouths when they’d lower their chance of miscarrying if they’d avoid just two foods: queso fresco and turkey deli meat? Here’s yet another instance of sexism, as government officials and doctors apparently couldn’t believe that women were capable of taking our own precautions to avoid a smaller list of foods. Easier to just ban everything! Pregnant or not, I’m not going to eat sushi sold at a gas station. But while pregnant, it’s important to just make sure that sushi is consumed in moderation (like all foods), mostly avoid high-mercury varietals like tuna, and only eat in clean restaurants.¹² In the United States, it’s a law that all sushi must be flash frozen before served, anyway, which kills most bacteria and parasites.¹³

Fighting Depression? Don’t Ditch Your Antidepressants Cold Turkey

Millions of women are taking antidepressants,¹⁴ and it’s normal to be concerned about how the medicine will affect your unborn baby—and your own mood if you stop. Most antidepressants are totally fine, especially when compared to the alternative: A depressed mom may not take care of herself, including getting good prenatal care. The Mayo Clinic also reports that depression during pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: It’s Time for #NoShameParenting
• Chapter 1: Drink a Little Wine! Why It’s Okay to Break Most of the Pregnancy “Rules”
• Chapter 2: C-Section vs. “Natural”: Why the Way We Give Birth Shouldn’t Be a Competition
• Chapter 3: Protein Is Protein: Breastfeeding, Formula, and Why It Doesn’t Really Matter Which One You Choose
• Chapter 4: Knock Yourself Out: Letting Your Kid Cry Himself to Sleep Won’t Ruin His Life (And It May Save Yours)
• Chapter 5: You Don’t Have to Be Mary Poppins: Why Your Kid Will Be Fine If They Go to Daycare (or Don’t)
• Chapter 6: Time Out! How to Discipline Without Losing Your Sh*t (Or Your Kid)
• Chapter 7: Embrace Technology: There’s Literally No Way We Can Keep Our Kids Off Screens Anyway
• Chapter 8: Technically, French Fries Are a Vegetable: How to Get Meals on the Table and Make Dinnertime Less Stressful
• Chapter 9: Busting the Myth of “Having It All”: It Doesn’t Exist (So Can We Stop Saying It, Please?)
• Chapter 10: Get It On: How Much Sex Everyone Is Really Having After Kids
• Chapter 11: There’s No Such Thing as Normal: Embrace Your Family’s Situation (Even If You Didn’t Choose It)
• Epilogue: The Bottom Line: Seriously, You Can’t F*ck Up Your Kids
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Index
• Copyright