Understanding childhood, including the one you accompany

Associations between family meals and adolescent outcomes are numerous and positive. They probably measure something other than the meal.

One does not randomly assign how an infant is fed. The rare designs that come close have greatly reduced the effects attributed.

It concerns a majority of families in rich countries and has almost never been evaluated. What exists bears mainly on adult financial behaviour.

Banned in French primary schools since 1956, it continues to exist. Syntheses find an effect close to zero among the youngest and measurable in upper secondary.

Families do not choose at random between a nursery, a childminder and home care. Any direct comparison first measures that choice.

The gap between mothers and fathers is narrowing slowly, but not in the way one imagines. The composition of tasks changes faster than their volume.

The advised age for introducing certain foods was pushed back in the 2000s, then brought forward in the 2010s. The reversal rests on specific trials.

Time use surveys have existed since the 1960s and produce a counter-intuitive result: reported parental time has risen, in almost every rich country.

It is one of the rare family practices tested by controlled trials. Effects exist, and they are better established on vocabulary than on anything else.

A typology formulated in the 1960s still structures the textbooks. It was built on a narrow sample, and its reach beyond that context has been contested ever since.

Few subjects set such sharply drawn camps against each other on such thin data. Here is what the published trials actually measure, and what they stay silent on.