May 7, 2025 • 38 mins
Economist and best-selling author Emily Oster joins Carol in part one of a fascinating two-part conversation about how data can reduce parenting stress and help us make smarter, more confident decisions. Emily shares the origins of her data-driven parenting philosophy, why not all research studies are created equal, and how decision trees can bring calm to the chaos. Whether you're brand new to parenting, raising toddlers or teens, you'll come away with new tools—and a much-needed sense of relief.
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Be sure to check out:
- Emily Oster’s Books: Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, The Unexpected
- Emily’s newsletter and site: ParentData.org
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🌐 Website: GroundControlParenting.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, Hi, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog
and now a podcast creative for parents raising black and
brown children. I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis.
In this podcast series, I talk with some really interesting
people about the joy and the job of parenting. So
a central goal of Ground Control Parenting is to give
parents and caretakers the resources you need to make the
(00:27):
best parenting decisions possible for you and your family. The
more information you have, the more you can understand how
to use it, the more you're able to make confident
decisions and experience less parenting stress. I'm especially thrilled to
welcome today's guest, an economist who shares this goal and
offers invaluable insights on how to achieve it. Emily Aster
is an unapologetically data driven economist who uses her expertise
(00:49):
to analyze and interpret data, empowering parents with Evan space
guidelines to make confident decisions for themselves and their families.
Emily is the JG. Egleman Sex University Professor of Economics,
Brown University, and a New York Times bestselling author whose
books include Expecting Better, Cripsheet, The Family Firm, and most
recently The Unexpected. Emily's also the CEO of parent Data,
(01:10):
a comprehensive website that provides a data driven guide through
trying to conceive, pregnancy, parenting, and beyond. Emily received to
undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. She and her husband,
Jesse Sapiro, who's also an economist of great renowned, have
a son and a daughter. Welcome to Ground Control Parenting, Emily,
thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You have no idea how much additional credit I got
from moms and Moms to be when I told them
you would joining me on the podcast. I have children
in their twenties and their thirties. It's been a while
since I've been pouring over new mom books, and it's
been fun and really fascinating to dive into your methodology
and your perspective. There's so much enthusiasm about your visit
that this is going to be a two parter. First,
we're going to dive into the world of how you
(01:50):
take your economic lens into parenting and learn how parents
can use your approach to gain more confidence. And then
I'm going to ask you away in on specific parenting questions,
which I have polled them many very excited people around me.
So I want to start with you, Emily Young Emily Ostor,
who was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to two not one,
(02:10):
but two parent economists, yes, both of them economics professors
at Yale. So I have to ask, how to being
raised in this household influence your approach to applying economic
principles to parenting or did it really just come when
you start thinking about parenting.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
No, it really came from my childhood.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
You know, my mom in particular, was very, very very
good at this scale of like taking economics and taking
principles of economics and applying them to your job. And
I think she almost like I do it in a
deliberate way where I think, okay, like what are the
tools here? I think for my mother it was just
like that was how her brain worked, right like it
(02:50):
just like it took these tools of economics and it
made them into how you run your run your household.
And so that was just around everywhere. And and then
you know, if we have a nice upbringing, which I did,
we all aim to parent like our parents. And I
was lucky to marry another economist so it was no
problem to just do that.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, that was that was luck. And so you had somebody,
you are, a partner in parenting who had the same lens,
who had the same perspective and appreciated the approach.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, I think it's it's it's always very helpful to
be on the same page with your partner. And I
think in this in this case, there's a little bit
of extra of kind of having the same language and
having the same frame on the world. You can use
these tools even if your partner is not an economist,
but maybe it's faster if they are.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I'm married to someone who has an economics background, and
as you say this, I think now many of the
principles and values and things we talked about with the
kids a lot that come from him do have an
economic space. I mean, there's always a question of you
want to spend money on X, you want us to
spend money on X. If I gave you this amount
of money, totally would you spend it?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Don't use that all the use that all the time.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
And I think, you know, for us, like that was
an argument for you know, how do we think about
an allowance?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Like what you know that is a way for you
to internalize that when you're asking me to buy you,
you know, roebucks, like, do you actually want the roebucks
or do you want the roebucks at their value?
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Or do you just want them for nothing?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And it turns out when you're paying you don't want the.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Roebucks as much. Valuable lessons when it took me to
adulthood to get exactly exactly. So, for the few people
out there who have not been able to read your books,
can you tell me a little bit about how you
basically apply economic principles to parenting?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Sure? So I think there's really two pieces here.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So economics for me is kind of a combination of
an approach to analyzing data and thinking about evidence on causality,
and then an approach to decision making which tries to
weigh costs and benefits and kind of organize our decisions
in a way that takes into account preferences and takes
into account constraints and takes into account evidence. And so
(04:56):
when I think about parenting, I sort of bring all
of that together. So a lot of my work is
about reading data and helping people understand, you know, is
this is it likely? That this study you're seeing is
causal or is this just a correlation? And how big
is the effect? What do we actually learn and then
trying to help them take that evidence into their decision
making and say, Okay, you know you need to weigh
(05:18):
this evidence along with your preferences, think about what your
values are and what your constraints are, and then ultimately
make a decision. So I think it's it's really both
of those pieces of economics brought into the parenting space.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And see that's second part which I so wholeheartedly concur
with the concept of once you know the information, your
ability to process it for yourself is a key to
what I know you believe in as well, So the
relaxed approach to parenting that is not relaxed and letting
kids do anything but your approach to I don't have
to freak out over every single thing.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, I think that what's really important is that when
we convey information to parents. I think, especially now, like
when parents and hear things, they hear like you must
do X or there. You know, we showed a positive
impact of this, and so therefore you must do it.
And I think that there are almost nothing in early parenting,
which is like this.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You know so many of these choices.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You know there are multiple good choices, and maybe this
one has a little benefit, or this one has a
little benefit. But really it's about taking your preferences, like
the things that you care about, looking at this data
and deciding based on that what's the right decision for me?
And I say this all the time, but you know
the right decision for you is not the right decision
for everyone else. And being relaxed for me, being confident
(06:37):
in our choices is about knowing that we made the
decisions that were the best decisions we could make for us, and.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
That's kind of all you can ask for.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
So your four into this really began as you were
pregnant with your first child and you discovered that the
world did not operate efficiently in this respect. So can
you talk a little bit about how you moved from
being another pregnant mother with ten thousand questions to someone
(07:07):
who was actually nailing the answers.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yes, sometimes I say I just I just took it
too far, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
So you know, when I got pregnant, I was faced
with something I think is very familiar to anyone who
comes into pregnancy, which is, you know, here's a list
of what you should do and you shouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
It was really like my first exper like extended experience
with the medical system with someone being like, Okay, here,
here is a set of rules. You know, here's the
test that you should have. You know, here's the here's
what we recommend. And I found, you know, I'm a
person who asks why a lot, And I said, well,
why is it? Well this, you know, here's the list,
and we don't really have time to explain why. And
(07:43):
when I went out to look for you know, what do.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
The books say about why?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
The books also didn't say why, you know, And sometimes
one of them said you can have two cups of coffee,
and one said you can have no cups of coffee,
and one said any amount of coffee is fine. But
no one was like, and this is why I think that.
And so for me, that was the part of it
I was always missing. And so I went out mainly
initially in service of these questions for myself, doing a
(08:08):
bunch of research, sometimes working with my husband as we
tried to navigate through some of these bigger decisions around
things like prenatal testing, and at some point I like
to write. At some point I sort of started writing
around this because I thought it would be fun, and
then the book kind of sort of spilled out from there.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
That's great. So if you can remember what is one
parenting belief that you held firmly too before your research,
before you started researching, I mean, as opposed to hearing
the things and wanting to know, why was there anything
that you kind of knew for sure and then discovered
that maybe it wasn't quite as sure as you thought.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I think there are things in my research that surprised me,
sort of things where like I was like, huh, I like,
you know, in the pregnancy contest bed rest, so bed
rest is something actually still a reasonable share of pregnant
women are prescribed bed rest. It turns out there's basically
nothing for which bad rest is a good treatment.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That was one of the very surprising things that I read.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
And it's surprising, I think, because it seems sensible. It's
like it's sort of like evil, if only you just
lay down, it would be fine. Just turns out that's
not how it works. And so I think that was
both surprising to me because the kind of logic is
so like somehow feels right, and because it was such
a common is still a fairly common recommendation, and it's
(09:26):
one of the places where you really do need to
look at evidence you and you really see the value
of the kinds of evidence that you get in good randomized.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Trials, because of course, most of the people who.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Are put on bed rest, you know, for like because
of concerns about preterm labor, most of those people don't
go into preterm labor. But it turns out that most
of the people who don't get put on bed rest
also don't go into preterm late but you wouldn't know
that unless you look at the control groups. So that
was an example of a time where I kind of
like looked at the data and it was like, huh,
that is not what I expect in my own parenting.
(09:59):
I will say, when I came into early parenting, I
had like no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
So I'm not sure I was holding a lot of
preconceived beliefs.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You're like, Mom, I'm just trying different random stuff and
seeing what happens, and so.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Everything was surprising. Nothing was surprising.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I don't know, it's all blur The beauty of it
is that as the children get older, it stays a
blur that great good. You know. So now I would
be remiss if sitting with a professor of economics, if
I didn't ask you for a little bit more of
a description of the data, how you look at the
data and the differing weights of the data. And you
talk about this in your book cripsheet. You talk about
(10:40):
in order to get this data, you have to be studies,
and there are different kinds of studies. Can you just
tell me about the gold standard of studies.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So generally in these kinds of questions, we're looking at
trying to figure out the effect of some treatment on
some outcome. So, you know, if I breastfeed, will it
make my kids smarter? If I sleep train them, will
it make them you know, hate me forever?
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Whatever it is?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
If I you know, if I do toilet train them early,
will it make them better in school?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Who knows?
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Like so, it's some kind of treatment effect, and there's
the gold standard way to figure out the answers to
those questions is to randomize, is to take a group
of people, assign pick at random half of them, and
assign them to one treatment and pick it the other
half and don't assign them to the treatment, and then
follow them over time.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
And there are settings.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
In which we have that kind of study, and it's
it's very valuable because you know that other than this randomization,
other than this thing you're doing to them, the groups
are otherwise identical. And so that's that's how then you
can say, if I see a difference, it must be
due to the treatment, or it's very likely it's due
to the treatment, because everything else was identical because I
pick them at random. So in a lot of medical stuff,
(11:48):
you know, particularly stuff I talk about and expecting better,
we do have those kind of randomized trials. When we
turn to things in the more behavioral space, so things
like potty training or screen time time, we actually rarely
have that kind of randomized data. We're almost always looking
at what we call observational data, where there's one group
(12:08):
of people who did one thing, one group of people
who did another thing, and we're comparing outcomes for their kids.
And those kind of studies you often run into a
problem where you really don't know if it's the particular
behavior you're studying or some other difference across the families
that's driving the differences. And so a lot of my
work is spent, you know, reading really carefully into studies
(12:30):
like that and trying to evaluate you is it likely
that this result is really driven by the behavior we're
interested in or does it seem like.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
There's something else going on?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
So you really need some expertise to be able to
do this. Unfortunately, for parents, I mean, absent the things
that you cover in your book is it's not as
easy for them to even interpret the data. And sometimes
some data, as you've said, is better than other data.
So that leads me to this question. Just a lot
of misinformation out there for parents surrounding parenting issues, especially
(13:04):
some that have controversy, like vaccines for example. So what
do you say when parents go onto the internet or
go down a rabbit hole of some particular theory, let's
just stick with vaccines for now, and then they're rejecting
it because of a very specific thing that they've read
that they've embodied.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
I think it's really hard, like I would sort of
separate two things. So I think one is that there
are a lot of parents questions that parents have where
they say, I'm going to go out and find the
answer to this question. And in those settings, I think
there are a lot of ways to help people protect
themselves against misinformation. So if you said, you know, I'm
going to go out and look for information about vaccine safety, great,
(13:42):
There actually are many good places to get that information,
including places to get people who really explain in detail,
you know, this is why we think these vaccines are safe.
And here is the nuance of you know, how safety
monitoring is done and so on, and so I actually
think when people are going and they're looking like they're
ready to process the information and looking for themselves, you
(14:03):
can say, look, here are some really good sources that
you know you can go to. And this is, you know,
part of what I try to do in my work.
I say, Okay, here's a good, reliable source that doesn't
where I hope that you trust me and you can
come and I'm going to help you understand the problems.
I think we're the navigating these questions. I think where
we get into the biggest trouble is when people are
(14:26):
faced with information in a moment that they are.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Not really looking for it.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
So the biggest kind of like misinformation issues arise for
me when people send me these Instagram reels, and I
just imagine it's at night.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
You're scrolling Instagram.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
All you want to do is just watch like Balleriina
Farm's latest instagram about her sourdough, you know, and you're
like just enjoying yourself, and then the next thing that
shows up in your feed is like, did you know
that you can cure your child's ADHD by small changes
to their diet?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Or did you know that.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
No vaccines have never been tested against a placebo? Or
whatever is the latest thing, and people aren't ready to
process that, and all they see is this one Instagram
real or this one quote, and it's by someone who
has a million followers. And I think that's when the
misinformation is most harmful, because it sort of gets in
your head in a moment you're not really ready to
think about it in context. And so I don't know
(15:20):
how much to tell people to fight that except just
be like scroll past, you know, like wait like file
that away until you're ready to think about this question overall,
and then you can, you know, really dive into an
actual research project actually trying to learn what trusted sources say.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Right, Okay, that's a really good note to parents when
you are scrolling and you come across some genius idea
in the middle of the night, return to the sour
look for more sourdos. Back to the sourdough. We'll be
right back after these messages. Welcome back to the show.
So this works well when you have studies, and if
(16:00):
you have studies that aren't as reliable, if you can
decipher how they can be made more reliable. But what
happens as is often the case when there isn't sufficient
data at all. And I'm asking this especially for black
and brown families. There's a lot of parenting issues that
come up, ranging from black maternal mortality to sickle cell
(16:21):
to just questions on talking to our children about race.
They are all sorts of things that are really important
to our parenting decisions that there is just not enough
data for. Is there any kind of a clearer eyed
perspective we can take on this in the absence of
hard data.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
So sometimes we.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Are looking for data like it's going to give us
the answer, and even in a case when there is evidence,
it's not going to.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Tell you what to do.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I think there's a lot of value in structuring the
question that you're asking and even if you sort of
ask something about, like, you know, how do I want
to talk to any kids about police brutality, racial bias,
or one of these issues where there's absolutely no data,
You're not going to go out and get a study.
That's like the best way, you know, the best age
at which to present this information is the following. It's
(17:10):
not going to help, but there are ways to say, Okay,
let me sit down and think about you know, what
is the real choice I face?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Is the choice like what is the question I'm asking?
What is the right age? You know?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Let me think carefully in a structured way about what's
the right age to do this? Let me plan how
I am going to do it. I think are our
most problematic parenting decisions come when we are not ready
for some conversation. And if you sort of do that
and you sit down and you think about it, all right,
I want to make a plan for how to do this,
(17:40):
you will often find that, you know, if there's not data,
there is maybe some guidance about like what's the best
way to have a conversation like this. You know, we
know a fair amount from psychology about like what's the
right moment to have hard conversations. What's the right way
to present hard topics to kids? How do you do
it sort of age appropriately, waiting for kids to come
back with questions, not giving them all the.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Information at once.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
There are a bunch of guidelines which would be not
exactly about this topic, but adjacent enough that it.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Could be helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
But I really think the core there is being ready
to make the decision in the like, a deliberate thinking
about the problem in a deliberate way, rather than looking
out for some data, being like there's nothing and then saying, Okay, well,
I guess I'm.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Just just anything is fine, right right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So that brings me to the decision tree concept, which
I really loved. I mean, I've heard about decision trees,
I've used them, but in your book you in crypt Sheet, certainly,
but I'm sure across your books you recommend that parents
take a deliberate approach to decision making and build decision
trees on big issues. Can you I love that? And
for people who aren't as well versed in decision trees
(18:43):
as you or I might be, can you talk about
how you would do that? I mean, you've pretty much
you've explained it to some degree already.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, no, so I think like, let's take some kind
of big So one of the things in crypsheet I
talk about this in the context of like deciding about childcare,
and so people often approach the decision about like what
kind of childcare as really just like this, like I
could do anything and I can't, and then you're that's
so overwhelming, there's no way to make that decision. And
so what I tell people is, Okay, just think about,
like what are what are the options?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Someone could stay home, You could have.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
A childcare in your house, kind of nanny, you could
have daycare. Those are pretty much your three options, and
a decision three tree framework, you would just say, okay,
let me then think about like the best option within
those three things. So, what's the best daycare childcare option
I can have? How would I structure nanny? What would
that look like? Is it reasonable for someone to stay home?
(19:33):
Sort of really like almost like optimize as if you're
going to do each of those things. So decision trees
tend to work by kind of starting at the bottom
saying Okay, what's the best thing I can get in
these different parts, and then okay, now I'm in a
position to kind of compare say nanny or childcare and say, okay,
you know, if I were to have to pick one
(19:54):
of these, now that I know what the best options are,
which one of those would I pick? And then you
can say, okay, how do I compare that against the
option of one parent staying home? And then you've sort
of backed into it. So rather than just saying the
world is full of an infinite variety of choices, to say,
I need to first decide what is It's not infinite.
(20:14):
There's a smaller amount of choices, and I can choose
within them and then slowly work up to what is
the best option. You can sort of imagine in your
head that it's in tring.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
No.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I love that for so many reasons. First of all,
you know is what you said earlier when you are
trying to figure out all the options available, but in
a pointed way, not just in the world, but you know,
if you're thinking, okay, daycare, what kind of daycare? Where
does it need to be? It requires you to ask
a lot of questions yes, and it calms you down
so that you can start thinking of the questions. You
(20:46):
go into investigative reporter mode. You want to know the
answers to the questions, and just acquiring the information makes
you feel more confident in what you're ultimately going to
decide upon.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Totally granted, I think it takes out some of the
like almost like emotional valance panic, right that comes with
like I have to make this decision. It's very hard
to be like, no, this is a totally tractable problem.
Like now you're just looking at like what are the
daycares around me? Or what are the you know, like
now I'm in like kind of deliberative like not emotional mo.
(21:18):
And I think that taking some of the emotion out
of those decisions can be very helpful in making you
feel confident about them.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
And they have a beauty of this decision tree. Particularly
if you literally are writing this stuff all down, then
you can take a look at it and you say,
you make the decision that you choose a daycare and
it doesn't work out for whatever reason. As opposed to
arms flailing panic, you just go back to the tree
and you say, Okay, that didn't work out for whatever reasons,
(21:47):
and what were the other options and how do they
look now.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So one of the things I often tell people is
when any big decision, there should be like a sort
of step after the decision that I call follow up,
where in any choice that you make, you should plan
a time leader at which you will revisit it, huh,
at which you will like say, like, how do we
feel about this decision. I talk about this all the
time in extracurriculars because they think a lot of people
they'll like enroll their kid in travel soccer, and then
(22:11):
like five years later they're like, everybody hates travel soccer.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I can't believe we do this.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
And it's like, hey, you know, if there was an
option at the end of every season, just schedule.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
A time to think about, like, hey, do we hate
travel soccer? Should we not do it anymore?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
And I think that if we are very reluctant to
revisit our decisions because it feels like I don't like
to think that I made a mistake. But if you say,
you know, look, it wasn't a mistake. We did the
best thing we could in the moment, and it turns
out next time we want to do something differently. That's
this sort of cognitive dissonance turns off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And another good reason to do that is because certainly
within my family, one or more children may want to
bail in the middle of the pots. And if you know,
if everyone knows that we're going to do it for
the season, we're going to wait until our season and
we're going to sit down and talk about it. It
is what motivates everyone to keep going, and it saves
(23:05):
you a lot of conversation in the middle of the
season for you know, you hate it.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yes, no, I mean so one of our we have
these sort of core family values, and one of our
core family values as we follow through on our commitments,
and this is this is this version basically like you
don't have to you know, you don't have to take
the violin forever, but you sign up for the year.
At the end of the year, that's your opportunity to revisit.
And yes, the number of times that that has saved
me from a fight. She's like, great, I would love
to discuss this in.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
June, right, and we agreed to do it. Right, look
forward to it.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
You don't even have to go into the We've paid
for this. I love I'm looking forward to that. It's
going to be looking forward to it right down, right down.
How you're feeling right in a calendar, set me a
calendar invite, I'd be delighted. No how you're feeling now,
so we can be short include that discussion. So I'm
sure even asked this question before, but are there any
(23:56):
parenting thing, parenting tips or tricks, or your favorite thoughts
about parenting that you really believe in that you follow
through on, but that aren't really backed up by any
data whatsoever that just sort of gut so I will
I will.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Say I think that that parenting older kids has a
sort of humbling My kids are nine and thirteen, and
parenting older kids has a sort of there's a humbling
moment for someone who loves data because it is not
as amenable to data as the kinds of things that
you know, the world in which I could like get
a study in sleep training and understand like that is gone,
(24:33):
and so I find that much of what I am
doing is kind of it's like almost self experimentation based
rather than so. For example, by far, my best parenting
strategy at the moment is from eight o'clock until nine
o'clock every night, I sit in the den outside of
my daughter's room, and I work on my computer she's
(24:55):
the one who's thirteen. And then some of the time
she comes to talk to me, and as soon as
she comes back to I close my computer and I'm
just like, oh, I was not doing anything. I was
just sitting here and then and that is an opportunity
and I have found like, that's that's how we can
have some time together is by sort of keeping that
door open without being like, let's schedule a time or
(25:15):
I'm like, you know, like why don't you want to
talk to me?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Just like I'm sitting here.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
I'm I'm happily sitting here, and if we don't talk,
it's fine. But like being open, I think that is
my best parenting strategy. And I'm not sure there's any
like data that just happens to work for us.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Sort of like driving the car and they're in the
back and so yeah, exactly, but now your kids have
your bud so the car doesn't work right.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
And also my kids get so sick in the car.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Oh so I've considered like telling them they can't listen
to things, but then they would just be vomiting.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I don't want to vomiting.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Oh, so you have created I mean, I jokingly call
you the data driven parenting Guru, but you really have
a wonderfully large following of people who appreciate this rational
and calming approach to making the myriad of parenting decisions
we have to make. So I'm curious about who you
(26:08):
look to in terms of other parenting advice experts of
parenting experts or do you do you feel like you
are looking at through a particular lens and that there's
room for even in your parenting approach, for other perspectives on.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
I find that I follow an enormous number of other people,
and I get a lot of good things, you know,
like like doctor Becky. I get a lot of interesting
ideas from doctor Becky. And my kids are a little older now,
but it's like still there's some really good stuff in there.
There are two women who run an organization called This
(26:43):
Is So Awkward, which is about puberty.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I hear things from them.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
I think the important piece for me is like I
like to take pieces and I from what Like I
like to hear what people are saying. I am not
an adopter of like big pig sure strategies, I but
I there are often things where I would hear where
also take one thing out.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
And I actually think a mark of.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
A really good book about parenting, or really good book
about almost anything is if you can sort of pull
one thing out and be like, oh, that's something I'm
going to take and I'm going to think about implementing it,
because you know, in some sense, I sort of think
everyone needs to know roll.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Their own, roll their own parenting a little right, right.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
No, absolutely, I mean certainly I agree with that. All
that I do with this podcast in my work is
try to extract, try to extract really interesting things that
I think would be helpful in service of which is why.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
It's sort of interesting.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
One of the things these many of I feel very
lucky that people follow the stuff that I that I do,
and people will sometimes ask me, but like, just tell
me what you did, like you know, I'm trying, like
I want to, you know, sleep tare my kid or
pie training killer, just tell me what you did. And
I'm pretty reluctant to tell people what I did because
I don't think it's relevant. Actually, I don't think that
(27:59):
the the particular choices that I made, which were driven
by the circumstances I had and the partner I had,
and the like lifestyle had and whatever it was like,
those are not gonna be the right choices for everyone.
And I think that the when when this kind of
role can get complicated is when you're telling people like
act like me. So the only time I'll ever tell
people what I do is if it's about running. I'm
always happy to tell people, like, exactly the running schedule
(28:21):
I had.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
You should do that, But no one thinks I'm an
expert in that. So it's fine.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Well, I just this morning I did one of my runs.
I'm training for our half marathons, so by the time
this airs, hopefully I will have finished and I will
be in one peace still. But so I may have
to ask you some running tests.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I'm training for the Boston marathons. Oh running a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Ooh, that's side did New York, but Boston is you
know time and be ooh good for you. One second,
I want to follow up on a question, but I
got sidetracked.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Run the most.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So similarly when you said about you know, not wanting
to make about what you do when people ask. When
I started this podcast, my kids were a little younger,
and I made a vow first and foremost to myself
but also to them that I would not talk about
them or I wouldn't make them examples. I mean, as
it happens, I'm very proud of my children. They're really
lovely people, and I feel some, but certainly not all,
(29:16):
responsibility for that. But it really can't be about to
your point, if you're trying to help parents learn about
how to be better parents, it can't be about what
you do, because I mean, certainly the only thing in
my instance is the mistakes I've made. I can say,
don't try this, But other than that, no, So no,
I definitely agree with that perspective. I want to turn
(29:38):
as we wrap up to your latest book, which is
called The Unexpected, and it is it is. It's a
very important book, but it's a very specific book for
people who have had pregnancy complications, and you talk about
the complications and then how to prevent or people's worries
about having them again. So can you tell me inspired
(30:00):
the writing of this book?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yeah, so I had, you know, when I wrote this book,
I had had ten years after i'd written Expecting Better,
and the number of questions I've gotten over time from
people who said, you know, I had this complication in
my earlier pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Will it happen again?
Speaker 3 (30:17):
You know, that was one of the most common questions
that I got from people, and I wanted a way
to answer that question.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
And it felt like.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
This was not a space that people were talking about enough.
And the book is a bit different than my other books,
because you know, the rest of the books are really
about my own they're like motivated my own experience, and
this book is not. But I.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Wanted there to be something to give people.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
So the dedication in the book says that is it
is for the readers who ask me these questions, and
that is absolutely what it was.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
You know, it's interesting. Did you find that people women
were generally reluctant to talk? I mean, obviously people reached
out to you with it, but as you as you
began to research it more thoroughly, was there's some reluctance
to talk about pregnancy complications?
Speaker 3 (31:06):
People would like to talk, I mean like to It's
not the word I would use, but I think that
there is a lot of openness when asked for people
to share the things.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
That are hard.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I mean, when we put out a call for people
to share some things about their experiences because we wanted
to use some of this stuff in the book, and
I have, you know, an Excel response with thousands and
thousands of people just incredibly long stories about what happened
to them and how they tried to navigate it afterwards.
And I think that these experiences are quite widely shared.
(31:40):
You know, about fifty percent of pregnancies will have or
end in one of the complications in the book. And
it's almost not that people are not comfortable talking about them,
but that they feel like other people are not comfortable
hearing them. And I think that's that sort of opening
that up to say, you know, this is a space
where you can you know, you can talk about this.
(32:02):
You know, I went on CBS Warning Show and talked about,
you know, vaginal prolapse and.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Like, we don't you know, no, we don't always do that. No, No,
it's true.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
It's interesting. I've thought about that as I was reading
through The Unexpected because while I imagine now, if asked
people are very happy, not happy, people want to talk
about it, but not so long ago, and it may
even still be the case now to some degree that
it doesn't get talked about because of the feelings of disappointment,
(32:33):
of fear of weirdly almost failure. I mean, I'm speaking
personally because it reminded me as I was reading. I mean,
I have three healthy children, thank goodness, but I had
miscarriages in the in the midst, and I have not
talked about that much. And I remember thinking I had
my first miscarriage after my first child was born, and
I remember thinking, I'm so grateful that I at least
(32:55):
I have my body knows how to do this, and
this is I'm not dealing with this loss as in tensely,
as if I'd never done it before. I'm very glad
that we're able to normalize these kind of conversations because
while there are people that want to talk about that,
there are other people that feel a little less inclined.
And by reading the book and realizing how common it is,
first of all, and secondly, there's no need for it's
(33:17):
a weird thing to apply shame or embarrassment to this
because it but.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
But I think it totally. I mean people do.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
I think it really is a feeling of like, well,
you know, is this something that I did?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Like what you know what this is?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
It's yeah, I mean, embarrassment and shame I think are
are very common emotions, which of course absolutely should not
be and you wouldn't you know, it's when you have
another medical other people have medical issues, you wouldn't be like, oh,
I'm so embarrassed that I you know, I have a
migraine or I mean, that's a comparable thing.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
But like, right right, we don't.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
We don't imbue other medical experiences with that kind of shame,
right right, No, it's true, it's true, all right.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So women, we need to leave that alone.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
I need to leave that alone.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
So my final question to you is, in the dream
world of Emily astrom parent data, what kind of research
do you wish that you had available or that you
would fund if you could, Like, what's your dream set
of data?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
So I would love to I mean, there's a million
things in this space, but I think one I would
I would highlight is I think that we could do
so much better in understanding the path of the emotional
experience post childbirth. You know, we talk about postpartum depression
more than we once did, which is great, but it's
still not talked about enough. And there is such a
(34:30):
fuller range of postpartum emotions and sort of the any
experience of recovery, and I don't think we know that
much about what is it that makes it better or
worse for people? You know, what are the supports that
we could have in place that would make this better?
And it's a hard data question because we like to
measure things you can like measure in a hospital, and
you can't measure on how people feel. But I think
(34:51):
that with enough you know, with enough funding, you can
run that kind of study and I think we get
a much clearer picture of how we can support families
post childbirth.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, that's great that I look.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Forward to yes your ability one day, Yes one day.
So I'm going to wrap up part one of our
conversation here and I want to say thank you so much, Emily.
It's been a great conversation. And for those of you
who already do not have the entire set of Emily
Ostar parenting books, now is the time to get them.
Expecting better Cripshet Family Firm, and The Unexpected, and also
(35:26):
check out and subscribe to parent Data because you'll be
glad you did. I mean, I'm on there all the time,
I really am. I love the things you ask about
and I love the way that you answer the question.
So one more quick thing before we go, and I'd
love you to play the Lightning round, the GCP Lightning Round. Okay,
four quick questions. Your favorite poem or saying.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
It ends is my favorite saying, which I think just
applies to many things. Good things. You want to appreciate
them because they will end bad things.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
It ends love That your favorite two children's books, and
they can be from when you were young or when
you read to your children.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Hippos go bizarre.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
And I want my hat back. Wow, I tho there
are things my children loved. I must have read them
four billion times, and there's a lot of interesting nuance
in very small number of boards those times. I can
still recite all the temoscope cerk, but I'm not going
to do it on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Okay, give me a parenting moment that you would love
to do over, And by that, I don't mean that
it was so good you want to do it better
the next time.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
When my daughter was four months old, we took her
on an international trip, and.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Every aspect of it was a total disaster.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And I wish that either I had not done it,
or that I had adopted a more relaxed attitude.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Oh, that sounds like a.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Lot more than I had remembered the adapter for the
breast pump Ah, which I did not.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
There were many mistakes.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Made, Okay, so give me a moment you when you
nailed it as a mom.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
I think there are actually many moments with my older
kids where they tell you something and you have waited
long enough that they are willing to say, like, you've
sort of taken the time to just sit and be
for long enough that one of my kids will be like,
(37:27):
here's really what's going on. And I think those are
the moments in which I feel like, Okay, I want
I did, like I did. I am sort of sometimes
like crawling my way to the to the right thing here.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
That's great. Yeah no, I know those moments and they're
kind of rare, but.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
They're old and they're rare. But when you have them,
it's like, yeah, yeah, no, it's good. He'll come my husband,
I'll be like, I did it.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Okay, great, Thank you so much, great answer, Thanks so
much for being here. Thank you. I hope everyone listening
enjoyed to Day's conversation with Emily Oster.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
As I mentioned at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Of this episode, this was part one of a two
parter with Emily. We'll be back a bit later on
in the season with part two when Emily will answer
questions that were submitted by listeners, so please be sure
to look out for this next episode. Thanks again for
joining me at ground Control Parenting. If you like what
you've heard, subscribe, rate and review where you find your podcasts,
and tell your friends. For more parenting info and advice,
(38:27):
check out the ground Control Parenting blog at groundcontrol parenting
dot com. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram,
and tik tok at ground Control Parenting. Until the next time,
take care and thanks for listening.
Hello, Hi, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog
and now a podcast creative for parents raising black and
brown children. I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis.
In this podcast series, I talk with some really interesting
people about the joy and the job of parenting. So
a central goal of Ground Control Parenting is to give
parents and caretakers the resources you need to make the
(00:27):
best parenting decisions possible for you and your family. The
more information you have, the more you can understand how
to use it, the more you're able to make confident
decisions and experience less parenting stress. I'm especially thrilled to
welcome today's guest, an economist who shares this goal and
offers invaluable insights on how to achieve it. Emily Aster
is an unapologetically data driven economist who uses her expertise
(00:49):
to analyze and interpret data, empowering parents with Evan space
guidelines to make confident decisions for themselves and their families.
Emily is the JG. Egleman Sex University Professor of Economics,
Brown University, and a New York Times bestselling author whose
books include Expecting Better, Cripsheet, The Family Firm, and most
recently The Unexpected. Emily's also the CEO of parent Data,
(01:10):
a comprehensive website that provides a data driven guide through
trying to conceive, pregnancy, parenting, and beyond. Emily received to
undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. She and her husband,
Jesse Sapiro, who's also an economist of great renowned, have
a son and a daughter. Welcome to Ground Control Parenting, Emily,
thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You have no idea how much additional credit I got
from moms and Moms to be when I told them
you would joining me on the podcast. I have children
in their twenties and their thirties. It's been a while
since I've been pouring over new mom books, and it's
been fun and really fascinating to dive into your methodology
and your perspective. There's so much enthusiasm about your visit
that this is going to be a two parter. First,
we're going to dive into the world of how you
(01:50):
take your economic lens into parenting and learn how parents
can use your approach to gain more confidence. And then
I'm going to ask you away in on specific parenting questions,
which I have polled them many very excited people around me.
So I want to start with you, Emily Young Emily Ostor,
who was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to two not one,
(02:10):
but two parent economists, yes, both of them economics professors
at Yale. So I have to ask, how to being
raised in this household influence your approach to applying economic
principles to parenting or did it really just come when
you start thinking about parenting.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
No, it really came from my childhood.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
You know, my mom in particular, was very, very very
good at this scale of like taking economics and taking
principles of economics and applying them to your job. And
I think she almost like I do it in a
deliberate way where I think, okay, like what are the
tools here? I think for my mother it was just
like that was how her brain worked, right like it
(02:50):
just like it took these tools of economics and it
made them into how you run your run your household.
And so that was just around everywhere. And and then
you know, if we have a nice upbringing, which I did,
we all aim to parent like our parents. And I
was lucky to marry another economist so it was no
problem to just do that.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, that was that was luck. And so you had somebody,
you are, a partner in parenting who had the same lens,
who had the same perspective and appreciated the approach.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, I think it's it's it's always very helpful to
be on the same page with your partner. And I
think in this in this case, there's a little bit
of extra of kind of having the same language and
having the same frame on the world. You can use
these tools even if your partner is not an economist,
but maybe it's faster if they are.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I'm married to someone who has an economics background, and
as you say this, I think now many of the
principles and values and things we talked about with the
kids a lot that come from him do have an
economic space. I mean, there's always a question of you
want to spend money on X, you want us to
spend money on X. If I gave you this amount
of money, totally would you spend it?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Don't use that all the use that all the time.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
And I think, you know, for us, like that was
an argument for you know, how do we think about
an allowance?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Like what you know that is a way for you
to internalize that when you're asking me to buy you,
you know, roebucks, like, do you actually want the roebucks
or do you want the roebucks at their value?
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Or do you just want them for nothing?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And it turns out when you're paying you don't want the.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Roebucks as much. Valuable lessons when it took me to
adulthood to get exactly exactly. So, for the few people
out there who have not been able to read your books,
can you tell me a little bit about how you
basically apply economic principles to parenting?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Sure? So I think there's really two pieces here.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So economics for me is kind of a combination of
an approach to analyzing data and thinking about evidence on causality,
and then an approach to decision making which tries to
weigh costs and benefits and kind of organize our decisions
in a way that takes into account preferences and takes
into account constraints and takes into account evidence. And so
(04:56):
when I think about parenting, I sort of bring all
of that together. So a lot of my work is
about reading data and helping people understand, you know, is
this is it likely? That this study you're seeing is
causal or is this just a correlation? And how big
is the effect? What do we actually learn and then
trying to help them take that evidence into their decision
making and say, Okay, you know you need to weigh
(05:18):
this evidence along with your preferences, think about what your
values are and what your constraints are, and then ultimately
make a decision. So I think it's it's really both
of those pieces of economics brought into the parenting space.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And see that's second part which I so wholeheartedly concur
with the concept of once you know the information, your
ability to process it for yourself is a key to
what I know you believe in as well, So the
relaxed approach to parenting that is not relaxed and letting
kids do anything but your approach to I don't have
to freak out over every single thing.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, I think that what's really important is that when
we convey information to parents. I think, especially now, like
when parents and hear things, they hear like you must
do X or there. You know, we showed a positive
impact of this, and so therefore you must do it.
And I think that there are almost nothing in early parenting,
which is like this.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You know so many of these choices.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You know there are multiple good choices, and maybe this
one has a little benefit, or this one has a
little benefit. But really it's about taking your preferences, like
the things that you care about, looking at this data
and deciding based on that what's the right decision for me?
And I say this all the time, but you know
the right decision for you is not the right decision
for everyone else. And being relaxed for me, being confident
(06:37):
in our choices is about knowing that we made the
decisions that were the best decisions we could make for us, and.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
That's kind of all you can ask for.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
So your four into this really began as you were
pregnant with your first child and you discovered that the
world did not operate efficiently in this respect. So can
you talk a little bit about how you moved from
being another pregnant mother with ten thousand questions to someone
(07:07):
who was actually nailing the answers.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yes, sometimes I say I just I just took it
too far, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
So you know, when I got pregnant, I was faced
with something I think is very familiar to anyone who
comes into pregnancy, which is, you know, here's a list
of what you should do and you shouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
It was really like my first exper like extended experience
with the medical system with someone being like, Okay, here,
here is a set of rules. You know, here's the
test that you should have. You know, here's the here's
what we recommend. And I found, you know, I'm a
person who asks why a lot, And I said, well,
why is it? Well this, you know, here's the list,
and we don't really have time to explain why. And
(07:43):
when I went out to look for you know, what do.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
The books say about why?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
The books also didn't say why, you know, And sometimes
one of them said you can have two cups of coffee,
and one said you can have no cups of coffee,
and one said any amount of coffee is fine. But
no one was like, and this is why I think that.
And so for me, that was the part of it
I was always missing. And so I went out mainly
initially in service of these questions for myself, doing a
(08:08):
bunch of research, sometimes working with my husband as we
tried to navigate through some of these bigger decisions around
things like prenatal testing, and at some point I like
to write. At some point I sort of started writing
around this because I thought it would be fun, and
then the book kind of sort of spilled out from there.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
That's great. So if you can remember what is one
parenting belief that you held firmly too before your research,
before you started researching, I mean, as opposed to hearing
the things and wanting to know, why was there anything
that you kind of knew for sure and then discovered
that maybe it wasn't quite as sure as you thought.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I think there are things in my research that surprised me,
sort of things where like I was like, huh, I like,
you know, in the pregnancy contest bed rest, so bed
rest is something actually still a reasonable share of pregnant
women are prescribed bed rest. It turns out there's basically
nothing for which bad rest is a good treatment.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That was one of the very surprising things that I read.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
And it's surprising, I think, because it seems sensible. It's
like it's sort of like evil, if only you just
lay down, it would be fine. Just turns out that's
not how it works. And so I think that was
both surprising to me because the kind of logic is
so like somehow feels right, and because it was such
a common is still a fairly common recommendation, and it's
(09:26):
one of the places where you really do need to
look at evidence you and you really see the value
of the kinds of evidence that you get in good randomized.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Trials, because of course, most of the people who.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Are put on bed rest, you know, for like because
of concerns about preterm labor, most of those people don't
go into preterm labor. But it turns out that most
of the people who don't get put on bed rest
also don't go into preterm late but you wouldn't know
that unless you look at the control groups. So that
was an example of a time where I kind of
like looked at the data and it was like, huh,
that is not what I expect in my own parenting.
(09:59):
I will say, when I came into early parenting, I
had like no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
So I'm not sure I was holding a lot of
preconceived beliefs.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You're like, Mom, I'm just trying different random stuff and
seeing what happens, and so.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Everything was surprising. Nothing was surprising.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I don't know, it's all blur The beauty of it
is that as the children get older, it stays a
blur that great good. You know. So now I would
be remiss if sitting with a professor of economics, if
I didn't ask you for a little bit more of
a description of the data, how you look at the
data and the differing weights of the data. And you
talk about this in your book cripsheet. You talk about
(10:40):
in order to get this data, you have to be studies,
and there are different kinds of studies. Can you just
tell me about the gold standard of studies.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So generally in these kinds of questions, we're looking at
trying to figure out the effect of some treatment on
some outcome. So, you know, if I breastfeed, will it
make my kids smarter? If I sleep train them, will
it make them you know, hate me forever?
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Whatever it is?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
If I you know, if I do toilet train them early,
will it make them better in school?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Who knows?
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Like so, it's some kind of treatment effect, and there's
the gold standard way to figure out the answers to
those questions is to randomize, is to take a group
of people, assign pick at random half of them, and
assign them to one treatment and pick it the other
half and don't assign them to the treatment, and then
follow them over time.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
And there are settings.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
In which we have that kind of study, and it's
it's very valuable because you know that other than this randomization,
other than this thing you're doing to them, the groups
are otherwise identical. And so that's that's how then you
can say, if I see a difference, it must be
due to the treatment, or it's very likely it's due
to the treatment, because everything else was identical because I
pick them at random. So in a lot of medical stuff,
(11:48):
you know, particularly stuff I talk about and expecting better,
we do have those kind of randomized trials. When we
turn to things in the more behavioral space, so things
like potty training or screen time time, we actually rarely
have that kind of randomized data. We're almost always looking
at what we call observational data, where there's one group
(12:08):
of people who did one thing, one group of people
who did another thing, and we're comparing outcomes for their kids.
And those kind of studies you often run into a
problem where you really don't know if it's the particular
behavior you're studying or some other difference across the families
that's driving the differences. And so a lot of my
work is spent, you know, reading really carefully into studies
(12:30):
like that and trying to evaluate you is it likely
that this result is really driven by the behavior we're
interested in or does it seem like.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
There's something else going on?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
So you really need some expertise to be able to
do this. Unfortunately, for parents, I mean, absent the things
that you cover in your book is it's not as
easy for them to even interpret the data. And sometimes
some data, as you've said, is better than other data.
So that leads me to this question. Just a lot
of misinformation out there for parents surrounding parenting issues, especially
(13:04):
some that have controversy, like vaccines for example. So what
do you say when parents go onto the internet or
go down a rabbit hole of some particular theory, let's
just stick with vaccines for now, and then they're rejecting
it because of a very specific thing that they've read
that they've embodied.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
I think it's really hard, like I would sort of
separate two things. So I think one is that there
are a lot of parents questions that parents have where
they say, I'm going to go out and find the
answer to this question. And in those settings, I think
there are a lot of ways to help people protect
themselves against misinformation. So if you said, you know, I'm
going to go out and look for information about vaccine safety, great,
(13:42):
There actually are many good places to get that information,
including places to get people who really explain in detail,
you know, this is why we think these vaccines are safe.
And here is the nuance of you know, how safety
monitoring is done and so on, and so I actually
think when people are going and they're looking like they're
ready to process the information and looking for themselves, you
(14:03):
can say, look, here are some really good sources that
you know you can go to. And this is, you know,
part of what I try to do in my work.
I say, Okay, here's a good, reliable source that doesn't
where I hope that you trust me and you can
come and I'm going to help you understand the problems.
I think we're the navigating these questions. I think where
we get into the biggest trouble is when people are
(14:26):
faced with information in a moment that they are.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Not really looking for it.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
So the biggest kind of like misinformation issues arise for
me when people send me these Instagram reels, and I
just imagine it's at night.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
You're scrolling Instagram.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
All you want to do is just watch like Balleriina
Farm's latest instagram about her sourdough, you know, and you're
like just enjoying yourself, and then the next thing that
shows up in your feed is like, did you know
that you can cure your child's ADHD by small changes
to their diet?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Or did you know that.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
No vaccines have never been tested against a placebo? Or
whatever is the latest thing, and people aren't ready to
process that, and all they see is this one Instagram
real or this one quote, and it's by someone who
has a million followers. And I think that's when the
misinformation is most harmful, because it sort of gets in
your head in a moment you're not really ready to
think about it in context. And so I don't know
(15:20):
how much to tell people to fight that except just
be like scroll past, you know, like wait like file
that away until you're ready to think about this question overall,
and then you can, you know, really dive into an
actual research project actually trying to learn what trusted sources say.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Right, Okay, that's a really good note to parents when
you are scrolling and you come across some genius idea
in the middle of the night, return to the sour
look for more sourdos. Back to the sourdough. We'll be
right back after these messages. Welcome back to the show.
So this works well when you have studies, and if
(16:00):
you have studies that aren't as reliable, if you can
decipher how they can be made more reliable. But what
happens as is often the case when there isn't sufficient
data at all. And I'm asking this especially for black
and brown families. There's a lot of parenting issues that
come up, ranging from black maternal mortality to sickle cell
(16:21):
to just questions on talking to our children about race.
They are all sorts of things that are really important
to our parenting decisions that there is just not enough
data for. Is there any kind of a clearer eyed
perspective we can take on this in the absence of
hard data.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
So sometimes we.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Are looking for data like it's going to give us
the answer, and even in a case when there is evidence,
it's not going to.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Tell you what to do.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I think there's a lot of value in structuring the
question that you're asking and even if you sort of
ask something about, like, you know, how do I want
to talk to any kids about police brutality, racial bias,
or one of these issues where there's absolutely no data,
You're not going to go out and get a study.
That's like the best way, you know, the best age
at which to present this information is the following. It's
(17:10):
not going to help, but there are ways to say, Okay,
let me sit down and think about you know, what
is the real choice I face?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Is the choice like what is the question I'm asking?
What is the right age? You know?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Let me think carefully in a structured way about what's
the right age to do this? Let me plan how
I am going to do it. I think are our
most problematic parenting decisions come when we are not ready
for some conversation. And if you sort of do that
and you sit down and you think about it, all right,
I want to make a plan for how to do this,
(17:40):
you will often find that, you know, if there's not data,
there is maybe some guidance about like what's the best
way to have a conversation like this. You know, we
know a fair amount from psychology about like what's the
right moment to have hard conversations. What's the right way
to present hard topics to kids? How do you do
it sort of age appropriately, waiting for kids to come
back with questions, not giving them all the.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Information at once.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
There are a bunch of guidelines which would be not
exactly about this topic, but adjacent enough that it.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Could be helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
But I really think the core there is being ready
to make the decision in the like, a deliberate thinking
about the problem in a deliberate way, rather than looking
out for some data, being like there's nothing and then saying, Okay, well,
I guess I'm.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Just just anything is fine, right right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So that brings me to the decision tree concept, which
I really loved. I mean, I've heard about decision trees,
I've used them, but in your book you in crypt Sheet, certainly,
but I'm sure across your books you recommend that parents
take a deliberate approach to decision making and build decision
trees on big issues. Can you I love that? And
for people who aren't as well versed in decision trees
(18:43):
as you or I might be, can you talk about
how you would do that? I mean, you've pretty much
you've explained it to some degree already.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, no, so I think like, let's take some kind
of big So one of the things in crypsheet I
talk about this in the context of like deciding about childcare,
and so people often approach the decision about like what
kind of childcare as really just like this, like I
could do anything and I can't, and then you're that's
so overwhelming, there's no way to make that decision. And
so what I tell people is, Okay, just think about,
like what are what are the options?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Someone could stay home, You could have.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
A childcare in your house, kind of nanny, you could
have daycare. Those are pretty much your three options, and
a decision three tree framework, you would just say, okay,
let me then think about like the best option within
those three things. So, what's the best daycare childcare option
I can have? How would I structure nanny? What would
that look like? Is it reasonable for someone to stay home?
(19:33):
Sort of really like almost like optimize as if you're
going to do each of those things. So decision trees
tend to work by kind of starting at the bottom
saying Okay, what's the best thing I can get in
these different parts, and then okay, now I'm in a
position to kind of compare say nanny or childcare and say, okay,
you know, if I were to have to pick one
(19:54):
of these, now that I know what the best options are,
which one of those would I pick? And then you
can say, okay, how do I compare that against the
option of one parent staying home? And then you've sort
of backed into it. So rather than just saying the
world is full of an infinite variety of choices, to say,
I need to first decide what is It's not infinite.
(20:14):
There's a smaller amount of choices, and I can choose
within them and then slowly work up to what is
the best option. You can sort of imagine in your
head that it's in tring.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
No.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I love that for so many reasons. First of all,
you know is what you said earlier when you are
trying to figure out all the options available, but in
a pointed way, not just in the world, but you know,
if you're thinking, okay, daycare, what kind of daycare? Where
does it need to be? It requires you to ask
a lot of questions yes, and it calms you down
so that you can start thinking of the questions. You
(20:46):
go into investigative reporter mode. You want to know the
answers to the questions, and just acquiring the information makes
you feel more confident in what you're ultimately going to
decide upon.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Totally granted, I think it takes out some of the
like almost like emotional valance panic, right that comes with
like I have to make this decision. It's very hard
to be like, no, this is a totally tractable problem.
Like now you're just looking at like what are the
daycares around me? Or what are the you know, like
now I'm in like kind of deliberative like not emotional mo.
(21:18):
And I think that taking some of the emotion out
of those decisions can be very helpful in making you
feel confident about them.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
And they have a beauty of this decision tree. Particularly
if you literally are writing this stuff all down, then
you can take a look at it and you say,
you make the decision that you choose a daycare and
it doesn't work out for whatever reason. As opposed to
arms flailing panic, you just go back to the tree
and you say, Okay, that didn't work out for whatever reasons,
(21:47):
and what were the other options and how do they
look now.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So one of the things I often tell people is
when any big decision, there should be like a sort
of step after the decision that I call follow up,
where in any choice that you make, you should plan
a time leader at which you will revisit it, huh,
at which you will like say, like, how do we
feel about this decision. I talk about this all the
time in extracurriculars because they think a lot of people
they'll like enroll their kid in travel soccer, and then
(22:11):
like five years later they're like, everybody hates travel soccer.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I can't believe we do this.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
And it's like, hey, you know, if there was an
option at the end of every season, just schedule.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
A time to think about, like, hey, do we hate
travel soccer? Should we not do it anymore?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
And I think that if we are very reluctant to
revisit our decisions because it feels like I don't like
to think that I made a mistake. But if you say,
you know, look, it wasn't a mistake. We did the
best thing we could in the moment, and it turns
out next time we want to do something differently. That's
this sort of cognitive dissonance turns off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And another good reason to do that is because certainly
within my family, one or more children may want to
bail in the middle of the pots. And if you know,
if everyone knows that we're going to do it for
the season, we're going to wait until our season and
we're going to sit down and talk about it. It
is what motivates everyone to keep going, and it saves
(23:05):
you a lot of conversation in the middle of the
season for you know, you hate it.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yes, no, I mean so one of our we have
these sort of core family values, and one of our
core family values as we follow through on our commitments,
and this is this is this version basically like you
don't have to you know, you don't have to take
the violin forever, but you sign up for the year.
At the end of the year, that's your opportunity to revisit.
And yes, the number of times that that has saved
me from a fight. She's like, great, I would love
to discuss this in.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
June, right, and we agreed to do it. Right, look
forward to it.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
You don't even have to go into the We've paid
for this. I love I'm looking forward to that. It's
going to be looking forward to it right down, right down.
How you're feeling right in a calendar, set me a
calendar invite, I'd be delighted. No how you're feeling now,
so we can be short include that discussion. So I'm
sure even asked this question before, but are there any
(23:56):
parenting thing, parenting tips or tricks, or your favorite thoughts
about parenting that you really believe in that you follow
through on, but that aren't really backed up by any
data whatsoever that just sort of gut so I will
I will.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Say I think that that parenting older kids has a
sort of humbling My kids are nine and thirteen, and
parenting older kids has a sort of there's a humbling
moment for someone who loves data because it is not
as amenable to data as the kinds of things that
you know, the world in which I could like get
a study in sleep training and understand like that is gone,
(24:33):
and so I find that much of what I am
doing is kind of it's like almost self experimentation based
rather than so. For example, by far, my best parenting
strategy at the moment is from eight o'clock until nine
o'clock every night, I sit in the den outside of
my daughter's room, and I work on my computer she's
(24:55):
the one who's thirteen. And then some of the time
she comes to talk to me, and as soon as
she comes back to I close my computer and I'm
just like, oh, I was not doing anything. I was
just sitting here and then and that is an opportunity
and I have found like, that's that's how we can
have some time together is by sort of keeping that
door open without being like, let's schedule a time or
(25:15):
I'm like, you know, like why don't you want to
talk to me?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Just like I'm sitting here.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
I'm I'm happily sitting here, and if we don't talk,
it's fine. But like being open, I think that is
my best parenting strategy. And I'm not sure there's any
like data that just happens to work for us.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Sort of like driving the car and they're in the
back and so yeah, exactly, but now your kids have
your bud so the car doesn't work right.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
And also my kids get so sick in the car.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Oh so I've considered like telling them they can't listen
to things, but then they would just be vomiting.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I don't want to vomiting.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Oh, so you have created I mean, I jokingly call
you the data driven parenting Guru, but you really have
a wonderfully large following of people who appreciate this rational
and calming approach to making the myriad of parenting decisions
we have to make. So I'm curious about who you
(26:08):
look to in terms of other parenting advice experts of
parenting experts or do you do you feel like you
are looking at through a particular lens and that there's
room for even in your parenting approach, for other perspectives on.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
I find that I follow an enormous number of other people,
and I get a lot of good things, you know,
like like doctor Becky. I get a lot of interesting
ideas from doctor Becky. And my kids are a little older now,
but it's like still there's some really good stuff in there.
There are two women who run an organization called This
(26:43):
Is So Awkward, which is about puberty.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I hear things from them.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
I think the important piece for me is like I
like to take pieces and I from what Like I
like to hear what people are saying. I am not
an adopter of like big pig sure strategies, I but
I there are often things where I would hear where
also take one thing out.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
And I actually think a mark of.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
A really good book about parenting, or really good book
about almost anything is if you can sort of pull
one thing out and be like, oh, that's something I'm
going to take and I'm going to think about implementing it,
because you know, in some sense, I sort of think
everyone needs to know roll.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Their own, roll their own parenting a little right, right.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
No, absolutely, I mean certainly I agree with that. All
that I do with this podcast in my work is
try to extract, try to extract really interesting things that
I think would be helpful in service of which is why.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
It's sort of interesting.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
One of the things these many of I feel very
lucky that people follow the stuff that I that I do,
and people will sometimes ask me, but like, just tell
me what you did, like you know, I'm trying, like
I want to, you know, sleep tare my kid or
pie training killer, just tell me what you did. And
I'm pretty reluctant to tell people what I did because
I don't think it's relevant. Actually, I don't think that
(27:59):
the the particular choices that I made, which were driven
by the circumstances I had and the partner I had,
and the like lifestyle had and whatever it was like,
those are not gonna be the right choices for everyone.
And I think that the when when this kind of
role can get complicated is when you're telling people like
act like me. So the only time I'll ever tell
people what I do is if it's about running. I'm
always happy to tell people, like, exactly the running schedule
(28:21):
I had.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
You should do that, But no one thinks I'm an
expert in that. So it's fine.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Well, I just this morning I did one of my runs.
I'm training for our half marathons, so by the time
this airs, hopefully I will have finished and I will
be in one peace still. But so I may have
to ask you some running tests.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I'm training for the Boston marathons. Oh running a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Ooh, that's side did New York, but Boston is you
know time and be ooh good for you. One second,
I want to follow up on a question, but I
got sidetracked.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Run the most.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So similarly when you said about you know, not wanting
to make about what you do when people ask. When
I started this podcast, my kids were a little younger,
and I made a vow first and foremost to myself
but also to them that I would not talk about
them or I wouldn't make them examples. I mean, as
it happens, I'm very proud of my children. They're really
lovely people, and I feel some, but certainly not all,
(29:16):
responsibility for that. But it really can't be about to
your point, if you're trying to help parents learn about
how to be better parents, it can't be about what
you do, because I mean, certainly the only thing in
my instance is the mistakes I've made. I can say,
don't try this, But other than that, no, So no,
I definitely agree with that perspective. I want to turn
(29:38):
as we wrap up to your latest book, which is
called The Unexpected, and it is it is. It's a
very important book, but it's a very specific book for
people who have had pregnancy complications, and you talk about
the complications and then how to prevent or people's worries
about having them again. So can you tell me inspired
(30:00):
the writing of this book?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yeah, so I had, you know, when I wrote this book,
I had had ten years after i'd written Expecting Better,
and the number of questions I've gotten over time from
people who said, you know, I had this complication in
my earlier pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Will it happen again?
Speaker 3 (30:17):
You know, that was one of the most common questions
that I got from people, and I wanted a way
to answer that question.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
And it felt like.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
This was not a space that people were talking about enough.
And the book is a bit different than my other books,
because you know, the rest of the books are really
about my own they're like motivated my own experience, and
this book is not. But I.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Wanted there to be something to give people.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
So the dedication in the book says that is it
is for the readers who ask me these questions, and
that is absolutely what it was.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
You know, it's interesting. Did you find that people women
were generally reluctant to talk? I mean, obviously people reached
out to you with it, but as you as you
began to research it more thoroughly, was there's some reluctance
to talk about pregnancy complications?
Speaker 3 (31:06):
People would like to talk, I mean like to It's
not the word I would use, but I think that
there is a lot of openness when asked for people
to share the things.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
That are hard.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I mean, when we put out a call for people
to share some things about their experiences because we wanted
to use some of this stuff in the book, and
I have, you know, an Excel response with thousands and
thousands of people just incredibly long stories about what happened
to them and how they tried to navigate it afterwards.
And I think that these experiences are quite widely shared.
(31:40):
You know, about fifty percent of pregnancies will have or
end in one of the complications in the book. And
it's almost not that people are not comfortable talking about them,
but that they feel like other people are not comfortable
hearing them. And I think that's that sort of opening
that up to say, you know, this is a space
where you can you know, you can talk about this.
(32:02):
You know, I went on CBS Warning Show and talked about,
you know, vaginal prolapse and.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Like, we don't you know, no, we don't always do that. No, No,
it's true.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
It's interesting. I've thought about that as I was reading
through The Unexpected because while I imagine now, if asked
people are very happy, not happy, people want to talk
about it, but not so long ago, and it may
even still be the case now to some degree that
it doesn't get talked about because of the feelings of disappointment,
(32:33):
of fear of weirdly almost failure. I mean, I'm speaking
personally because it reminded me as I was reading. I mean,
I have three healthy children, thank goodness, but I had
miscarriages in the in the midst, and I have not
talked about that much. And I remember thinking I had
my first miscarriage after my first child was born, and
I remember thinking, I'm so grateful that I at least
(32:55):
I have my body knows how to do this, and
this is I'm not dealing with this loss as in tensely,
as if I'd never done it before. I'm very glad
that we're able to normalize these kind of conversations because
while there are people that want to talk about that,
there are other people that feel a little less inclined.
And by reading the book and realizing how common it is,
first of all, and secondly, there's no need for it's
(33:17):
a weird thing to apply shame or embarrassment to this
because it but.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
But I think it totally. I mean people do.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
I think it really is a feeling of like, well,
you know, is this something that I did?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Like what you know what this is?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
It's yeah, I mean, embarrassment and shame I think are
are very common emotions, which of course absolutely should not
be and you wouldn't you know, it's when you have
another medical other people have medical issues, you wouldn't be like, oh,
I'm so embarrassed that I you know, I have a
migraine or I mean, that's a comparable thing.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
But like, right right, we don't.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
We don't imbue other medical experiences with that kind of shame,
right right, No, it's true, it's true, all right.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So women, we need to leave that alone.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
I need to leave that alone.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
So my final question to you is, in the dream
world of Emily astrom parent data, what kind of research
do you wish that you had available or that you
would fund if you could, Like, what's your dream set
of data?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
So I would love to I mean, there's a million
things in this space, but I think one I would
I would highlight is I think that we could do
so much better in understanding the path of the emotional
experience post childbirth. You know, we talk about postpartum depression
more than we once did, which is great, but it's
still not talked about enough. And there is such a
(34:30):
fuller range of postpartum emotions and sort of the any
experience of recovery, and I don't think we know that
much about what is it that makes it better or
worse for people? You know, what are the supports that
we could have in place that would make this better?
And it's a hard data question because we like to
measure things you can like measure in a hospital, and
you can't measure on how people feel. But I think
(34:51):
that with enough you know, with enough funding, you can
run that kind of study and I think we get
a much clearer picture of how we can support families
post childbirth.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, that's great that I look.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Forward to yes your ability one day, Yes one day.
So I'm going to wrap up part one of our
conversation here and I want to say thank you so much, Emily.
It's been a great conversation. And for those of you
who already do not have the entire set of Emily
Ostar parenting books, now is the time to get them.
Expecting better Cripshet Family Firm, and The Unexpected, and also
(35:26):
check out and subscribe to parent Data because you'll be
glad you did. I mean, I'm on there all the time,
I really am. I love the things you ask about
and I love the way that you answer the question.
So one more quick thing before we go, and I'd
love you to play the Lightning round, the GCP Lightning Round. Okay,
four quick questions. Your favorite poem or saying.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
It ends is my favorite saying, which I think just
applies to many things. Good things. You want to appreciate
them because they will end bad things.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
It ends love That your favorite two children's books, and
they can be from when you were young or when
you read to your children.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Hippos go bizarre.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
And I want my hat back. Wow, I tho there
are things my children loved. I must have read them
four billion times, and there's a lot of interesting nuance
in very small number of boards those times. I can
still recite all the temoscope cerk, but I'm not going
to do it on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Okay, give me a parenting moment that you would love
to do over, And by that, I don't mean that
it was so good you want to do it better
the next time.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
When my daughter was four months old, we took her
on an international trip, and.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Every aspect of it was a total disaster.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And I wish that either I had not done it,
or that I had adopted a more relaxed attitude.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Oh, that sounds like a.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Lot more than I had remembered the adapter for the
breast pump Ah, which I did not.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
There were many mistakes.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Made, Okay, so give me a moment you when you
nailed it as a mom.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
I think there are actually many moments with my older
kids where they tell you something and you have waited
long enough that they are willing to say, like, you've
sort of taken the time to just sit and be
for long enough that one of my kids will be like,
(37:27):
here's really what's going on. And I think those are
the moments in which I feel like, Okay, I want
I did, like I did. I am sort of sometimes
like crawling my way to the to the right thing here.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
That's great. Yeah no, I know those moments and they're
kind of rare, but.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
They're old and they're rare. But when you have them,
it's like, yeah, yeah, no, it's good. He'll come my husband,
I'll be like, I did it.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Okay, great, Thank you so much, great answer, Thanks so
much for being here. Thank you. I hope everyone listening
enjoyed to Day's conversation with Emily Oster.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
As I mentioned at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Of this episode, this was part one of a two
parter with Emily. We'll be back a bit later on
in the season with part two when Emily will answer
questions that were submitted by listeners, so please be sure
to look out for this next episode. Thanks again for
joining me at ground Control Parenting. If you like what
you've heard, subscribe, rate and review where you find your podcasts,
and tell your friends. For more parenting info and advice,
(38:27):
check out the ground Control Parenting blog at groundcontrol parenting
dot com. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram,
and tik tok at ground Control Parenting. Until the next time,
take care and thanks for listening.
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