Parent by Numbers

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Zachary Karabell: What’s one small thing parents can do today that’s backed up by data and makes life easier?

Emily Oster: Read to your kid. It is one of the few interventions where we know there are good data to back up the link with development and with kids liking to read and with kids learning to read. And it is a lot more fun than people often think it will be.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined us always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network and co-host of our weekly podcast, which is this, where we deal with issues of the day in a constructive way, or at least what we hope is a constructive way compared to the more common, frenetic, agitated way that we deal with issues.

Because news is never good. News is not good news. There is no good news. That is not the nature of the news business. Emma is writing a book about, or at least in part a book about, but there is a lot going on in the world and a lot of people in the world who are animated by a different sensibility and a different spirit, a different way of looking at what is going on.

More from the angle of how do we navigate a complicated terrain of many, many different voices, arguing many, many different things. And how do we do so in a way that is both balanced and healthy rather than in a way that is likely to nash our teeth, raise our blood pressure, and enhance the collective malaise?

And one of the areas that has always generated intense controversy is how do we raise children? What is the right way to produce the best kids? All these lists: I raised five Harvard graduates. What should she do? Right? What did he do right? The idea that there is a formula and there is a right and a wrong has been. of the mix for quite some time and is ever more so now and enhanced by social media where everybody has not just an opinion, but a strong one. And everyone else’s opinion is not just incorrect, it is morally reprehensible and absolutely wrong and will lead to the death of all of us. So we’re gonna talk to somebody who has entered this fray from a data perspective and has done so as a public voice to great, great effect.

So who are we gonna talk to today, Emma?

Emma Varvaloucas: We are gonna talk to Emily Oster. She is a professor of economics at Brown University, but if you know her, it’s very likely you know her through her work on a data-driven approach to parenting and pregnancy. She’s the CEO of ParentData, which is kind of like a Substack on steroids. We used to call that a website. It’s a website that publishes data driven articles around all things parenting, health, pregnancy, like I said, and also a bestselling author. She has written four books, the titles of which very likely, you know, if you have been pregnant or know someone who has ever been pregnant, and those are Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected. So we are ready to go talk to Emily and see what she has to say about raising, what was it, four or five Harvard graduates. Just kidding. She has two kids under the age of 14.

Zachary Karabell: Emily Oster, it is such a pleasure to be speaking with you on, well we’re recording this in August, I don’t know when people will be listening to it, but on this, what is for me, a beautiful August day in New York City. 

I think before we go into a lot of your work, I wanna ask kind of the meta question of. How you emerged as a voice during COVID. Now I know that we’ve all forgotten that COVID happened. I gave a speech the other day and I was reflecting on five years ago how the world had appeared to be different forever and how now we can hardly remember that we thought that, let alone looking around, observing it.

I mean, yes, more people are working at home on Fridays and maybe more people are working at home on Mondays, but commensurate with the expectation that the world would change forever. Schools, jobs, life, social life, it would appear that the world did not in fact change forever. In fact, it hardly seems to have changed much at all. your career changed. That absolutely did happen. And that was a permanent thing. Maybe not a tectonic world historical thing. Well, I guess we’ll find out in a few hundred years if this was the “Emily Oster Flux” or something. But we’ll leave that to future generations and it changed for the better and that your profile rose, but it also, I, I, I assume if I were in your shoes for a large period of 2020 and 2021, it had changed in a complicated way.

I mean, you were the target of a lot of intense feelings, many of which were at least observably, not positive. So I’m curious, and, and for those of you who don’t know, I mean, look, look up Emily Oster COVID, and you’ll, you know, you’ll find the Google compendium or…

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, you…

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m kind of curious about…

Zachary Karabell: I thought this was like, I, because I’m, I’m, I’m acutely aware of this because it, because Emily was… well, why don’t you tell your own story.

Emily Oster: Sure. So I came into early 2020 as a professor and writer, so I had two books Expecting Better and cribsheet. I was writing about data in parenting, and in like January of 2020, I was working on a third book and my publisher was like, you know, there’s this new thing called like newsletters and we think you, you know, maybe you should have one.

And I was like, okay. And I had this idea that the, the newsletter which I started on Substack, which is called ParentData, was gonna be kind of an extension of the books. Sort of like an opportunity to connect with people and tell them things that weren’t quite in the books and then tell them to buy the new book.

Basically it was to tell them to buy the new book. That was the core goal of the initial substack. And I started this substack in like. mid-February of 2020. And like the first post is about like baby carriers and Zika. It’s like what’s the best baby carrier? And also should you be worried about Zika? And the second, I don’t know if you remember Zika,

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Emily Oster: It’s a mosquito born.

Zachary Karabell: The thing we thought was gonna be a big deal.

Emily Oster: We were very concerned about it. And then like two posts in, there’s a post that’s like, there’s this COVID thing and you know, but I’m not that worried. And I have this very vivid memory that that post was illustrated with like a giant jar of peanut butter. And the sort of premise was like, sure, I’m stocking some extra peanut butter, but like, ha ha, COVID.

And then it sort of faded. Things evolved and, and in the end, you know, the newsletter kind of went from being what I had initially envisioned to really being a newsletter about basically for parents, but about COVID. And I spent a lot of the early part of the kind of pandemic writing to people about how they could process the data that was coming out around the pandemic.

So, you know, I had a lot like a big audience of people with little kids. And actually fairly early on people started asking the question like. Should I send my kids back to daycare? So, you know, this is like kind of May of 2020, some daycare started reopening and I was writing for people about, you know, how do you think about the trade-offs and what does the data look like and how risky is this for kids?

And that work sort of evolved through the pandemic. And one of the things that happened. In the kind of summer and fall of 2020 is I started spending a lot of time on schools and school reopening, and this is probably the most controversial thing that I did in the pandemic, was I spent a lot of time basically advocating for school reopening on the basis of data that we had collected.

I was running a project on schools and COVID, which we had ended up with the most comprehensive database on COVID in schools, like being run out of. Basically my kitchen. So I was writing about that. I was advocating about that. I was also writing for people about what else can you do with your, with your kids.

But really I think the sort of core part of the pandemic for me was the school reopening stuff and trying to get people to open schools more. And that definitely prompted. Some people to like me and many people to be very angry. It also raised my profile a lot and, and ultimately what I’ve built in parent data, kind of built out of the audience that I built during, during COVID.

Even though at the moment I don’t, we do a lot, like a lot of parenting and not a lot of COVID.

Zachary Karabell: How did the negativity affect you? I recall a lot of it was, you’re not a public health official. What do you know? What’s an economist? You know, why would an economist do this? You know, one of the great challenges I think in 2020 and 21, which I certainly encountered, was a lot of what master’s degree public health officials excel at is data analysis. They’re not doctors, but we, we kind of lost the thread in 2020 and 2021. Whereby if you weren’t a public health official, you somehow were not qualified to read data. Right? But a lot of the pushback against you was, why should we listen to an economist about school reopenings?

Emily Oster: There was a fair amount of that pushback. I, I mean, I think that there’s sort of two pieces of what economics brings to this and what I was bringing to this. So one is the data piece, and I think that my. I read of data was maybe I looked at the data a little bit differently or I had access to slightly different data, or I was willing to combine a bunch of different pieces of data to kind of make some of these statements.

But I actually think the much bigger distinction was around how we trade risks and benefits. So I think in a lot of the public health space at that time, you know, in sort of October of 2020 we might have looked at the data and said the same thing. Said basically, you know, schools are a low risk environment, but what is for was for sure true and remains true is, you know, when people started interacting at schools, we could not guarantee that no one would get COVID.

Right. I think to say that like no one will ever get COVID at school, I think we can all agree. That if we reopen schools, there would be some cases of COVID in in school. And the view that I was taking was, you know, this is a relatively low risk environment and there are a lot of benefits to opening schools.

And I think that benefit risk trade off is sort of core to how economists think about the world. There are risks potentially to opening schools. There’s risk to having schools in, in general. People get sick there. Get in car accidents. It’s the, this is a risky environment and we take risks all the time, but there are benefits and that’s why we do things.

And in my view, I saw very clearly the benefits of school reopening that, you know, kids would learn things and they would have access to peers and all kinds of other stuff. I think there was a lot of pushback from people who were like, let’s take a kind of abundance of caution approach. You know, if it, until we can guarantee schools are a hundred percent safe, let’s not open them.

And I thought at the time and continued to think that that really understated the benefit of schooling. And I think some of the pushback there was, you know, you’re an economist, you just want people to be able to go back to work because you care about money. And that wasn’t my motivation, but I understood people’s pushback there.

Emma Varvaloucas: So was that like the first and last pushback spike? Like once the COVID left and you started talking about parenting again, was that the end of the hate or, or does it continue now but in different directions?

Emily Oster: There was more COVID hate him. Just to be clear. So first there was school reopening. Once we got some vaccines, I told people in the spring of 2021 that they could do things with their kids and that their kids were low risk for COVID even before they were vaccinated. And people were very upset about that.

And then in the fall of maybe even 2023, I wrote something about how people should forgive each other. We should like accept that, you know, mistakes were made and like on both sides and we need to move on.

Zachary Karabell: How dare you.

Emma Varvaloucas: That was the worst, the worst offense.

Emily Oster: That was the worst offense in part, I think because that angered previously I had only been angering the left, and then when I said people should forgive each other, I angered both left and the right. That was the low in the pandemic.

Emma Varvaloucas: What about the right now though? Because now there you, you must be in the thick of it with like autism and microplastics and God knows what else.

Emily Oster: Yeah, so I now spend a lot of time writing about some of the stuff that RFK is pushing on the right. So I write a lot about vaccines and talk a lot about how people should vaccinate their kids. And in that writing, I try to hit the same kind of balance that I tried to hit everywhere, which is, you know, here’s what the data says, and here’s how we should think about the relative risks and benefits, and certainly that.

I have found that trying very hard to be in the center is the easiest way to anger people on both sides, but also like on the plus side, the easiest way to generate trust. So if you tell people, you know, I’m gonna tell you, not vaccinating your kids for measles is a worse choice than drinking raw milk.

They are, neither of them are things I think are a great choice, but if you wanted to rank them in terms of their importance, one of these things is a much bigger deal than the other. And so I try to keep in all of these pieces of what I do. That’s the core value is like, I’m gonna tell you what the data says.

I’m gonna help you think about, you know, how to prioritize risks and benefits and, you know, help you make your own decisions, which is sort of ultimately the position I took with the books. It’s a position I took during COVID. It’s a position I take with my website and with the writing I do now.

Zachary Karabell: It seems to me there’s this intense challenge that COVID really shone a bright light on, which is it? It is true. For years, public health and doctors, particularly around vaccines, took a sort of, people can’t handle nuanced approach, and so doctors would say historically about vaccines to worried parents, oh, don’t worry. It’s safe. 

And it seems like if you read a lot of RFK and, and the world that’s really been emerging for the past 20 years around autism and vaccines, it sort of starts with the, we were told this was safe and we interpreted the word safe to mean risk-free. And this is also what happened, right during COVID, where public health officials later admitted that they internally had decided that in messaging things to the public, you couldn’t talk in terms of spectrum of possibilities.

It had to be kind of safe, unsafe, you know? Yes, no. And so I’m wondering how you deal with that in your current work, because it’s, you know, as you know, it’s clearly true. The right answer, right? As in the truthful answer all along would’ve been if you come into a doctor and says, look, I’m really worried that little Johnny’s gonna have a side effect from a vaccine. The doctor would, and then say, yes. Well, there are five cases per 500,000 where people have really negative reactions. And the problem is there will be a lot of parents who go, I, I don’t want my kid to be the five oh 100,000. We collectively want to accept that risk. We just don’t want to individually accept that risk.

So how do you deal with that very human issue?

Emily Oster: So I believe pretty strongly in giving people information that is true, in part because I think that the approach of. Kind of understating people’s concerns and just saying, you know, these are safe and you know, this is the good thing, and this is not a good thing, actually can often backfire because if people start looking into one thing and they don’t, they decide that you’re, you’re wrong.

Perhaps because you have not told them the whole truth, then you lose their trust on everything, on everything else. So I think there’s a lot of value in building trust by being willing to say, you know, here are the trade-offs. And I think in the case of vaccines, you know, if you have that nuanced conversation with a lot of parents, I, I’m not sure that, I think many of them would choose not to vaccinate.

I think to sort of realistically tell someone like, here, you know, measles has an R-naught of 12 and if you, you know, encounter someone with measles, your kid could get measles and people die of measles and had these other negative, like measles is no joke. You know, it’s not a made up disease. It’s a real disease that people die of.

And then you wanna be honest with people about, you know, here are some potential reactions. You know, kids can get a fever that’s very common. You know, kids can, in a small share of cases, they can have a febrile seizure. It’s benign but scary. And there’s sort of a set of things we can explain to parents and then help them make their own best choices.

But I, I don’t think we serve even the narrow goal of increasing the uptake of something like vaccines. Like I don’t think we serve that narrow goal well. By not explaining to people what the issues are when they ask. And I guess this is another piece, you know, there are many people who come into their pediatrician.

They’re like, look, just tell me what, like, I, I’m busy. I don’t have time. Like, I trust you. I’ve decided that you’re the person I trust. Many people trust their pediatricians. Just like, tell me the vaccines to get the pediatrician’s like. Here are the vaccines. Here’s the thing you sign, like, I don’t think we need to belabor this, but where I think we have lost is when people say, you know, I’m worried about this.

And we say, well, you know, you’re, you’re a tin had a conspiracy theorist. Like, do you have a worm in your brain? Like JFK, you know, RFK Jr. Because like, that’s the only people are worried. You know what I mean? Like if we sort of, someone comes and says they’re concerned. That is where it’s the responsibility of public health authorities, of pediatricians, of whoever it is to say, yeah, I hear your concern and let me help you work through that and explain why I’m not concerned or explain why.

I think even in light of your concerns, this is the right decision. And I, you know, I think we don’t serve ourselves if we dismiss those concerns and make people feel like we think they’re crazy.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think particularly over the pandemic, the left media also got into this bad habit where they were saying like, if you engage with misinformation, even to debunk it or like talk about it, you’re giving it a platform. And they just felt very like in a defensive crouch about that for some reason.

Emily Oster: I think that there were places where the leftwing media and public health officials made some errors in how they were communicating and how willing they were to engage with reasonable criticisms. And I think I probably made some of those mistakes. And I think, I mean, hindsight is 2020.

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s why we need to forgive each other. 

Emily Oster: It’s why we need to forgive each other. Don’t say that’s too soon. Maybe now we could forgive each other, but like it was too soon. People were not ready to forgive.

Zachary Karabell: Emma and I have reflected in doing this podcast and the work we do at The Progress Network, how much, even presenting the word optimism or trying to focus on things in a more constructive fashion seems to occasionally really anger people, which is not the reaction that is intended, but is clearly the reaction that you get.

Emily Oster: I’m constantly surprised when people are upset with me. I think my most important defense mechanism is that I forget very quickly when people are upset, but then that means that like I’m, I’m like, wow, I thought I was being so nuanced.

Emma Varvaloucas: Another kind of meta question about data and, and where we are as a society. I feel like aside from the recent administration’s push against data. We are in an era where we have more information than ever, right? Like we have more data than ever. The science is more advanced than ever. Like we should be in a position where we are best equipped to make decisions than like ever before in humanity.

And it seems like that reality has come with it, like an advanced rise in freaking out, like. People are really, really freaking out about like, doing pregnancy right, and like doing childcare right. And being a parent. Right. What do you make of the tension of those two things together? Like why, why is that?

Emily Oster: I actually think there’s a very simple thing that’s going on, which is one way that we might seek answers to the questions in our lives about like, what’s the right thing to do is by thinking of the question and going to look for the information. Like, is it a good idea to sleep, train my kid, I have a baby.

I’m trying to think about what’s the right sleeping sort of situation. And so I’m ready to engage with the question of like, do I wanna sleep train, and I can go out in the world and relative to, you know, 50 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever, there’s a lot more information than I can use to inform that decision.

There is more studies, there’s more data, there’s more people have written about it. I can really say, okay. I can engage with this decision based on the evidence and based on reasonably good evidence in that case, and then I can use that and combine it with my preferences and think about the right choice.

And that is a place that is a way in which data has really improved our ability to make good decisions that we can be confident in and happy with. The problem is that. Most of the time when people are engaging with information, it is not in a moment that they are ready to seek it out. It is when they are trying to just relax.

Think about someone who’s like a new parent who’s scrolling around on Instagram and you know, trying to watch, I don’t know, videos about cats or whatever people enjoy to recreate, and then all of a sudden a reel comes through that’s like, you know, did you know that? A baby’s attachment can be ruined by even one night of sleep training.

And studies have shown that, you know, adult happiness and marital status is affected by like, and just like some crazy thing. And then of course, not only is that really not great data, but I’m not in a moment when I’m ready to engage with it. That’s just scary. And I think what happens is that people are like, oh, there’s too much data.

It’s not too much data. You’re getting too much data when you’re not ready. If you were ready for the data, you could look and you could see, okay, you know, this person says this, this person says this. Let me evaluate what’s a good study with, like, there’s things that people can do, but the problem is that the data and information is coming in a time when we’re not ready to engage with it.And then it’s just scary and unhelpful. 

Zachary Karabell: Of course you have the magnifying effect of some of the algorithms, which is that if you then click on that story, if it happens to appear in your social feed, the algorithm may interpret that as, give me more of these stories.

Emily Oster: It does, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: So therefore, like one moment of alarming data becomes 10 moments of alarming data, and you haven’t even done much to seek it out. But then suddenly it’s confirming a fear because, wait, I had no idea. And suddenly you’re getting inundated with all these things. So that creates its own really negative vortex and feedback loop.

Emily Oster: What I particularly find sort of disappointing about that dynamic is that one of the reactions people can have is there’s too much data. I’m just gonna do whatever. So this is current, like fuck around and find out meme idea about parenting, which is some form of parenting where you just like do whatever and don’t ever think about it.

And I think people are drawn to that because it feels like. You know, you’re kind of constantly being told what to do and what and what not to do. I think it’s a mistake to think that the alternative, that like, somehow, the only way to escape from this crazy information environment is to just do whatever and not think about your choices.

Like the issue is you should be thinking about your choices when you are ready to think about your choices and not at all moments when you wanna see cat videos.

Emma Varvaloucas: Or AI animals diving into pools and whatnot.

Emily Oster: I try very hard to curate my Instagram algorithm, so it’s just serving me like professional running content. But then occasionally I’ll get on some parenting thing and then it’s like, and then I’m in some kind of crazy thing about how I’m doing it wrong. My kids are big now though, so…

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s so reactive too. You watch one thing, you click on one thing and it’s like, boom. You want this now? No, I don’t.

Emily Oster: There should be a button for like, I was only hate-watching this.

Emma Varvaloucas: I am curious to hear a little bit about some parenting myths that have stuck around that are, people are still freaking out too much about. Your books were a great guide for my sister who just gave birth and then she was like, everyone I know reads Emily Oster, she tells me not to freak out.

So I’m curious to hear like the ones that you feel like are still sticking around you would like people to calm down a bit about, and maybe also some ones that. You wish people were paying more attention to?

Emily Oster: The biggest place this comes up is in sort of early parenting where there are many. Big important choices about how you’re gonna run your life and what you’re gonna do with your kids. So are you gonna co-sleep or are you gonna sleep train? Are you gonna do neither of those? Are you gonna circumcise or not circumcising and breastfeed? You use formula? 

In some ways, I think the myth is that there’s a right way and we get fed very frequently. The idea that this is something you could win. This is something where you could do it right? If only you got all the right things you would like be the optimal parent. In some ways, the simplest kind of myth busting there is just like.

Many of these things are fine. There are some of them where there’s small benefits, small costs. For most of them, any choice is good. You just need to figure out what is the choice that you want. So if I sort of could dial down people on one thing, it would be the idea that there’s a correct answer.

There are some things in pregnancy where I feel that we have persisted in myths and behaviors, which are just literally not a good idea. So the example there. I think is most salient is bedrest. So a lot of people get put on bedrest during pregnancy still, and there’s virtually nothing for which bedrest is actually a good idea.

It like seems sensible, which is a source of many kinds of myths. It seems like. You know if, well, if you are at a risk of going into preterm labor, if you just lay down like that would probably be fine. ’cause then it like couldn’t fall out, which sort of misunderstands the. Process of birth and is sort of ridiculous, but I think it kind of seems like it could be.

Right. That’s how a lot of myths get reinforced. So that’s, that’s one in, in pregnancy. I guess the other one in pregnancy, which is so weird because it’s so very specific, is the idea that your heart rate should not rise above 140. There’s this sort of specific thing people hear, which is like, don’t get your heart rate above 140, which for most people would mean kind of very, very limited exercise.

And then you’re also told, well, it’s really important to exercise. And so people come to me, they’re like, you said I should exercise, but like I exercise and you know, my heart rate’s 160 because like I’m running and like, which of these things? And it just turns out, you know, exercise actually is good during pregnancy in this.

Thing about a heart rate of 140. I dug around, cannot really tell where it comes from. But that’s both a myth and an example of where we almost make it impossible for people. And I think that’s some of the frustration. Like, you’re telling me do this and, and also do this other thing. And they are totally incompatible.

Your baby needs to sleep on its back all the time, but also it’s really important to sleep and you need to get sleep. It’s like, well, it won’t sleep. Like what do you want me to do? And I think this is the complication of much of, much of pregnancy and early parenting.

Zachary Karabell: We wanna talk a little bit about you as a parent, and then also how our, our individual parenting experiences can maybe shape public policy or the collective, the personal versus the collective. So did you. in the work you’ve been doing over the past 10 years because we’re all subject to confirmation bias.

So there’s a tendency to read the data in the light of, oh, right, that’s what I was doing, and the data says I should be doing it, therefore I was doing the right thing. But has there been data that you’ve come across or when you’re doing research where you’ve corrected your own instincts in light of that data? And if so, like when?

Emily Oster: Yeah, so one of the, the sort of lucky things in pregnancy was I did almost all the research for expecting better, like in the service of my own pregnancy. And so some of that was almost like, it’s not that I would, that I corrected it, it’s that I did the research so then I could make a choice that I thought was the right one.

But a thing that comes to mind here is I was writing cribsheet, which is about early parenting, and I had a 2-year-old as my second kid and he was more complicated behaviorally than my first, which isn’t to say that he is like a comp, like he’s a wonderful person. It’s just my first kid was like, you would tell her like, don’t touch the outlet.

And she would be like, okay, I’ll never touch the outlet. And my second kid was like a little bit more of like a regular person who like you tell him not to touch the outlet. He’s like, nah, I’m gonna try that out.

Zachary Karabell: Said you could never get her to plug anything in, a later problem.

Emily Oster: In service of, of the second book. One of the things I was researching was discipline, and so I spent a bunch of time reading about sort of evidence-based discipline approaches and we ended up sort of changing how we were doing discipline in our house in light of having basically spent a bunch of time in the book researching this.

And so that was a place where I, you know, I don’t think we were doing something terribly wrong, but we definitely were not using the optimal approaches.

Zachary Karabell: How did you change?

Emma Varvaloucas: I need to know what the optimal approaches are because, uh, this has been a thorn in my side.

Emily Oster: So we adopted a form of 1, 2, 3 Magic. This was the most popular discipline approach from the 1990s. And it’s just like a very simple kind of counting timeout system where you just say like. That’s a warning. That’s the second warning. That’s the three. It’s a timeout. It’s like one of these examples of kind of very simple evidence-based parenting, but we adopted that and it worked really well for us, as it generally does in the data.

Emma Varvaloucas: This is a really specific question, but this is an ongoing debate between myself and somebody else in my life. What does the data say about spanking? Because I’m very anti, but I know from also talking with this on social media with The Progress Network, is that it gets people really, really amped up.

Emily Oster: Data on spanking is, is hard because of course there’s a line between spank and abuse and we know pretty clearly that, you know, child abuse is linked to all kinds of negative outcomes. And I think what people often wanna know is like, okay, but if I wasn’t gonna go into there, you know, what is the evidence?

Almost all of the evidence we have on spanking suggests at least weekly negative outcomes that it doesn’t improve kids. Behavior and there is no evidence at all that it works better, and in fact, evidence that it works worse than a form of kind of timeout based discipline that does not involve physical encounters.

So I, you know, I, I sometimes hear people say like, I don’t wanna spank and also I don’t want timeouts and so on. We actually have a lot of evidence that like discipline system was timeouts work fine and do not have any negative consequences. And so I would sort of put, I often would sort of say like that, if you’re looking for something that works. This is something that works.

Zachary Karabell: One of the challenges of parenting, right, is the societal dimension of it and basically how we conceive of children. I don’t mean how we. Conceive children. I mean, how we think about children, how we conceive children is one of the few things that has been relatively static for much of human history.

Emily Oster: Although…

Zachary Karabell: Although unlikely to be static in the future, but we, that’s a whole other set of questions. There was a huge period of human history where the primary goal was like an orderly house because you needed to get shit done. It was not. Well-balanced, happy. Those concepts would have been beyond unfathomable to most human beings for most of history.

Right. It was just like, keep them alive, keep them fed, and make them do the work that needs to be done so that the collective can survive, literally. Right? And maybe there’s some wiring in us that still has that as a thing. I mean, it’s hard to note the genetics of behavior are complicated, to say the least. But I’m wondering if you think about that at all. Like there’s clearly stuff that we do. That is profoundly societal, but also kind of weirdly inexplicable, i.e. it’s in our genes kind of thing. And have you thought about that? Like, like how these toggle.

Emily Oster: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, not too much. I think there’s many things where when you ask like, why did we do it like that, you can go back and be like, oh, it’s because of some genetic thing. You know, of even of very simple things, which is like, why don’t you die after menopause? Why don’t you just like have menopause and then die?

Emma Varvaloucas: I never thought about that.

Emily Oster: The answer is like, because you know, grandma’s really valuable for grandkids survival.

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s the only reason.

Emily Oster: There is a sort of very, very important cultural shift in how I think we’re almost thinking about parenting, which has for sure been happening over a long time scale, but is has also happened over a, a shorter timescale, which is this sort of mo very modern idea of like parenting as like a constant investment in your kids, you know?

Which I, I think was certainly different from the fifties and I think it also was kind of different from the 1980s. You know, parents are spending. Way more time with their kids and broadly. That’s great. You know, time with your kids is good. I think sometimes it airs into, if you are ever thinking about yourself, that is a failure of your parenting.

That makes it very, very difficult, particularly I think for moms to sort of think that like your whole job is to optimize your kid. Not sure that’s the best way for your kid to feel, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the best way for you to feel.

Emma Varvaloucas: Other than the like constant investment trend. What do you think about? I think the other like big parenting trend that I see nowadays, at least on social media is the gentle parenting thing or like the point of parenting is to. Not repeat the trauma that your parents have done upon you. And then people get really mad about gentle parenting, right?

They’re like, it’s not gonna work. And like you’re creating like kids that are too loose or whatever. What do you make of all that?

Emily Oster: I think gentle parenting is a tricky concept because no one could tell you what it’s, and so depending on who on Instagram you are following, this is gonna look really, really different. And we don’t have data because it isn’t a thing. Right. So there are these like other sort of disciplinary approaches, which we have a lot of data.

Because you can say, you know, this is this system, here’s the system and we can evaluate, we can train some people in the system train, not train some people. We can evaluate the outcomes. Like that’s a thing to study the sort of gentle parenting because it isn’t a defined concept for difficult to kind of test it against anything else.

What is true, and we sort of look out in the broad scope of the data is that very permissive parenting does not tend to lead to good outcomes because it is frustrating and it also doesn’t, you know, generate kids who understand the context of a boundary. A lot of the things that fall under what people would call gentle parenting like.

Dr. Becky, who’s like very popular on Instagram, like what Dr. Becky is doing is different from totally being permissive. It’s basically like setting a physical boundary rather than a kind of talking boundary. So I am very skeptical of many of the things that come under the heading of gentle parenting simply because we have no data on that and because I think parents find them really, really, really difficult.

To implement and to get back to the question of spanking, I actually think there’s a reasonable risk sometimes that people sort of do this and do this and do this, and then they feel like the only other option is like, well, my kid is just not listening. They’re not listening, and so I’m gonna hit them.

If we get into that, I would much, I think it’d be much, much better for people to kind of have a discipline system that worked for them that did not involve something physical. And I think the kind of like, let’s have every, every interaction out the door be a discussion about how you should choose to put your shoes on. Like sometimes you just have to put your fucking shoes on so we can leave.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s shift maybe to like tween era. We’ve had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast. There’s a lot of debate still about Jonathan Haidt, the research in time, meaning it’s very hard to know in real time the effect of something, or rather, it’s very tempting to think that you can know in real time the effect of something.

And he may be totally right that there is a slam dunk correlation between the rise of Instagram, social media, and a whole series of attendant ills in terms of childhood development. But I’m just, I’m. Wondering if you have thoughts of that. I mean, I, I know you absolutely do have thoughts on that, but it’s also about how we use data, right?

In that, particularly the stuff that you do, there’s no control group. So even, even spanking there’s, it’s not like we took 10,000 at birth. We spanked 3000 of them until they were six. We spanked another 3000 until they were 10. We, some of them lightly, we abused a bunch. We didn’t spank the others. We pretended spanking, I mean,

Emily Oster: The IRB is coming for you on the ethics of that particular intervention.

Zachary Karabell: Not happening anytime soon. And the same thing with social media. Like we gave nobody phones, we gave everybody a look. So what do you do about that data problem?

Emily Oster: I think it’s really tricky because as, as you say, you know, I look at the data that John looks at and I think, you know, there’s some clear correlations and it’s, it’s also pretty clear like some kids seem to benefit from social media and some kids are really harmed, and I would say on average in the correlations is kind of negative.

There are some better studies, but they’re, they’re in adults. They’re short term. They’re like, you know, we took the social media away from people for three weeks and they said they felt better, which is informative. I think it’s certainly something to think about. It’s different from the kind of questions with kids.

So I think the data is very incomplete, and with that incomplete data, you then sort of arrive at a point where you are like, okay, but how do we make a choice with incomplete data? And actually I think there are some interesting parallels to COVID because people looked at the sort of data on COVID spread.

Schools are in other settings. And some people said, you know, look, the potential bad outcomes are so large that until we’re sure we gotta shut it down. And some people said, you know, well I don’t, I don’t read it like that. I think there are some benefits. We should be more, more loose. I think there’s the same thing here.

I think what John would say is like the potential that this is like an existentially bad situation for kids, is there. As a result in a kind of Pascal’s wager style way, like we gotta try to shut this down even if the data is not perfect, because the possibility that this is like ruining an entire generation is a real one, and we must act before that happens.

Other people would say, look, the data is not that clear on this. And you know, we need to, maybe we need to alter some things we need to do. Maybe we need to take phones out of schools. You know, I am in very, very sharp agreement with John. I think many other people at this point like, you don’t need your phone in third period math.

You don’t need ESPN, you know, two notifications going off while you’re trying to read Shakespeare. So like, think taking phones out of schools is almost a distraction issue, relative to a mental health issue. But when we come to the mental health stuff, I think it ends up being very complicated and a lot of what people are recommending is driven by how they see the potential outcome, not by how they read the data, which is incomplete for everyone.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, given everything you just said, and I don’t know how old your kids are, but have you come to decisions about what you’ll do in your own household around social media and screens and phones?

Emily Oster: I mean, I have a 14-year-old and a 10-year-old, and my 14-year-old got a phone last year. She does not have social media. I don’t think it’s a good idea, and I’ve told her that she can’t have it. But you know, for me in this age group, the more important thing is trying to help my kids figure out their own relationship with these medias rather than putting rules in place.

Because at some point like, look, what is your job as a parent? It is to raise someone to leave you. That’s your ultimate job. Like you’re trying to make a good person who is going to leave you, which is very depressing, but is totally right. And as kids get into the teen years, I see that part of it, you know, in, in a few years.

Like, my kids are gonna be out of my house and then they will be able to do whatever the fuck they want on their phones. And I want them to have thought about how to manage their relationship. So when they are alone with their phone and I am not standing over them saying, I’m gonna take it, I’m gonna take it.

They are gonna navigate that, right? So I think much of what I do is about sort of shaping that, not saying like you have whatever, but like trying to put the guardrails in to develop your own good choices, rather than saying, you know, I’m gonna impose rules, and then when the rules are over, you kind of do whatever.

Zachary Karabell: And then there are these challenges of, you know, a lot of parenting hinges on people thinking or trying to ascertain whether the. Is a, a very specifically right or wrong moment. I think collectively there’s not a lot of disagreement about some big things, right? We, we don’t think six year olds should drive cars, and that’s based on a series of kind of collective observations about motor skills and awareness and the probability of…

Emily Oster: Height.

Zachary Karabell: Although we could design cars…

Emily Oster: For small people. Totally.

Zachary Karabell: But we decide not to do that for the other reasons. It’s not as if everybody’s like, I don’t know whether we should give a kid a phone at two or 22, but somewhere between two and 22, there is a vast amount of intense, heated and aggravated debate about a lot of things.

What do you feel about that? I mean, and then there’s also people who say, well, it’s very kid dependent, right? Some kids are fine at seven, some kids aren’t fine at 17.

Emily Oster: The piece of this debate that drives me crazy is this idea that like, we’re gonna wait till a time and then we’re just gonna do it like that, that there’s some answer, which is like 14 or 15 or 16, and the assumption seems to be like nothing, nothing, nothing. And then at 16 you like to give them their phone and you’re like, hey, see you later.

I think cars are a really good example. Because when we teach people to drive, we’re not like, wait till you’re 16 and then on your 16th birthday I’ll hand you a key and you’re just like, just do it. Just go do whatever. You know? We have this thing, it’s called driver’s ed. We set rules, parents set rules.

Like if I find out that you’re speeding or you get a ticket for this, like I’m gonna take your keys away. And we don’t do any of that with the phone. And so rather than obsessing about whether there’s like a particular aid that’s right, which is surely gonna vary across kids and across circumstances. I would tell everybody, whatever is the time you give your kid a phone, you need to decide what the rules are and you need to understand it’s your phone until some later time, like, and that means you can take it away.

I had a conversation once with a guy who was like, you know, we gave our daughter a phone and we told her like, you can’t have any social media. But then she got social media and then we told her, you can’t have a private Instagram. You can, you know, you can only have this private Instagram. But then she got another Instagram account, then she was doing all this other stuff.

I was just like, why didn’t you take the phone away? So I somehow feel that the thing that is missing here is people sort of setting up in advance. There are rules about this. We are going to ease into this the way you would ease into. Driving a car and whatever the age is, 11 or 12 or 14 or 16, or whatever it is, that the first thing you do is you get this and we’re gonna have some guide guardrails and I’m gonna be able to take it away if you don’t fulfill the guardrails. And I don’t think there’s any substitute for that kind of discipline.

Emma Varvaloucas: Before we started recording, you were talking about worrying about a, the data that’s, that might disappear. Right? We’re in a very particular moment. With this administration and data, so do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Emily Oster: I think there’s two things I’m really worried about with data in the current administration. So one is that there are a number of, you know, very important studies for learning things about the world that are run by organizations inside the government where I just think they may disappear. So, for example, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which is the best way, we have to know what’s happening in kindergarten. People wanna know, is kindergarten getting more academic? Well, we learned that from this study, but I don’t know if the Department of Education is gonna run the latest round of this study because. I don’t know if they exist. And similarly, there are studies around women’s health and births and babies and so on, which are run inside the CDC.

And it’s unclear if some of those will continue. And I think the government has played an incredibly important role in just having these consistent metrics. You know, how do we know what share of Americans are obese? Well, that’s from a web data cycle, the NHANES that’s run by the government and there isn’t a good substitute for that.

And so if we disappear some of those things, that’s a problem. The second piece. Is with something like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So recently the sort of head civil servant in the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fired and suggestion of replacing her with a much more partisan individual. Once we start manipulating data that is about the economy, we are in real trouble because that is when we lose the ability to track what is going on and to hold people accountable.

So there’s sort of like, will we have the data? And then there’s like, how are we going to show the data to people, and I have concerns about both of those.

Zachary Karabell: I’m sure we could keep going and going and going. I’d encourage everybody to. Read Emily Oster’s Substack, read her articles, read about her. Read her books. Sequentially or not, depending on where you are in whatever lifecycle you’re in, your career has been a really good iteration of a version of a public intellectual that we don’t at least traditionally think of one in that.

You’re really applying data to real life concerns in a way that people can actually relate to. You know, you’re not obfuscating behind academic jargon world that really does create a barrier between the ability of quote unquote lay people, people who are not trained as economists or data sets, whatever, to really meaningfully access to that.

And that is an incredibly valuable public service. So I think we can all sort of genuflect and thank you for that and hope that you continue the work, which I’m sure you will, and we will keep going.

Emily Oster: I feel very lucky to get to do it. So thank you for reading and thank you for having me.

Emma Varvaloucas: So that was great. I really enjoy talking to people that, you know, have a pedigree in education of the wazoo, but, but talk like normal people and I think that’s really Emily’s superpower and what you were talking about at the end where she can go through like. Complicated data sets and translate that to people and make it really real and, and tangible, um, to their everyday lives.

And I wish more people would do that, to be honest. Because it’s hard for me to think of like an Emily Oster in other realms or spheres of data actually.

Zachary Karabell: Part of its incentive structures of where you were in a profession. So professional academic economists or government economists don’t get rewards for doing the kind of work that Emily Oster does. Now if you can get a substack that then is paying and it’s very remunerative, you get to substitute the professional rewards for the monetary and public rewards that come from being a, a larger public voice.

But there’s only so many people who can be Emily Oster, meaning there’s a lot more people we would want to be doing that kind of crossover translation, but many of those would have to be supported within their professional development. Because they’re not gonna have a 500,000 person Substack or a column for the New York Times. I think that’s part of the problem. An occasional person can find outside rewards, but professions reward what they reward. And most of these professions don’t reward being a public voice that engages people. I think that’s part of the challenge always of these things like why aren’t there more people? That’s partly why there aren’t, because these professions don’t exist to produce that. At least that’s been my experience.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and it’s the rare person that like writes a breakout book or like writes in a fresh enough or engaging enough way to have a breakup book, breakup book, to have a breakout book that you know become, or that, well, you know. A Substack or you know, Emily has an insane social media following, and that’s a rare talent too.

So it’s incentives and it’s, and it’s talent and it’s interest as you’re saying, which is also affected by incentives.

Zachary Karabell: And some luck, right? I mean, there’s a lot of people who try to do that, who don’t catch that particular wave, but who are every bit as skilled and competent, but also have to kind of do their day job as it were. But yeah, I think that’s a, you know, she’s a great example of this sort of merging of public presence and really deep research, data and analysis. And look, you know, you want people to do some of that for you. Emily made the point during the interview that a lot of people just go to their pediatrician, they’re busy, they’re going to their pediatrician for the informed advice that they themselves don’t have the time or potentially the skill to obtain and. To make it really basic, we hire a plumber to fix our plumbing because we don’t wanna spend thousands of hours on YouTube trying to become good plumbers. So the idea that there we outsource legitimately things that we know are important to people who we know are doing a good job, is absolutely vital.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, because some of those studies are deadly to read.

Zachary Karabell: Anyway, thank you all for listening. I think that was a great conversation. Anyone who is at any point in a parenting journey can benefit from her work or just anything. Public policy debates about vaccines and autism, which affect all of us, whether or not we’re parents now or were, is very much in the spirit of how do we solve our collective problems best? And one of the ways we do so is the sensibility of really trying to look at the issue from the perspective of understanding it, not from the perspective of an agenda, I want X or I want Y. And her work is really in that spirit, very much in the spirit of what we are trying to do.

Please send us your thoughts at hello@theprogressnetwork.org. Sign up for the newsletter What Could Go Right? which Emma writes weekly. It comes to your mailbox. It’s free, free, free. All that. You can pay, pay, pay if you want, want, want, we will be back with you next week. Thank you.