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In life, we are constantly pressured to make the right decision and that pressure feels even higher for parents. We're told what to do and what not to do, but it turns out that so much of that guidance isn't even based on real data.
So today, with the help of renowned economist turned parenting expert Emily Oster, we're going to challenge that conventional parenting wisdom and see what the research really says. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins, and this is All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. Let's get into it right after this.
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You've been looking at data about parenting for over a decade. I just want to kick us off. How much of the guidance you see people sharing is misleading or just completely wrong? A huge share of the guidance is misleading in its strength, is how I would put it. So a lot of the advice and guidance that one gets, particularly on the internet, but in general, comes with a, if you don't do this now,
terrible outcome X will happen. If you don't breastfeed, your child will be a loser. If you co-sleep, your child will die. If you don't co-sleep, your child will never love you. Like the thing that's on the other end of it is a kind of
devastating outcome in some way. And the reality is very few of our parenting choices have any impact anywhere near that important. Maybe that isn't very nice to hear, but for the most part, many of the choices we make
aren't really going to matter very much in the end based on the data. So the difference between breastfeeding and not, the difference between circumcision and not, there are maybe small things in any direction, but they're not that important. So I think that's the sense in which a lot of the noise that parents hear is really misleading because it makes you think there is a correct way. And if I do the wrong way, something terrible will happen. And most of the time there isn't a particularly correct way. And
And any choice you make is unlikely to matter that much in the long run. And you mentioned look at the data. I know you have a background in economics, which maybe is different than the average person talking about parenting advice. I'm curious how people can think about that job that they might have and not know, which is actually to look at the data instead of rely on one's
one person's anecdotal advice or their experience where maybe they've only had that experience one time? As humans, we are very drawn to anecdotal experience. We really like stories and we find stories very compelling. And one of the things I've found in all of these years of using data is that I really believe in data. That's my core. I've trained as an economist. My economics work is very situated in data. I love it.
And if you tell me, here's a piece of data, here's a great randomized trial, here's what you learned from it, I find that very compelling. One of the things I've learned over time is that not everyone finds data as compelling as I do. And there is sometimes a lot of value in helping people understand why data is just a lot of anecdotes altogether. When we think about how we can better incorporate the use of data in decisions,
One key is to make sure you are asking the question in a thoughtful way that is seeking an answer. Part of the reason why anecdote and other people's experiences, whether they're strangers on the Internet or people you see at the park or your family or whatever, the reason those things hit so hard is because they are pushed at you.
You're on Instagram and all of a sudden somebody's telling you something that they think is very important for you to do with your baby or your mother says, oh my God, that's so wrong. Like, how could you possibly do that? Or I did it differently and look how great you turned out. When we're looking to make decisions, we want to think about the decision and seek out help making the decision rather than making our decisions in the moment that someone is coming at us with an anecdote.
And you have a framework to think about this when you're making a decision. Is that right? In my book, The Family Farm, I talk about the idea of a decision framework, which I think is helpful for bigger decisions in particular. And that starts with this idea of framing a question of asking what are really the realistic choices and then goes on to say, yeah,
You just spend some time collecting all the data that you need, collecting all the information, the logistics, whatever is going into that decision. And then you want to make the decision and kind of move on. I think one of our big decision-making problems is that we tend to linger on our decisions and make them again and again without just accepting, I'm going to make the decision and move forward. One of the challenges I've always had is,
Sometimes you collect lots of data and it doesn't point you to the answer. Can you give an example first of how you might frame the question so that it makes it easier to look at that data and make a decision? So first of all, I should say data is almost never going to give you an answer. So if you're expecting the data to boss you to an answer, you will be disappointed almost every single time because there's very few things in life or in parenting where it's somehow so obvious from the evidence that one thing is the right thing.
But I'll give you a specific example. Should I send my child to daycare or should I have a nanny? That's a question where I would encourage people to first think about what the realistic options are. Should I send my child to daycare or not?
or not is not a childcare solution. What is the other thing you could be doing? Is it you stay home? Is it a nanny? Is it a grandparent? Is it a different daycare? What are the actual choices? And then you get some data. And in that case, the information that they would need would be, what do we know about outcomes for daycare versus nanny versus stay-at-home parent? And that's the kind of data I talk about in my books.
And then there's also a bunch of information about your family, which also has to go into that decision. How much do these things cost? What other things would you have to give up if you wanted to pay for a more expensive option? What's realistic in terms of your careers? What do you want? How do you want to spend your day? These are all important parts of the decision that go along with the data.
And then when you make that decision, you take that data, but you overlay your preferences, your values, your constraints on top of it. That's how good decision making happens. It's not like, let me look at this data and pick exclusively based on these numbers, which are pretty divorced from all of the considerations that my particular family has.
And do you think a lot of the decisions people treat as irreversible, we often talk about reversible and irreversible decisions and like, just make the decision and you can change it later. I'm curious how much that applies here. The last part of the decision-making framework I talk about is the idea of follow-up, that most of our decisions are not irreversible. So a decision like, I'm going to decide to send my child to daycare, that's a decision you can revisit in a year or six months or some other time.
Humans don't like to revisit our decisions very much because it's like admitting we were wrong. So this is, I think, what happens in many cases, both in business and in parenting. I made this choice. I chose to send my child to this childcare option. And even if it's not working, admitting that it's not working requires me to say I made a mistake. The cognitive dissonance associated with having made a mistake is very hard. So people fail to revisit their choices.
Sometimes you can get around that by planning to revisit. In six months, we'll come back and ask if it worked. And that's an opportunity to then frame a reversal of the decision as like, well, this was an experiment as opposed to we made a mistake. There are some decisions which are irreversible. So if you choose not to breastfeed at some point, you won't be able to restart. So there's some biology, things like that. But a lot of the choices we make are reversible. Yeah, one investing principle I'll encourage people to also consider is
thinking about the information you had when you made the decision. So if you're deciding one year into daycare that you don't want to do it anymore, well, you have this new piece of information, which is one year of experience doing it. And so you're not saying your old decision was wrong. With the information you had a year ago, it might have been the right decision. And new information now lets you make a different decision that shouldn't make you feel like you did the wrong thing when you had the limited knowledge you did a year ago.
Totally. One of my favorite places where this comes up is in extracurriculars. So when your kids get like a little older than yours are, but there becomes this pressure to engage in like very extensive extracurriculars, which take like all of your weekends. And so there's this story about sitting and watching their kid do some kind of gymnastics or something. And the parents behind them were like, boy, we hate doing this. It's such a waste. The kid hates it. We hate it. But like, what are you going to do about it? Yeah.
And the answer is like, well, quit. You're going to quit. But it's so hard to quit. It's like we put all this time in and some combination of remembering like, look, now you've learned everyone hates gymnastics like you couldn't have known before. You learned you hate it and now you should quit some combination of that. And just the idea of like sunk costs are sunk. It's too bad you spent six years of your life investing in gymnastics, but don't make it worse by spending a seven. Yes, totally.
I feel like nowadays, and maybe this has always been the case, there's just so much pressure to try to raise the perfect child, be the perfect parent. I see lots of parents with anxiety about this and stress about this. Very few things are going to have this massive impact. Yet, I think a lot of parents carry a tremendous amount of burden and stress about trying to make sure their kid has every opportunity, gets the perfect school, gets the perfect this.
The first thing I would say is that we might want to ask the question of why is this? What is the demographic change that caused this generation of parents to have more of this attitude? My sense is some of it is a feeling of you're having kids later. It's like there's a set of things I tried to achieve, you know, going to college, getting a job, getting promoted, whatever it is. And then this is like another thing.
I'm going to win my kid the way that like I won partnership at Ropes and Gray. And it's hard to realize sometimes, but it's very true that the amount of control you have over your kid's success and outcomes is quite a bit less than many of us think. So the corollary of a lot of the choices you make probably don't matter as much as we think is that you could do everything right, even if that were a thing. And then your kid might not turn out to be
an Olympic athlete like you had hoped or whatever was your dream. And that loss of control, that's really hard for a lot of people. And I think sometimes people would benefit by asking a little bit more, what do I want my life to look like with my kid right now, rather than what am I trying to build? I mean, our job is to raise our kids to be adults. But also, I can feel sometimes that people don't have the fun that they could with their kids, because they're
trying to achieve something. And sometimes you just want to have fun. You mentioned that the outcomes don't matter as much as you might think. For someone who might not believe that they can't have a bigger impact on their kid's future,
Is there any kind of data or anecdotes that you'd point them to that maybe will help them realize they might not be correct? There are many, many individual things that people do. You know, this kind of extracurricular stuff that people think a lot about, where then when you look at the relationship with outcomes, right?
You just don't see much. And that's true for something like breastfeeding. Also, people like, I just had to breastfeed for nine years. Like actually the correlations between breastfeeding and IQ are just correlations. Those are not causal in the data. So there's many of those things where you can point to data and just say, look, we don't see that these things are driving outcomes in a meaningful way. On the flip side, there is a very important part of the first three years of kids' lives and even longer than that, where...
You start to already see very big differences across, say, socioeconomic groups in kind of how kids are coming into kindergarten in terms of their readiness to learn, in terms of their readiness to kind of move forward, and in terms of long-term psychological health. But when you isolate what's going on, a lot of it is kids really benefit from having a stable adult who expresses love, from having a place to eat.
A place to sleep that's consistent, having enough food, and maybe hearing some language. Pretty basic things, which unfortunately not every kid in America is getting, but it's
most of the people who are most worried about investing in their kids are doing all of those things, right? And so we're sort of obsessing about a bunch of small stuff on the margin that doesn't matter. The answer is like the first three years are really crucial, but you've already done it by the time you are starting to think about like, is it really important that my kid go to a Montessori school? By the time you're down to like how many master's degrees do the preschool teachers have to have? Everything is already as much as you can do. You're already done.
So does that mean the parent thinking about that question might need a good enough approach, not a perfect approach? I think it depends a lot on whether that approach is serving them. In some sense, we'll put myself in this category, like sort of effectively overthinking a lot of parenting decisions is helpful.
If I am able to say to myself, I thought a lot about this. I thought about these two schools. I like evaluated them. Even if I sort of know in the back of my head, like they're pretty similar. The fact that I thought about it and was careful and made a thoughtful decision that helps me psychologically. Later, when I question my decision, I have this confidence. I know I made the decision in a way that was thoughtful and was the way that I want to show up for decisions.
So I think that can be very valuable. I think that when this gets into a place where people feel overwhelmed, I think that's where stepping back and saying, hey, let's embrace a little bit of the second best parenting is a good idea. I see some parents that are focused so much on providing everything perfect for the kid that maybe they don't even take a second for themselves. How important do you think it is for people to also prioritize themselves as a parent?
There's a guy I really like named Tom Phelan, who's the author of what was once, I think, the most popular basically discipline book for parents called One, Two, Three, Magic. It's still a very popular book. But I talked to him at some point and he was talking about the idea that there are different dyads in the family. There's each parent with each kid. There's the kids together. And that one of the things that you want to prioritize is connections, relationships.
between each of those dyads. And then he said to me, he said, what is the most important dyad in the house? And I said, the parent to the oldest kid, I had some like idea. And he was like, no, it's the two parents. As we get so focused on our kids, we can forget ourselves and we can forget our relationships outside of the kids. And those are both pretty important to prioritize for the family because, you know, parents are people also.
I assume children are watching those things also, right? Not everything they learn is the things you've taught them, but seeing happy mom and dad, not tired, not stressed out, probably has an impact that might be hard for data to quantify.
Our kids learn a lot better from seeing than from being told. You know, that's not their like preferred mechanism of learning is to have things explained to them. And so certainly the image of my parent is willing to prioritize themselves, communicate something. I think we worry that that communicates, I don't care about you, but it doesn't. And I will say this is something like just at a personal level, like I struggle with quite a lot is I do not do a good job of saying,
saying that I need time. So for me, actually, the only thing that works is running for whatever reason. I've like convinced myself running is important for health, even though it's definitely not true at the level that I'm doing it. But it's the one thing where I can tell my family, like, this is really important to me.
I'm going to do it and I'm going to leave you for it. And they kind of accept. They're just like, okay, yeah, mom's really important for mom to go. Which I guess then inherently means it probably is important to your health. Yeah, no, it's important to my mental health. It just may not be good for my knees. Well, I come from a family of many replaced knees, so I've just accepted that's in my future. You're just going to get a new one. Yeah. Think about how fast I'll be with my new bionic knees. It's going to be amazing.
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gotten through all of them at different stages. I already mentioned in the intro how valuable they were, so I encourage everyone to take a look. You challenge a lot of common myths and misconceptions, and we talked about how many there are, but I'm curious if there's one or two that stand out as the most shocking ones now that you've dug into the data. So my first book is about pregnancy. I think the one that really sticks out to me is bed rest. So bed rest in pregnancy is something that actually still pretty commonly happens
prescribed. And it just isn't effective for anything. There's basically no complication for which bedrest has been shown to be a good idea. And it
also has some pretty negative outcomes. If somebody is concerned about preterm labor, you tell people just lie down. And I guess the reason I find this so interesting is because it strikes me as an example where the sort of anecdotes of lived experience are basically getting in the way of data. Most of the time when people have threatened preterm labor, they don't go into preterm labor. So that happens more commonly than actual labor. And
If you tell people lay down for like six weeks, most of the time that will appear to work. And so it's such a clear example where like if you had a control group, you would see that the outcomes were the same. But in the absence of the control group, if you just decide like this is a good idea and you just start doing it, it looks like a good idea because like most of the time everything works out fine like it would have anyway.
It's just one of these things where as a person who cares about data and evidence, it's such a clear example where you can get into a path of doing something which is wrong, but self-reinforcing.
I assume that the doctors prescribing this bedrest have access to the same data you do and anyone does. Why does stuff like that keep happening? So this is a place where I think even in the decades since Expecting Better came out, the advice has changed a lot, in part because some of the evidence, not because of my book, but because evidence slowly updates over time. But I think there is a lot of hysteresis in practice.
You are an obstetrician. You've been prescribing this for many years, and most of the time it seems to work. The idea of not doing it anymore because of some study, I think, is hard because it's like your lived experience is that this works.
I remember one distinct moment during our first child. You basically got a choice. Do you want to meet with your OB before pregnancy like three times or do you want to go to group meetings six or seven times? Oh, right. Group prenatal care. Yeah. And we were like, oh, wow, well, we want more information. So like we get six or seven times. So we go to the first meeting and they asked a bunch of these preconceptions and they were like, how many of you think you can't? And then the nurse went through like
have coffee, eat sushi, have honey. And I remember we had both just read Expecting Better and we were both like, yeah, that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. And everyone looked at mostly my wife. Oh my gosh, who is this person that's poisoning her child? What is going on? And the nurse eventually was like, no, actually she's right.
But even in a room in the Bay Area, lots of educated people, everyone seemed to keep believing things that I guess data has now disproven. Things like caffeine and even like small amounts of alcohol being so terrible. Where does this come from? Pregnancy is full of this abundance of caution attitude, I think. And with something like...
or sushi or even little bits of alcohol, you get, you've convinced me with the data that caffeine in pregnancy is okay. But, you know, I still wouldn't do it. But why? Some of it is just the feeling of if something bad happened,
I would blame myself, especially early in pregnancy when people worry about miscarriage. Then the feeling of like, I want to do everything right because then I will know if something bad happens is not because of something that I did. And I think that's actually a very hard psychological issue to get
around this kind of I'm worried about blaming myself, partly because society is quite good at blaming women when things go wrong or just in general. I think people have to decide where they are emotionally on this. I think people should read the evidence and I think they should understand it.
And I think we should work on the idea that sometimes bad things happen for reasons that are not in our control. And that is really sad. And that is just the way the world is. And that somehow we have to stop blaming people for things. And I think if we could do that, then people would feel a little more comfortable kind of making some of these choices based on evidence. I think some of it is how other people look at you. I can't remember if this actually happened to my wife or it was a friend, but someone like
took the coffee out of their hand when they were at a coffee shop, which I'm sure you've also heard stories of things like that happening. And so even though you might decide this is okay for me, it seems like
Other people must not have this data because they're willing to go to such extremes to share their opinion, if that's the right way to say it. I think those experiences for me go beyond like this person doesn't have the data into like this person is willing to step over a line that like I thought we had in polite society. And this happens all the time, more in pregnancy than with your kids, although it happens with babies also, where people just feel like somehow it's their business.
to say what you should do. Take the coffee out of her hand to touch your belly. Say, well, I hope that's decaf. Actually, no, it's not decaf. Why isn't your baby wearing a hat?
Did you know babies get cold? What do you want me to say? I mean, I think that our societal willingness to weigh in on people's pregnancy and parenting choices is somehow astonishing. I do think some of this is people don't have the data, but I think once you're at the point where you're taking coffee out of someone's hand, I'm not sure you would be compelled by evidence. I think that's just like...
That's just not OK. At some point, we talked about having a line of cards that said, like, well, actually on the front and then on the back, there would be like information about caffeine or whatever in pregnancy. You could like hand them out to people. As someone who enjoys confrontation, I would have really enjoyed having that deck of cards. And I think my wife would much prefer to be just walk away. Yes. Just walk away, buy your coffee elsewhere. What?
One other topic that I feel like maybe falls into the camp of heated with controversy. I don't remember where the data ends up, but it's around sleep training. How did a topic like that get so polarizing? And what does the data actually show? If you're not deeply steeped in the internet discussion of sleep training, we're generally referring to some system where a child is crying for some period of time during the night with the intention that they fall asleep on their own. So
So sleep training is extremely polarizing because people worry that if you sleep train your kid, it will cause them to never be attached to you and to have long-term psychological issues.
The origin of this is Romanian orphanages, basically. So there was this very unfortunate episode in Romania where they took away birth control and there were a lot of unwanted births. And a lot of those kids ended up in these orphanages in which they were left basically alone for days on end or not fed very much. And there's a lot of sexual abuse. And many of those kids died.
for reasons that I'm sure are obvious from that description, did very poorly as adults and had many long-term psychological and other consequences.
And when people from the West came and visited these orphanages, one of the things that they saw was that the babies were very quiet. If you didn't ever come and help a baby for many days, like it wouldn't just would stop crying. And so then people sort of took that like sleep training is like a little bit of Romanian orphanage. And so it probably is bad for kids. And, you know, it's going to have all these same negative consequences. The thing is that there's just no evidence.
having your kid cry it out in a world in which they are loved and cared for and adequately fed and not abused and et cetera, et cetera. The difference between that and Romanian orphanage is so vast. I think the comparison is a bit ridiculous. And at any rate, we have a fair amount of evidence on sleep training in places where we are thinking about sleep training as it is practiced, where it's
Kids cry it out and then they sleep and we can see that it does improve sleep. It does actually improve parent sleep, decreases postpartum depression. And then when you look at long-term outcomes, either long-term or short-term outcomes for kids, you just don't see any differences for kids who are sleep trained and not. There's just not any evidence in the data of these attachment issues.
There's a lot of rhetoric on the internet about this, which I think is not super supported by data. It's also very unpleasant to listen to your kid cry. I mean, I don't want to like sugarcoat. It can take a few days for this to work and it's really unpleasant. There are people who will tell me I just couldn't do this. That's fine. This isn't something where I would say you have to do this. It's an interesting space where
My sense is some of the debate online, some of the intensity of this debate is because both sides feel like they are being told they have to do something. So both the people who do the sleep training are told you're a terrible monster parent. I could never do that, which is frequently said.
And then if you don't do it, people are told like, we have to sleep train. You don't sleep train, your kid's never going to sleep and you're ruining them forever. So somehow both sides feel like they are being told they're doing it wrong, as opposed to what I think is a reasonable middle ground, which is this absolutely can work for many families. And there's no evidence that it would cause any long-term or short-term problems, but it's certainly not for everybody. And if it doesn't fit what you want to do with your family, then you should feel free not to do it. And
And maybe I'm wrong, but breastfeeding might fall into a similar camp. I think breastfeeding falls into a similar camp. It's interesting. I think the rhetoric on sleep training is actually in some ways a bit stronger. Rarely do people say if you choose not to breastfeed that you're a monster. Whereas I do think people will say that about the sleep training. But it has the same feel of like people really disagreeing and falling in these very sort of sharp camps and people feeling judged.
And the evidence to suggest that breast is best, there are some small benefits largely in the short term, but many of the benefits that are stated about breastfeeding are not actually supported in the best data. There's a lot of data around a lot of these topics. And honestly, I think the easiest way to tackle that data is to pick up a book that you've written on the stage of parenting that you're in. At least that was our approach.
But for someone who kind of wants to go a little further and look at the data, what advice do you have for someone trying to think about how to even read these studies, find this research, know that what they're looking at is the right stuff?
The first thing I will say, if you have started by looking for the answer to the question you want, you are already way ahead because often people will start by saying, well, I saw this study. Let me react to this particular study. But if your question is like, I actually want to evaluate this question, you're in a much better position because you can go and you can actually look at sources that are vetted and are not somebody on TikTok who has some feelings about this.
The best studies of almost any question are going to be randomized trials. We're almost always better at learning from things where we randomize a treatment and give one group one thing and one group another thing, because then you can be more confident that you're
the differences that you see across groups are driven by the treatment rather than by pre-existing differences. There's a set of reviews called the Cochrane Reviews, which are meta-analyses of randomized trials, which tend to be very good. So if someone said, like, where's the first place I would look and say, like, go to the Cochrane Library and see if they've done anything on it, and that's a good starting point. I've just searched your site, and you've usually done some of these things. It's been super helpful, and...
especially when we're like, ooh, now we're starting to think about education. I can use you as a starting point and then I can jump off to other things. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the core things we're trying to do on Parent Data is give people some depth
depth and then citation. So it's like if you want to go further, like here's the paper to read, here's the core of this literature, but you get some depth already with the parent data posting. There are lots of different norms all around the world. And so how much does it matter where these studies are done or how much do kind of cultural norms and traditions play into advice on these topics?
So cultural norms and traditions play enormously into advice. And it is extremely interesting to talk to people from other countries about what kinds of things they hear. I have a colleague from Sweden. At some point, she was telling me, you know, in Sweden,
No one would ever swaddle their baby because everybody knows their hips will be ruined. They'll never learn to walk. There was like some specific thing. Not only is that not supported by data, but I had never even heard that. This is not in the US. No one is like anti-swaddle. Swaddle is just like a regular milquetoast thing that we're doing. But she was like, in Sweden, that is the thing not to do. And then there was this time when I was pregnant when one of my Chinese colleagues was like, are you wearing a radiation vest? And I was like, I'm not. What?
And he's like, you know, everyone I know in China, like when they're pregnant in front of their computer, they wear this like canvas radiation vest to protect themselves from the computer radiation. It was like, there's no evidence for that, but it was just like, that's the cultural norm. And so there's so many of these places where you see these differing cultural norms, all
Also, we're studying some of these things like alcohol and pregnancy is a good example where cultural norms are pretty different in the US and in Europe or Australia. With that, there's more alcohol consumption, more like occasional drinking in European or Australian context than there is in the US during pregnancy. And so most of the better data, the larger scale, less complicated data comes from those places because you are more confident that this is a choice that is being made close
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I just want to thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Given the wide breadth of opinions all around the world, what advice do you have for someone who's read your book, done some research, come to an opinion, and
And get some pushback with a doctor or a nurse that maybe has a different opinion how to navigate that situation. One of the things I hope that my books will do is help people have better conversations. Rather than framing that as an opportunity to say, like, I think one thing and you think another thing. As an opportunity to say, hey, this is my understanding of the evidence on that.
can you tell me why you don't think that's relevant in my case? We often frame some of these interactions as we're having a disagreement or my doctor's not listening to me, which does happen. But I think that we can sort of use this as a jumping off point. And sometimes the answer will be, well, that's the advice I give everybody. But like, I don't really know why. And it's like, okay, well, that's more informative than just this is what we tell people. And sometimes the decisions you might discuss with
a doctor or a nurse or even your partner, either they're small or they're a little bit easy. And sometimes there's decisions that parents make that are much bigger and complicated. You mentioned childcare earlier. There's not one right answer. And there are lots of different factors and variables. I think given your background on economics and decision making, how do you give people guidance when they're making really complicated decisions like,
whether to return to work, have a second child, these kind of things where there's so many variables where it just feels like even if you ask the right question and collect the right data, actually making the decision is tough because there's not even close to a kind of right answer.
We are not very good at making hard decisions. I think that there's a core reason, which is with one of these very, very hard, complicated decisions, whether to have another kid is a common one for people to be a little stuck on. There's a sense in which you have to recognize that at the end of the day, you will never know if you made the right choice, right? And we really want to know that we made the right choice. And for many of these choices, you're never going to learn that.
You're going to have to live with the idea, whatever is the best choice you made, you're just never going to find out if it was right. And that's the core reason people delay choices, I think, is that they're waiting around for something, either a better choice, like a third option that fixes all their problems, or they
they just can't live with the idea that they're not going to know if they're right. And so then they never make the decision. So one of the things I will talk to people about sometimes is this idea that there's no secret option C. When you have a choice between A and B, even if A and B both really aren't that great, you have to choose one of them. So the classic example where I will talk about this is people who are thinking about a second kid and my spouse is really committed to a second kid and I'm really committed not to.
How can we make this decision? And the only thing you can say is there's no secret option C. If you're having this discussion waiting for some option to arise that is intermediate between having a kid and not having a kid, you will never get that because those two things are literally the opposite of each other. And so you're just going to have to make the decision knowing that one person is not going to get the thing that they want.
And waiting around and not making a choice is the same as making a choice. It's choosing in favor of the person who doesn't want to have a kid because eventually you'll lose your ability to do that. We're not great decision makers. Like as people, when things are hard, we just put them off. And sometimes we just have to force ourselves.
to make a choice. And the same thing is probably true with, do you want a will or not? Well, not having a will means you're just having a will that is whatever your state decides your will is. And so that I've brought up with a few people. They've been like, oh my gosh,
I didn't want to go through this process, but I already did. And I just accepted this thing that I'm completely out of control for. And now I'm really more motivated to figure this out for myself and our family. Yeah, I mean, the will one is a good example, because I think when we're thinking about like, should I make a will or should I not die? Well, actually, not dying is like not on the table. It's just do I decide what happens after or not? Or do I let the state decide?
There's a couple decisions that I think are particularly relevant for me. And so I'm just going to bring them up because they're interesting at the age of our kids. One of which I think you mentioned there are lots of decisions that maybe don't have as much impact as you think. But there's one decision that I think is happening, at least in my circle of kids that are kind of in the three, four, five, six range starting to go to school about the value of
private education. And the thing that I think is different than this about a lot of other decisions is the
the financial impact it can have. And I have talked to friends and I used to run a financial planning firm, people that put their personal finances at extreme tight places for the sake of their children's education. And it's one where it's hard to be like, well, I don't care about my kid's education, but maybe good enough actually isn't as bad as you think and not worth the
stretching your finances. I guess I'm curious how much a better education, quote unquote, really has an impact on things and how someone considering private education might think about it. Really hard question to answer because the demographics of the people who have private education are very different than the average, particularly if you're talking about the kind of private education that would stretch your finances.
In the U.S., there's public education. There's a large share of private education is Catholic schools. They tend to serve a pretty similar demographic to the public schools. They tend to not be that expensive. And then there's this sort of space of independent private schools, which can be very expensive, which is closer to what you're kind of imagining when you're stretching your finances.
When we look in general at schools, and let's say now let's compare different public schools, some of them are going to perform better test score-wise than others. And we would also frame that as like some of these schools are better than others, right? There's like better public schools. You could ask the same kind of question, should I stretch my finances to move to a district with a better public school based on this testing metric? Turns out when you look in the data, most of those differences across schools are basically about differences in who is going to the school.
which is to say moving your particular kid from school A to school B is not going to give them a boost in test scores. That is the difference between school A and school B. It's going to give them at best a tiny fraction of that boost because most of the things determining how your kid is doing on this test or whatever is what your kid is like and what happens at home and genetics and all the kinds of other stuff. And the treatment effect of the school is small. That doesn't mean every school has a small treatment effect, but
on average, a lot of the differences that people perceive out in the world are really differences in kids and not differences in schooling. A similar point may be made about private schools, and people have made it, that some of the difference in performance and college outcomes and whatever is really about a difference in the kids who are going there.
and not a difference in the kind of treatment effect of the school. Having said that, there are some things that we know matter for kids' school learning, like the size of classes. And it is true that private schools tend to have smaller class sizes than public schools. So that's probably the one very clear thing in the data, which does differ across school types and which shows up as impactful. This is sort of a long-winded and very academic-y answer to this question, which is like these differences are probably not as large as people perceive them.
to be. It actually reminds me of a comment that someone made about saunas. There is data that shows that a sauna can have some positive health impacts. Right. But I've heard that if you're eating cake and not exercising, the sauna is not where you should be focused to improve your health. And so I'm curious, private education might have smaller class sizes that might have an impact on
But what are the things that are like orders of magnitude more important on the outcome of your kids, maybe past those first few years where we talked about having food and having shelter and those kinds of things that people should maybe reframe their thinking about from kind of toddler beyond ages that are really important for parents to keep top of mind? It's an extremely good question. So in some ways, some of the answer is it's a lot of the same stuff matters when your kid is little. When we get parents,
Which is like having a stable place to live and enough to eat and family support. When we get into older kids, a lot of what people worry about is mental health. How do I have it be the case that my kid is resilient to the inevitable failures and complications and social issues and whatever that are happening in school? And the answer to that is no.
Kids are more resilient when they feel that home is a safe place. And so making home a place, not where you're fixing all their problems, but where they know when they show up there, somebody loves them unconditionally, even if they got a C on their math test, or even if Sally pushed them down on the slide or said that their hair sucked or whatever was the thing in the day, that that kind of being a core stable space, that's ultimately how we're going to raise resilient kids.
Probably much more important than is home a place that has Russian math or something. Which, by the way, I've heard lots of people say, oh, can't send them to public school. They don't teach language until fifth grade. And this other school does at second grade. And so like people are making decisions that cost money.
tens of thousands of dollars a year on small little things like that, which might be important to them. I'm not trying to say that's not an important thing. Yeah, I think there's always, they're just, there are always trade-offs, right? And sort of thinking about what am I trading off for this? You always want to have that in mind. And one other topic that I feel data is probably constantly evolving that I'm curious about is around technology and screen time, because
I don't know, when I was a kid, yes, we had a television, but like there wasn't an iPad that I could sit on all day, every day. And our kids are kind of not quite at the age where they're playing games on iPads, but I feel like in a few years, their peers are going to be doing that whether we let them or not. I honestly don't know how to think about it or whether the data's even developed enough. Yeah, it's a messy space. And I think it's worth separating passive screen time piece from the kind of like active sort of social media phone piece. Yeah.
Their kids will watch television on screens. And I think there's a limit to how much of that they should do. But the way I often will frame that to parents I think is right is this is an opportunity cost question. So there's nothing per se wrong with your kid watching Caillou. If they're watching Caillou for seven hours a day, they're not doing other things like going outside and hanging out with you and going to school. And that's too much. But is there anything inherently bad about
about access to some amount of screen time. No, it's just about setting boundaries and figuring out where does that fit in your family life and how do you leave enough time for the other things that you want your kid to be doing. So this is like really a question of boundaries. When we talk about phones, then you introduce another set of issues. One is that it's actually very hard to set boundaries with phones. So when kids have access to phones, they have access to all of those things all the time. And
We can try to set boundaries, but it's different than setting a boundary with a five-year-old with an iPad where you can just take it away. And if they scream like they're too short to reach it, it's hard to set those boundaries with a 13-year-old.
And then we have a lot of debate about the question of social media. And I think the evidence on that is mixed, but certainly suggests that for some kids, social media is quite bad for mental health, particularly for girls. I don't know. I think we're in the middle of a bit of a reckoning. You know, John Hite's book, The Anxious Generation has gotten a lot of attention. I think we're a little bit of a reckoning around phones and the question of what's an appropriate way for society to deal with kids and phones. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah.
Since this show is called All the Hacks, I figured one of the things we could do before we wrap is just ask if you have any kind of interesting or uncommon parenting hacks you've picked up along the way or read through research that people listening might find helpful. I think people are always shocked at the incredible rigidity of my household.
This is fine. Particularly around sleep. We have a fixed wake-up time during the week, which is 6.50. And like on the weekend, it's 7.05 and that's it. Like we do not deviate from that ever. There's no sleep in on the weekends. I have like a teenager now. Everyone in the house is rigidly associated with these bedtimes. And I think it just comes from like having decided sleep was the most important possible thing. And we just...
do it. And I think when people visit, they're like, everyone's very rigid in this household. What happens when they wake up early? Because I would love to set 650. But today, it was 610. Fair enough. One of my kids does wake up early and he just reads in his bed until the wake up time. Okay. We covered a lot.
Is there one takeaway someone who is thinking about being a parent is a parent is a grandparent you want to leave them with? So for someone who's thinking about being a parent, I think we talk a lot about the things that are hard in parenting and it's expensive and you have to think about every decision. But I always want to remind people the way that you will feel about your kid is hard to describe. We should talk about the parts that are hard.
But like, I also want people to understand, not that you have to have kids, but this is a very cool experience. And it's really, really fun. Like a lot of the time. Not all of the time. Yeah, not all the time, of course. But I'll just add that someone who, when hanging out with other people's children, was never like all that excited about children. Right. Nieces, nephews. It's fine, but I didn't have this immediate attraction, like must have this. And so I was always asking myself, I was like, man, why?
What if that's the same way I am with our kids? You'll never know. And I couldn't have been more wrong. And the more I bring this up with people, the more I find out that your opinion towards kids before having kids is completely different than your opinion after having them. So I will echo some of that sentiment. People ask me like, what's the best parenting advice?
And I will tell them the thing that our pediatrician told me when my daughter was two. And I had some obsessive thing about bees where I was like panicked about the possibility of her getting stung. And she just like listened to this whole diatribe. And then she told me, yeah, I would just try not to think about that. And I think there's many things in parenting where I will step back and be like, I'm just going to try not to think about that because it's getting in my head. My rational mind tells me like this isn't important and I'm just not going to think about it. I love it.
Where can everyone who wants to get more and stay in touch with everything you're working on go? Aside from the books I'm linking to, the site I'm linking to, all that will be in the show notes, but say it here as well. Parentdata.org is where I would start. That is where we have 1,500 articles about everything in parenting. There's an AI chatbot you can ask a question to. It is intended to be the place where you go instead of late night panic Googling about your parenting questions.
And you can find me on Instagram at ProfEmilyOster. And you can find my books on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Yeah, I'll link to all the books. We had a great time reading them and reference now the family firm regularly when we're making decisions. Amazing. Thank you, Chris. This is really fun. Yeah, thanks for being here.
Such a great episode. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please consider clicking that follow or subscribe button if you haven't already. It really helps us out. And there's no better way to support us than doing that or sharing the show with a friend, colleague or family member or even a random stranger is totally appreciated.
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