10 Biggest Parenting Myths, Debunked (ft. Emily Oster)

00:00:00.000 | How much of the parenting guidance out there do you think is misleading or just completely wrong?

00:00:04.880 | A huge share of the guidance is misleading in its strength, is how I would put it. So a lot

00:00:12.240 | of the advice comes with a, "If you don't do this, terrible outcome X will happen."

00:00:19.920 | You know, "If you don't breastfeed, your child will be a loser. If you co-sleep,

00:00:25.920 | your child will die. If you don't co-sleep, your child will never love you."

00:00:29.360 | Like the thing that's on the other end of it is a kind of devastating outcome in some way.

00:00:36.560 | And the reality is very few of our parenting choices have any impact anywhere near that

00:00:44.560 | important. Maybe that isn't very nice to hear, but for the most part, many of the choices we make

00:00:50.000 | aren't really going to matter very much in the end based on the data.

00:00:54.800 | So the difference between breastfeeding and not, the difference between circumcision and not,

00:01:02.400 | there are maybe small things in any direction, but they're not that important. So I think that's

00:01:07.040 | the sense in which a lot of what we're hearing, a lot of the noise that parents hear is really

00:01:11.760 | misleading because it makes you think there is a correct way. And if I do the wrong way,

00:01:15.680 | something terrible will happen. And most of the time, there isn't a particularly correct way.

00:01:20.080 | And any choice you make is unlikely to matter that much in the long run.

00:01:25.440 | And you mentioned look at the data. I know you have a background in economics,

00:01:30.080 | which maybe is different than the average person talking about parenting advice. I'm curious how

00:01:35.600 | people can think about that job that they might have and not know, which is actually to look at

00:01:40.800 | the data instead of rely on one person's anecdotal advice or their experience, where maybe they've

00:01:48.080 | only had that experience one time. As humans, we are very drawn to anecdotal experience. We really

00:01:53.600 | like stories and we find stories very compelling. And one of the things I've found in all of these

00:01:59.280 | years of using data is that I really believe in data. And that's my core. I've trained as an

00:02:05.520 | economist. My economics work is very situated in data. I love it. And if you tell me, "Here's a

00:02:12.880 | piece of data. Here's a great randomized trial. And here's what you learned from it," I find that

00:02:18.480 | very compelling. One of the things I've learned over time is that not everyone finds data as

00:02:26.320 | compelling as I do. And there is sometimes a lot of value in helping people understand why data is

00:02:33.920 | just a lot of anecdotes altogether. When we think about how we can better incorporate the use of

00:02:44.480 | data in decisions, one key is to make sure you are asking the question in a thoughtful way that

00:02:55.360 | is seeking an answer. My sense is part of the reason why anecdote and other people's experiences,

00:03:02.160 | whether they're strangers on the internet or people you see at the park or your family or

00:03:06.880 | whatever, the reason those things hit so hard is because they are pushed at you.

00:03:11.840 | You're on Instagram and all of a sudden somebody's telling you something really that they think is

00:03:17.280 | very important for you to do with your baby or you're doing something with your baby and your

00:03:20.880 | mother says, "Oh my God, that's so wrong. How could you possibly do that?" Or, "I did it differently

00:03:25.040 | and look how great you turned out." When we're looking to make decisions, we want to think about

00:03:30.320 | the decision and seek out help making the decision rather than making our decisions in the moment

00:03:38.000 | that someone is coming at us with an anecdote. You have a framework to think about this when

00:03:44.320 | you're making a decision. Is that right? In my book, The Family Farm, I talk about the idea of

00:03:48.880 | a decision framework, which I think is helpful for bigger decisions in particular. That starts

00:03:54.480 | with this idea of framing a question, of asking, "What am I trying to decide between? What are

00:03:59.200 | really the realistic choices?" Then it goes on to spend some time collecting all the data that

00:04:05.600 | you need, collecting all the information, the logistics, whatever is going into that decision.

00:04:10.560 | Then you want to make the decision and move on. I think one of our big decision-making

00:04:16.720 | problems is that we tend to linger on our decisions and make them again and again and again

00:04:22.080 | without just accepting, "I'm going to make the decision and move forward."

00:04:26.960 | One of the challenges I've always had is sometimes you collect lots of data, and it doesn't just

00:04:31.840 | point you to the answer. Can you give an example first of how you might frame the question

00:04:36.560 | better so that it makes it easier to look at that data and make a decision?

00:04:40.560 | First of all, I should say data is almost never going to give you an answer. If you're expecting

00:04:46.400 | the data to boss you to an answer, you will be disappointed almost every single time because

00:04:51.600 | there's very few things in life or in parenting where it's somehow so obvious from the evidence

00:04:58.160 | that one thing is the right thing. I'll give you a specific example, which is the decision

00:05:05.520 | of, "Should I send my child to daycare or should I have a nanny?" That's a question where I would

00:05:13.120 | encourage people to first think about what the realistic options are. "Should I send my child

00:05:17.760 | to daycare or not?" "Or not" is not a childcare solution. What is the other thing you could be

00:05:22.800 | doing? Is it you stay home? Is it a nanny? Is it a grandparent? Is it a different daycare? What are

00:05:28.640 | the actual choices? Then you get some data. In that case, for most people, the information that

00:05:34.720 | they would need would be both some information about what do we know about outcomes for daycare

00:05:40.400 | versus nanny versus stay-at-home parent. That's the kind of data I talk about in my books.

00:05:46.320 | Then there's also a bunch of information about your family, which also has to go into that

00:05:51.680 | decision. How much do these things cost? What other things would you have to give up if you

00:05:55.680 | wanted to pay for a more expensive option? What's realistic in terms of your careers?

00:06:00.320 | What do you want? How do you want to spend your day? These are all quite important choices,

00:06:06.240 | important parts of the decision that go along with the data. Then when you make that decision,

00:06:11.040 | you take that data, but you overlay your preferences, your values, your constraints

00:06:14.880 | on top of it. That's how good decision-making happens. Do you think a lot of the decisions

00:06:19.040 | people treat as irreversible? I'm curious if they actually are. In business, we often talk about

00:06:26.800 | reversible and irreversible decisions and like, "Just make the decision and you can change it

00:06:30.320 | later." I'm curious how much that applies here. The last part of the decision-making framework I

00:06:34.960 | talk about is the idea of follow-up, that most of our decisions are not irreversible or at least

00:06:40.560 | not irreversible forever. A decision like, "I'm going to decide to send my child to daycare,"

00:06:47.440 | that's a decision you can revisit in a year or six months or some other time.

00:06:51.360 | Humans don't like to revisit our decisions very much because it's like admitting we were wrong.

00:06:56.560 | This is, I think, what happens in many cases, both in business and in parenting and in life,

00:07:03.680 | is I made this choice. I chose to send my child to this childcare option. Even if it's not working,

00:07:12.000 | admitting that it's not working requires me to say I made a mistake. That's hard. The cognitive

00:07:18.400 | dissonance associated with having made a mistake is very hard, so people fail to revisit their

00:07:23.120 | choices. Sometimes you can get around that, like your psychology there, by planning to revisit.

00:07:28.160 | In six months, we'll come back and ask if it worked. That's an opportunity to then frame

00:07:33.760 | a different choice, a reversal of the decision as like, "Well, this was an experiment,

00:07:39.200 | and we knew we were going to revisit it as opposed to we made a mistake."

00:07:44.400 | There are some decisions which are irreversible. If you choose not to breastfeed at some point,

00:07:50.400 | you won't be able to restart. There's some biology, things like that. A lot of the choices

00:07:54.720 | we make are reversible. Yeah. One investing principle I'll encourage people to also consider

00:08:01.600 | is thinking about the information you had when you made the decision. If you're deciding one

00:08:06.960 | year into daycare that you don't want to do it anymore, well, you have this new piece of

00:08:11.680 | information, which is one year of experience doing it. You're not saying your old decision

00:08:19.040 | was wrong. With the information you had a year ago, it might have been the right decision,

00:08:22.800 | and new information now lets you make a different decision that shouldn't make you feel like you

00:08:27.520 | did the wrong thing when you had the limited knowledge you did a year ago.

00:08:32.320 | Totally. One of my favorite places where this comes up is in extracurriculars. When your kids

00:08:38.960 | get a little older than yours are, but there becomes this pressure to engage in very extensive

00:08:45.040 | extracurriculars, which take all of your weekends. There's this story about sitting in -- a friend of

00:08:51.840 | mine was sitting and watching their kid do some kind of gymnastics or something, and the parents

00:08:55.680 | behind them were like, "Boy, we hate doing this. It's such a waste. The kid hates it. We hate it,

00:09:01.920 | but what are you going to do about it?" The answer is like, "Well, quit. You're going to quit."

00:09:06.560 | But it's so hard to quit. We put all this time in and some combination of remembering like,

00:09:13.680 | "Look, now you've learned. Everyone hates gymnastics. You couldn't have known before,

00:09:17.600 | but you learned you hate it, and now you should quit." Some combination of that and just the idea

00:09:21.920 | of sunk costs are sunk. It's too bad you spent six years of your life investing in gymnastics,

00:09:27.280 | but don't make it worse by spending a seven. Yes, totally. I feel like nowadays -- and maybe

00:09:34.000 | this has always been the case, but I'm biased -- there's just so much pressure to try to raise

00:09:40.560 | the perfect child, be the perfect parent. I see lots of parents with anxiety about this and stress

00:09:46.800 | about this. What can people do? Because it seems like you said very beginning at the outset,

00:09:53.280 | very few things are going to have this massive impact, yet I think a lot of parents carry

00:09:58.720 | a tremendous amount of burden and stress about trying to make sure their kid has every opportunity,

00:10:03.840 | gets the perfect school, gets the perfect this. The first thing I would say is that we might want

00:10:09.760 | to ask the question of why is this? What is the demographic change that caused this generation

00:10:16.320 | of parents to have more of this attitude than when I was a kid? My sense is some of it is a

00:10:27.120 | feeling of -- at least in certain groups, you're having kids later, you've achieved something.

00:10:33.680 | It's like there's a set of things I tried to achieve, going to college, getting a job,

00:10:37.840 | getting promoted, whatever it is, and then this is another thing. I'm going to totally win it.

00:10:43.840 | I'm going to win my kid the way that I won partnership at Ropes & Gray. That's what I'm

00:10:50.400 | doing. It's hard to realize sometimes, but it's very true that the amount of control you have

00:10:58.560 | over your kid's success and outcomes is quite a bit less than many of us think. The corollary of

00:11:08.160 | a lot of the choices we make probably don't matter as much as we think is that you could

00:11:14.080 | do everything right, even if that were a thing. Then your kid might not turn out to be an Olympic

00:11:20.880 | athlete like you had hoped or whatever was your dream. That loss of control, that's really hard.

00:11:28.720 | That's really hard for a lot of people. I think sometimes people would benefit by asking a little

00:11:35.200 | bit more, "What do I want my life to look like with my kid right now?" rather than, "What am I

00:11:41.760 | trying to build?" It's not that we don't want to look… I mean, our job is to raise our kids to

00:11:49.840 | leave us and to raise our kids to be adults, but also I can feel sometimes that people don't have

00:11:58.240 | the fun that they could with their kids because they're trying to achieve something. Sometimes

00:12:07.920 | you just want to have fun. Yeah. You mentioned that the outcomes don't matter as much as you

00:12:15.040 | might think. For someone who might not believe that they can't have a bigger impact on their

00:12:19.520 | kid's future, is there any kind of data or anecdotes that you'd point them to that maybe

00:12:25.520 | will help them realize they might not be correct? There's a little bit of a kind of tension in the

00:12:32.240 | academic literature here because there are many, many individual things that people do. What does

00:12:39.520 | your kid do? Do this kind of extracurricular? Do you enroll them in these math things? Whatever.

00:12:45.360 | All this kind of stuff that people think a lot about where then when you look at the relationship

00:12:50.240 | with outcomes, you just don't see much. That's true for something like breastfeeding also.

00:12:56.000 | People are like, "I just let the breastfeed for nine years." Actually, the correlations between

00:13:00.160 | breastfeeding and IQ are just correlations. Those are not causal in the best data. There's many of

00:13:06.080 | those things where you can point to data and just say, "Look, we don't see that these things are

00:13:12.160 | driving outcomes in a meaningful way." On the flip side, there is a very important part of the

00:13:20.880 | first three years of kids' lives and even longer than that where you start to already see very big

00:13:28.640 | differences across, say, socioeconomic groups in how kids are coming into kindergarten in terms of

00:13:33.360 | their readiness to learn, in terms of their readiness to move forward, and in terms of long-term

00:13:38.720 | psychological health. But when you isolate what's going on, a lot of it is kids really benefit from

00:13:48.400 | having a stable adult who expresses love, from having a place to eat, a place to sleep that's

00:13:54.800 | consistent, having enough food, and maybe hearing some language, some pretty basic things which,

00:14:03.120 | unfortunately, not every kid in America is getting. But most of the people who are most worried about

00:14:09.200 | investing in their kids in these ways are doing all of those things.

00:14:13.200 | So we're obsessing about a bunch of small stuff on the margin that doesn't matter

00:14:17.760 | because we have heard the first three years are really crucial. The answer is the first three

00:14:23.280 | years are really crucial, but you've already done it by the time you are starting to think about,

00:14:30.480 | "Is it really important that my kid go to a Montessori school?" By the time you're down to

00:14:35.040 | how many master's degrees do the preschool teachers have to have, everything is fine.

00:14:39.360 | Everything is already as much as you can do. Does that mean the parent thinking about that

00:14:44.880 | question might need a good enough approach, not a perfect approach?

00:14:50.080 | I think it depends a lot on whether that approach is serving them. In some sense,

00:14:58.080 | we'll put myself in this category, sort of effectively overthinking a lot of parenting

00:15:02.160 | decisions is helpful. The fact that I thought about it and was careful and made a thoughtful

00:15:07.360 | decision, that helps me psychologically because later when I question my decision, I have this

00:15:14.880 | confidence. I know I made the decision in a way that was thoughtful and was the way that I want

00:15:20.080 | to show up for decisions. So I think that can be very valuable. I think that when this gets into a

00:15:26.000 | place where people feel overwhelmed or paralyzed, or they're constantly messing up, I think that's

00:15:33.280 | where stepping back and saying, "Hey, let's embrace a little bit of the second best parenting,

00:15:40.240 | like kind of good enough," is a good idea. I see some parents that are focused so much

00:15:47.120 | on providing everything perfect for the kid that maybe they don't even take a second for

00:15:52.400 | themselves. How important do you think it is for people to also prioritize themselves as a parent?

00:15:58.960 | There's a guy I really like named Tom Phelan, who is the author of what was once, I think,

00:16:04.960 | the most popular discipline book for parents called 123 Magic. It's still a very popular book.

00:16:12.480 | But I talked to him at some point and he was talking about the idea that there are different

00:16:20.720 | dyads in the family. There's each parent with each kid, there's the kids together,

00:16:25.200 | and that it's one of the things that you want to prioritize is connections between each of those

00:16:32.240 | dyads. Then he said to me, he said, "What is the most important dyad in the house?" I said,

00:16:37.280 | "I don't know, the parent to the oldest kid?" I had some idea. He was like, "No, it's the two

00:16:43.440 | parents." I was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah." I think that's part of this for me is as we get so focused

00:16:53.040 | on our kids, we can forget ourselves and we can forget our relationships outside of the kids.

00:16:59.200 | Those are both pretty important to prioritize for the family because parents are people also.

00:17:08.480 | I assume children are watching those things also. Not everything they learn is the things you've

00:17:16.320 | taught them. But seeing happy mom and dad, not tired, not stressed out, probably has an impact

00:17:23.280 | that might be hard for data to quantify. I think that's probably right. Our kids

00:17:28.080 | learn a lot better from seeing than from being told. That's not their preferred mechanism of

00:17:34.000 | learning is to have things explained to them. Certainly, the image of my parent is willing to

00:17:41.840 | prioritize themselves communicates something. I think we worry that that communicates,

00:17:47.680 | "I don't care about you." But at some level, it doesn't. I will say this is something just at a

00:17:56.800 | personal level I struggle with quite a lot. I do not do a good job, mostly, of saying that I need

00:18:10.160 | time. For me, actually, the only thing that works is running. I just because I, for whatever reason,

00:18:18.560 | have convinced myself that running is important for health, even though it's definitely not true

00:18:22.960 | at the level that I'm doing it. It's the one thing where I can tell my family, "This is really

00:18:29.200 | important to me. I'm going to do it. I'm going to leave you for it." They kind of accept. They're

00:18:33.600 | just like, "Okay. Yeah. Mom, it's really important for mom to go." Which I guess then inherently

00:18:37.840 | means it probably is important to your health. Yeah. No, it's important to my mental health.

00:18:41.600 | It just may not be good for my knees. I come from a family of many replaced knees,

00:18:48.560 | so I've just accepted that that's in my future. You're just going to get a new one. Yeah. Think

00:18:51.840 | about how fast I'll be with my new bionic knees. It's going to be amazing.

00:18:55.360 | I want to go back to something. Throughout the books you've written, and I've gotten through

00:19:00.800 | all of them at different stages, I already mentioned in the intro how valuable they were,

00:19:05.760 | so I encourage everyone to take a look. You challenge a lot of common misconceptions. We

00:19:11.280 | talked about how many there are, but I'm curious if there's one or two that stand out as the most

00:19:17.040 | shocking ones now that you've dug into the data. My first book is about pregnancy, and there I

00:19:24.480 | think the one that really sticks out to me is bed rest. Bed rest in pregnancy is something that

00:19:36.160 | actually is still pretty commonly prescribed, and it just isn't effective for anything. There's

00:19:44.000 | basically no complication for which bed rest has been shown to be a good idea, and it also has some

00:19:50.960 | pretty negative outcomes. If somebody is concerned about preterm labor, they'll tell people to just

00:19:56.720 | lie down. I guess the reason I find this so interesting is because it strikes me as an

00:20:03.600 | example where the anecdotes of lived experience are basically getting in the way of data.

00:20:12.960 | Most of the time when people have threatened preterm labor, they don't go into preterm labor,

00:20:18.800 | so that happens more commonly than actual labor. If you tell people, "Lay down for six weeks,"

00:20:28.320 | most of the time that will appear to work because it just would have worked.

00:20:36.720 | So it's such a clear example where if you had a control group,

00:20:40.720 | you would see that the outcomes were the same, but in the absence of the control group, if you

00:20:46.640 | just decide this is a good idea and you just start doing it, it looks like a good idea because most

00:20:50.800 | of the time everything works out fine like it would have anyway. It's just one of these things

00:20:56.400 | where as a person who cares about data and evidence, it's such a clear example where you

00:21:02.560 | can get into a path of doing something which is wrong but is self-reinforcing.

00:21:09.040 | Now I assume that the doctors prescribing this bedrest have access to the same data

00:21:14.400 | you do and anyone does. Why does stuff like that keep happening?

00:21:18.000 | So this is a place where I think even in the decades since Expecting Better came out,

00:21:23.440 | the advice has changed a lot in part because some of the evidence, not because of my book,

00:21:27.440 | but because the evidence slowly updates over time. But I think there's a lot of hysteresis in

00:21:33.920 | practice. So if you are an obstetrician and you've been prescribing this for many years and most of

00:21:39.600 | the time it seems to work, the idea of not doing it anymore because of some study I think is hard

00:21:48.240 | because it's like your lived experience is that this works.

00:21:53.040 | Yeah. I remember one distinct moment during our first child, you basically got a choice.

00:21:59.760 | Do you want to meet with your OB before pregnancy like three times or do you want to go to group

00:22:05.520 | meetings six or seven times? Oh, right. Group prenatal care. Uh-huh.

00:22:08.000 | Yeah. And we were like, "Oh, wow. We want more information." So we get six or seven times.

00:22:12.320 | So we go to the first meeting and they asked a bunch of these preconceived myths and they were

00:22:17.680 | like, "How many of you think you can't?" And then the nurse went through like, "Have coffee,

00:22:23.040 | eat sushi, have honey," and went through them. And I remember we had both just read Expecting

00:22:28.720 | Better and we were both like, "Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, that's okay." And everyone looked at mostly

00:22:33.840 | my wife like, "Oh my gosh, who is this person that's poisoning her child? What is going on?"

00:22:39.840 | And the nurse eventually was like, "No, actually she's right." But even in a room in the Bay Area,

00:22:45.840 | lots of educated people, everyone seemed to keep believing things that I guess data has now

00:22:51.920 | disproven. Things like caffeine and even small amounts of alcohol being so terrible.

00:22:58.800 | Where does this come from? Pregnancy is full of this abundance of caution

00:23:09.040 | attitude, I think. And with something like coffee or sushi or even little bits of alcohol,

00:23:16.560 | I would get people to be like, "Yes, I looked at that data. You've convinced me with the data

00:23:24.400 | that some amount of caffeine in pregnancy is okay, but I still wouldn't do it."

00:23:34.240 | Instead of pushing, "But why?" It's like, well, and I think some of it is just the feeling of

00:23:40.560 | if something bad happened, I would blame myself. And especially early in pregnancy when people

00:23:49.040 | worry about miscarriage, whatever, then the feeling of like, "I want to do everything right

00:23:54.400 | because then I will know if something bad happens is not because of something that I did." And I

00:24:02.960 | think that's actually a very hard psychological issue to get around. I'm worried about blaming

00:24:09.760 | myself partly because society is quite good at blaming women when things go wrong or just in

00:24:16.160 | general. I think people have to decide where they are emotionally on this. I think it's totally fine

00:24:22.240 | to say, "I think that we should have the evidence there. I think people should read the evidence,

00:24:27.920 | and I think they should understand it." And I think we should work on the idea that sometimes

00:24:35.600 | bad things happen for reasons that are not in our control, and that is really sad, and that is just

00:24:45.040 | the way the world is, and that somehow we have to stop blaming people for things. And I think

00:24:52.240 | if we could do that, then people would feel a little more comfortable making some of these

00:24:55.520 | choices based on evidence. I think some of it is how other people look at you.

00:25:01.280 | I can't remember if this actually happened to my wife or it was a friend, but someone took the

00:25:07.440 | coffee out of their hand when they were at a coffee shop, which I'm sure you've also heard

00:25:12.000 | stories of things like that happening. And so even though you might decide, "This is okay for me,"

00:25:18.320 | it seems like other people must not have this data because they're willing to go to such extremes to

00:25:25.760 | share their opinion, if that's the right way to say it.

00:25:29.600 | I think those experiences for me go beyond, "This person doesn't have the data," into, "This person

00:25:36.160 | is willing to step over a line that I thought we had in polite society." And this happens all the

00:25:43.600 | time, more in pregnancy than with your kids, although it happens with babies also, where

00:25:47.120 | people just feel like somehow it's their business to say what you should do, to take the coffee out

00:25:55.360 | of her hand, to touch her belly, to say, "Well, I hope that's decaf, but why isn't your baby

00:26:01.600 | wearing a hat? Did you know babies get cold?" It's like, "What do you want me to say?" I think that

00:26:09.120 | our societal willingness to weigh in on people's pregnancy and parenting choices is somehow

00:26:18.160 | astonishing. I do think some of this is people don't have the data, but I think once you're at

00:26:23.600 | the point where you're taking coffee out of someone's hand, I'm not sure you would be compelled

00:26:27.440 | by evidence. That's just not okay. Yes, I agree.

00:26:34.480 | At some point, we talked about having a line of cards that said, "Well, actually," on the front,

00:26:39.440 | and then on the back, there would be information about caffeine or whatever in pregnancy,

00:26:42.880 | and you could hand them out to people. As someone who enjoys confrontation,

00:26:46.640 | I would have really enjoyed having that deck of cards. I think my wife would much prefer to just

00:26:52.080 | walk away. Yes, just walk away, buy your coffee elsewhere. One other topic that I feel like maybe

00:26:57.840 | falls into the camp of "Heated with Controversy" that I'm curious about. I don't remember where

00:27:04.560 | the data ends up in that chapter of the book, but it's around sleep training, which I know is very

00:27:09.600 | polarizing. How did a topic like that get so polarizing, and what does the data actually show?

00:27:15.520 | If you're not deeply steeped in the internet discussion of sleep training,

00:27:18.880 | when we talk about sleep training, we're generally referring to some system where a child is crying

00:27:25.280 | for some period of time during the night, and with the intention that they fall asleep on their own.

00:27:30.800 | I'm guessing most parents that find this not a great method haven't actually learned about this

00:27:37.440 | Romanian study. This is the first I'm hearing about it. Do you think people just don't want

00:27:43.040 | to hear children cry, or why has it become so polarizing, absent knowledge about this

00:27:48.800 | Romanian orphanage? Sleep training is extremely polarizing

00:27:56.480 | because people worry that if you sleep train your kid, it will cause them to never be attached to

00:28:03.040 | you and to have long-term psychological issues. The origin of this is Romanian orphanages,

00:28:12.400 | basically. There was this very unfortunate, tragic episode in Romania where they took away

00:28:19.760 | birth control, and there were a lot of unwanted births. A lot of those kids ended up in these

00:28:24.080 | orphanages, in which they were left basically alone for days on end, or not fed very much,

00:28:30.080 | and there's a lot of sexual abuse. Many of those kids did very poorly, for reasons that I'm sure

00:28:36.800 | are obvious from that description, did very, very poorly as adults and had many long-term

00:28:41.280 | psychological and other consequences. When people from the West came and visited these

00:28:46.640 | orphanages, one of the things that they saw was that the babies were very quiet,

00:28:50.800 | that if you didn't ever come and help a baby for many days, it just would stop crying.

00:28:57.840 | Then people took that and were like, "Sleep training is a little bit of a Romanian orphanage,

00:29:06.400 | and so it probably is bad for kids. It's going to have all these same negative consequences."

00:29:12.320 | The thing is that there's just no evidence for that, and the difference between having your

00:29:18.400 | kid cry it out in a world in which they are loved and cared for and adequately fed and not abused,

00:29:27.120 | and etc., etc. The difference between that and a Romanian orphanage is so vast that I'm not sure

00:29:31.760 | that you can -- I think the comparison is a bit -- it seems ridiculous. At any rate, we have a

00:29:39.440 | fair amount of evidence on sleep training in places where we are thinking about sleep training as it

00:29:45.920 | is practiced, where kids cry it out and then they sleep. We can see that it does improve sleep. It

00:29:50.880 | does actually improve parent sleep, decreases postpartum depression. Then when you look at

00:29:57.040 | long-term outcomes, either long-term or short-term outcomes for kids, you just don't see any

00:30:01.760 | differences for kids who are sleep trained and not. There's just not any evidence in the data

00:30:05.520 | of this kind of attachment, these attachment issues. I think, first of all, there is a fair

00:30:11.760 | amount of talk on the internet, not so much about the Romanian orphanage, because I think people

00:30:18.000 | recognize that that doesn't seem that parallel, but just in general about the idea of attachment

00:30:26.000 | theory and people saying, "We know this must be bad for your baby because babies are made to be

00:30:35.040 | with their mothers all the time." There's a lot of rhetoric on the internet about this, which I

00:30:40.240 | think is not super supported by data. It's also very unpleasant to listen to your kid cry. I don't

00:30:46.640 | want to sugarcoat, it can take a few days for this to work, and it's really unpleasant to listen to,

00:30:56.160 | and it is not for everyone. There are people who will tell me, "I just couldn't do this," and I

00:31:01.760 | think that's fine. This isn't something where I would say you have to do this. It's an interesting

00:31:09.680 | space where my sense is some of the debate online, some of the intensity of this debate is because

00:31:19.280 | both sides feel like they are being told they have to do something. Both the people who do the sleep

00:31:26.480 | training are told, "You're a terrible monster parent. I could never do that," which is frequently

00:31:31.920 | said. Then if you don't do it, people are told, "We have to sleep train. You don't sleep train,

00:31:37.760 | your kid's never going to sleep, and you're ruining them forever." Somehow, both sides feel

00:31:43.200 | like they're being told they're doing it wrong, as opposed to what I think is a reasonable middle

00:31:48.320 | ground, which is this absolutely can work for many families. There's no evidence that it would cause

00:31:53.600 | any long-term or short-term problems, but it's certainly not for everybody. If it doesn't fit

00:31:58.160 | what you want to do with your family, then you should feel free not to do it.

00:32:00.720 | Maybe I'm wrong, but breastfeeding might fall into a similar camp?

00:32:04.640 | I think breastfeeding falls into a similar camp. It's interesting. I think the rhetoric on sleep

00:32:09.680 | training is actually, in some ways, a bit stronger. Rarely do people say, if you choose not

00:32:19.600 | to breastfeed, that you're a monster, whereas I do think people will say that about the sleep

00:32:24.160 | training. It has the same feel of people really disagreeing and falling in these very sharp camps,

00:32:33.200 | and people feeling judged. The evidence to suggest that breast is best is

00:32:38.800 | there are some small benefits, largely in the short-term, but many of the benefits that are

00:32:44.080 | dated about breastfeeding are not actually supported in the best data.

00:32:48.640 | There's a lot of data around a lot of these topics. Honestly, I think the easiest way to

00:32:54.880 | tackle that data is to pick up a book that you've written on the stage of parenting that you're in.

00:33:00.800 | At least that was our approach. But for someone who wants to go a little further and look at the

00:33:06.320 | data, what advice do you have for someone trying to think about how to even read these studies,

00:33:11.760 | find this research, know that what they're looking at is the right stuff?

00:33:14.640 | The first thing I will say is that if you have started by looking for the answer to the question

00:33:21.840 | you want, you are already way ahead because often people will start by saying, "Well, I saw this

00:33:26.240 | study. Let me react to this particular study." But if your question is like, "I actually want

00:33:30.880 | to evaluate this question," you're in a much better position because you can go and you can

00:33:34.480 | actually look at sources that are vetted and are not somebody on TikTok who has some feelings about

00:33:41.280 | this topic. The best studies of almost any question are going to be randomized trials.

00:33:48.480 | We're almost always better at learning from things where we randomize a treatment

00:33:53.920 | and give one group one thing and one group another thing because then you can be more confident that

00:33:58.720 | the differences that you see across groups are driven by the treatment rather than by

00:34:03.680 | preexisting differences. There's a set of reviews called the Cochrane Reviews, which are meta

00:34:11.680 | analyses of randomized trials, which tend to be very good. So if someone said, "Where's the first

00:34:16.720 | place I would look?" and say, "Go to the Cochrane Library and see if they've done anything on it,"

00:34:21.280 | and that's often a very good starting point. I've just searched your site and you've usually

00:34:27.680 | done some of these things. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the core things we're trying to do on

00:34:31.920 | parent data is give people some depth and then citations. So it's like, if you want to go further,

00:34:38.640 | here's the paper to read. Here's kind of the core of this literature, but you get some depth already

00:34:44.640 | with the parent data posting. And I know there are lots of different norms all around the world.

00:34:50.080 | And so how much does it matter where these studies are done or how much do kind of cultural

00:34:55.200 | norms and traditions play into advice on these topics? Cultural norms and traditions play

00:35:01.520 | enormously into advice. And it is extremely interesting to talk to people from other

00:35:07.680 | countries about what kinds of things they hear. I have a friend, a colleague from Sweden,

00:35:17.440 | and at some point, she was telling me, she was like, "In Sweden, no one would ever swaddle their

00:35:23.040 | baby," because everybody knows if you swaddle them, their hips will be ruined. They'll never

00:35:28.720 | learn to walk. There was some specific thing. And it's just like, not only is that not supported

00:35:33.920 | by data, but I had never even heard that. This is not in the US. No one is anti-swaddle. Swaddle is

00:35:41.200 | just like a regular milquetoast thing that we're doing. But she was like, "In Sweden,

00:35:46.160 | that is a thing not to do." And then there was this time when I was pregnant, when one of my

00:35:50.800 | Chinese colleagues was like, "Are you wearing a radiation vest?" And I was like, "I'm not. What?"

00:35:57.920 | And he's like, "Everyone I know in China, when they're pregnant in front of their computer,

00:36:02.240 | they wear this canvas radiation vest to protect themselves from the computer radiation."

00:36:06.560 | I was like, "Okay, there's no evidence for that." But it was just like, that's the cultural norm.

00:36:12.160 | And there's so many of these places where you see these differing cultural norms.

00:36:18.480 | There are also then, when we're studying some of these things, alcohol and pregnancy is a

00:36:27.120 | good example, where cultural norms are pretty different in the US and in Europe or Australia

00:36:33.360 | with that. There's more alcohol consumption, more occasional drinking in European or Australian

00:36:40.640 | context than there is in the US during pregnancy. And so most of the better data, the larger scale,

00:36:45.600 | less complicated data comes from those places, because you are more confident that this is a

00:36:52.080 | choice that is being made closer to at random or that is not really wrapped up in demographic

00:36:58.880 | differences across groups. Given the wide breadth of opinions

00:37:04.800 | all around the world, one challenge, and this probably the answer spans way beyond just

00:37:10.480 | parenting or pregnancy, but what advice do you have for someone who's read your book,

00:37:15.760 | done some research, come to an opinion, and get some pushback with a doctor or a nurse

00:37:22.400 | that maybe has a different opinion, how to navigate that situation?

00:37:26.160 | One of the things I hope that our books will do is help that my books will do is help people

00:37:33.600 | have better conversations. In a sense, rather than framing that as an opportunity to say,

00:37:42.560 | "I think one thing and you think another thing," as an opportunity to say, "Hey, this is my

00:37:49.840 | understanding of the evidence on that. Can you tell me why you don't think that's relevant in my case?"

00:37:59.600 | We often frame some of these interactions as we're having a disagreement or my doctor's not

00:38:04.320 | listening to me, which does happen, but I think that we can use this as a jumping off point.

00:38:12.160 | Sometimes the answer will be, "Well, that's the advice I give everybody, but I don't really know

00:38:16.160 | why." It's like, "Okay, well, that's more informative than just this is what we tell

00:38:21.760 | people." Sometimes the decisions you might discuss with a doctor or a nurse or even your partner

00:38:29.280 | are either small or they're a little bit easy. Sometimes there are decisions that parents make

00:38:35.200 | that are much bigger and complicated. You mentioned childcare earlier. There's not one

00:38:40.000 | right answer and there are lots of different factors and variables. I think given your

00:38:45.760 | background on economics and decision-making, how do you give people guidance when they're making

00:38:52.480 | really complicated decisions like whether to return to work, have a second child,

00:38:58.560 | these kinds of things where there's so many variables, where it just feels like even if you

00:39:03.920 | ask the right question and collect the right data, actually making the decision is tough

00:39:09.200 | because there's not even close to a kind of right answer.

00:39:12.240 | We are not very good at making hard decisions like that. I think that there's a core reason,

00:39:20.480 | which is that with one of these very, very hard, complicated decisions, for different people,

00:39:28.560 | those are different. I think whether to have another kid is a common one for people to be

00:39:33.440 | a little stuck on. There's a sense in which you have to recognize that at the end of the day,

00:39:42.800 | you will never know if you made the right choice. We really want to know that we made the right

00:39:47.680 | choice. For many of these choices, you're never going to learn that. You are never going to find

00:39:52.800 | out if you did it, if you would have been happier in the other option or things would have worked

00:39:57.040 | out better the other way. You just won't. You're going to have to live with the idea that you made

00:40:03.360 | a good choice ex ante, you made whatever is the best choice you made, and you're just never going

00:40:08.080 | to find out if it was right. That's the core reason people delay choices, I think, is that

00:40:15.200 | they're waiting around for something, either a better choice, like a third option that fixes all

00:40:24.160 | their problems, or they just can't live with the idea that they're not going to know if they're

00:40:29.840 | right, and so then they never make the decision. One of the things I will talk to people about

00:40:34.160 | sometimes is this idea that there's no secret option C, that when you have a choice between A

00:40:39.120 | and B, even if A and B both really aren't that great, you have to choose one of them.

00:40:46.320 | People ask me, "So the classic example where I will talk about this is people who are thinking

00:40:53.600 | about a second kid, and one person wants a second kid, and one person doesn't." It's like, "My

00:40:59.360 | spouse is really committed to a second kid, and I'm really committed not to. How can we make this

00:41:03.920 | decision?" The only thing you can say is there's no secret option C. If you're having this discussion

00:41:11.040 | waiting for some option to arise that is intermediate between having a kid and not

00:41:17.920 | having a kid, you will never get that, because those two things are literally the opposite of

00:41:23.360 | each other. You're just going to have to make the decision knowing that one person is not going to

00:41:27.920 | get the thing that they want. Waiting around and not making a choice is the same as making a choice.

00:41:33.440 | It's choosing in favor of the person who doesn't want to have a kid, because eventually you'll lose

00:41:38.240 | your ability to do that. We're not great decision-makers as people. When things are

00:41:47.200 | hard, we just put them off. Sometimes we just have to force ourselves to make a choice.

00:41:51.520 | Yeah. It's funny. The same thing is probably true with, "Do you want a will or not?" Well,

00:41:57.840 | not having a will means you're just having a will that is whatever your state decides your will is.

00:42:03.440 | That I've brought up with a few people. They've been like, "Oh my gosh. I didn't want to go

00:42:09.600 | through this process, but I already did. I just accepted this thing that I'm completely out of

00:42:15.280 | control for. Now, I'm really, really more motivated to figure this out for myself and our family."

00:42:21.840 | Yeah. The will one is a good example, because I think when we think about that,

00:42:25.600 | we're thinking about, "Should I make a will or should I not die?" Well, actually, not dying is

00:42:30.960 | not on the table. It's really just, "Do I decide what happens after or not, or do I let the state

00:42:37.440 | decide?" I don't know. I think people think about the prenups also. It's like, "Should I have a

00:42:42.240 | prenup? If I have a prenup, then I'll get divorced." It's like, "Well, you might get divorced

00:42:45.360 | anyway." Yeah. I think the data shows that that's at least a reasonable, likely outcome for almost

00:42:50.880 | any relationship. It does happen. There's a couple of decisions that I think are particularly

00:42:56.720 | relevant for me, and so I'm just going to bring them up because they're interesting at the age

00:43:00.720 | of our kids. One of which I think... You mentioned there are lots of decisions that maybe don't have

00:43:06.640 | as much impact as you think, but there's one decision that I think is happening at least in

00:43:12.240 | my circle of kids that are in the 3, 4, 5, 6 range starting to go to school about the value

00:43:20.320 | of private education. The thing that I think is different than this about a lot of other decisions

00:43:26.560 | is the financial impact it can have. I have talked to friends, and I used to run a financial

00:43:33.680 | planning firm, people that put their personal finances at extreme tight places for the sake

00:43:42.080 | of their children's education. It's one where it's hard to be like, "Oh, I don't care about

00:43:48.080 | my kid's education," but maybe good enough actually isn't as bad as you think and not worth

00:43:54.320 | stretching your finances. I guess I'm curious how much a "better education" really has an

00:44:04.240 | impact on things and how someone considering private education might think about it.

00:44:08.880 | Really hard question to answer because the demographics of the people who have

00:44:14.240 | private education are very, very different than the average, particularly if you're talking about

00:44:19.600 | the kind of private education that would stretch your finances. In the US, there's public education,

00:44:25.280 | there's a large share of private education is Catholic schools. Actually, they tend to serve

00:44:31.680 | a pretty similar demographic to the public schools, and they tend to not be that expensive.

00:44:38.320 | Then there's this space of independent private schools, which can be very, very expensive,

00:44:44.720 | which is closer to what you're imagining when you're stretching your finances.

00:44:49.280 | When we look in general at schools, and let's say now let's compare different public schools,

00:44:56.400 | some of them are going to perform better on test score-wise than others. We would also frame that

00:45:04.240 | as some of these schools are better than others. There's better public schools. You could ask the

00:45:07.920 | same kind of question, "Should I stretch my finances to move to a district with a better

00:45:11.520 | public school based on this testing metric?" It turns out when you look in the data,

00:45:16.400 | most of those differences across schools are basically about differences in who is going to

00:45:24.000 | the school, which is to say moving your particular kid from school A to school B is not going to give

00:45:32.240 | them a boost in test scores that is the difference between school A and school B. It's going to give

00:45:37.040 | them at best a tiny fraction of that boost because most of the things determining how your kid is

00:45:41.600 | doing on this test or whatever is just what your kid is like and what happens at home and genetics

00:45:47.200 | and all the kinds of other stuff. The treatment effect of the school is small. That doesn't mean

00:45:52.720 | every school has a small treatment effect, but on average, a lot of the differences that people

00:45:57.360 | perceive out in the world are really differences in kids and not differences in schooling.

00:46:04.640 | A similar point may be made about private schools, and people have made it, that some of

00:46:10.800 | the difference in performance and college outcomes and whatever is really about a difference in the

00:46:16.240 | kids who are going there and not a difference in the amount of treatment effect of the school.

00:46:25.280 | Having said that, there are some things that we know matter for kids' school learning, like the

00:46:31.120 | size of classes. It is true that private schools tend to have smaller class sizes than public

00:46:37.360 | schools. That's the one very clear thing in the data, which does differ across school types

00:46:43.360 | and which shows up as impactful. This is a long-winded and very academic answer to this

00:46:50.880 | question, which is these differences are probably not as large as people perceive them to be.

00:46:57.040 | It actually reminds me of a comment that someone made about saunas, which I will bring back.

00:47:02.720 | There is data that shows that a sauna can have some positive health impact, but if you're eating

00:47:13.840 | cake and not exercising, the sauna is not where you should be focused to improve your health.

00:47:20.880 | I'm curious. Private education might have smaller class sizes. That might have an impact.

00:47:26.960 | But what are the things that are orders of magnitude more important on the outcome of your

00:47:31.920 | kids maybe past those first few years where we talked about having food and having shelter and

00:47:37.280 | those kinds of things that people should maybe reframe their thinking about from toddler beyond

00:47:44.160 | ages that are really important for parents to keep top of mind?

00:47:47.760 | It's an extremely good question because I've thought a lot about this. In some ways,

00:47:51.600 | some of the answer is it's a lot of the same stuff that matters when your kid is little.

00:47:56.800 | Which is having a stable place to live and enough to eat and family support. When we get into older

00:48:05.440 | kids, a lot of what people worry about is mental health. How do I have it be the case that my kid

00:48:13.680 | is resilient to the inevitable failures and complications and social issues and whatever

00:48:19.360 | that are happening in school? The answer to that is kids are more resilient when they

00:48:24.880 | feel that home is a safe place. Making home a place where kids feel not where you're fixing

00:48:32.720 | all their problems, but where they know when they show up there, somebody loves them

00:48:39.120 | unconditionally, even if they got a C on their math test or even if Sally pushed them down on

00:48:44.880 | the slide or said that their hair sucked or whatever was the thing in the day. That being

00:48:51.520 | a core stable space, that's ultimately how we're going to raise resilient kids. Probably much more

00:48:59.040 | important than is home a place that has Russian math or something.

00:49:05.520 | Yes. Which by the way, I've heard lots of people say, "Oh, can't send them to public school. They

00:49:11.200 | don't teach language until fifth grade and this other school does at second grade." People are

00:49:17.040 | making decisions that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year on small little things like that,

00:49:23.520 | which might be important to them. I'm not trying to say that's not an important thing,

00:49:27.440 | but it sounds like there are other things that if you're never around for your children...

00:49:35.280 | Yeah, I think there are always trade-offs and thinking about what am I trading off for this.

00:49:41.920 | You always want to have that in mind. Yep. And one other topic that I feel

00:49:48.080 | data is probably constantly evolving that I'm curious about is around technology and screen

00:49:54.240 | time. Because I don't know, when I was a kid, yes, we had a television, but there wasn't an

00:49:59.280 | iPad that I could sit on all day, every day. And our kids are not quite at the age where

00:50:05.120 | they're playing games on iPads and watching TV all day. But I feel like in a few years,

00:50:11.280 | their peers are going to be doing that whether we let them or not. And I honestly don't know

00:50:16.640 | how to think about it or whether the data is even developed enough.

00:50:21.760 | Yeah, it's a messy space. And I think it's worth separating out the passive screen time piece from

00:50:31.360 | the active social media phone piece. Kids will watch television on screens. And I think there's

00:50:42.480 | a limit to how much of that they should do. But the way I often will frame that to parents I think

00:50:46.320 | is right is this is an opportunity cost question. So there's nothing per se wrong with your kid

00:50:51.840 | watching Caillou. If they're watching Caillou for seven hours a day, they're not doing other

00:50:56.480 | things like going outside and hanging out with you and going to school. And that's too much.

00:51:01.840 | But is there anything inherently bad about access to some amount of screen time? No. It's just about

00:51:08.640 | setting boundaries and figuring out where does that fit in your family life and how do you leave

00:51:12.640 | enough time for the other things that you want your kid to be doing. So this is really a question

00:51:17.840 | of boundaries. When we talk about phones, then you introduce another set of issues. One is that

00:51:24.080 | it's actually very hard to set boundaries with phones. So when kids have access to phones,

00:51:30.560 | they have access to all of those things all the time. And we can try to set boundaries,

00:51:36.640 | but it's different than setting a boundary with a five-year-old with an iPad where you can just

00:51:40.400 | take it away. And if they scream like they're too short to reach it, it's hard to set those

00:51:48.160 | boundaries with a 13-year-old. And then we have a lot of debate about the question of social media.

00:51:53.360 | And I think the evidence on that is mixed, but certainly suggests that for some kids,

00:51:59.840 | social media is quite bad for mental health, particularly for girls.

00:52:03.200 | So I don't know. I think we're in the middle of a bit of a reckoning. John Haidt's book,

00:52:07.760 | The Anxious Generation, has gotten a lot of attention. I think we're a little bit of a

00:52:11.040 | reckoning around phones and the question of what's an appropriate way for society to deal with kids

00:52:16.400 | and phones. Yeah. I haven't had to deal with it yet, but I had our nephew over this weekend,

00:52:24.160 | and I was working on something on the computer. Since this show is called All the Hacks,

00:52:28.000 | I figured one of the things we could do before we wrap is just ask if you have any kind of

00:52:32.320 | interesting or uncommon parenting hacks you've picked up along the way or read through research

00:52:37.840 | that people listening might find helpful. I think people are always shocked at the

00:52:43.280 | incredible rigidity of my household, particularly around sleep. We have a fixed wake-up time during

00:52:55.040 | the week, which is 6.50 for the kids, and on the weekends it's 7.05, and that's it. We do not

00:53:00.720 | deviate from that ever. There's no sleep in on the weekends. I have a teenager now. There's no

00:53:09.520 | sleep in during this. Everyone in the house is rigidly associated with these bedtimes,

00:53:15.600 | and I think it just comes from having decided sleep was the most important possible thing,

00:53:21.200 | and we just do it. I think when people visit, they're like, "Everyone's very rigid in this

00:53:29.600 | household." What happens when they wake up early? I would love to set 6.50, but today it was 6.10.

00:53:35.760 | Yes, fair enough. One of my kids does wake up early, and then he just reads in his bed until

00:53:39.840 | the wake-up time. Okay. We covered a lot. Is there one takeaway,

00:53:48.720 | someone who is thinking about being a parent, is a parent, is a grandparent you want to leave them

00:53:54.240 | with? For someone who's thinking about being a parent, I think we talk a lot about the things

00:53:59.680 | that are hard in parenting, and it's expensive, and you have to think about every decision,

00:54:04.080 | but I always want to remind people the way that you will feel about your kid is hard to describe,

00:54:10.400 | and so while you're hearing about... We should talk about the parts that are hard,

00:54:14.320 | but I also want people to understand, not that you have to have kids, but this is a very cool

00:54:20.400 | experience, and it's really, really fun a lot of the time. Not all of the time.

00:54:27.040 | Yeah, not all the time, of course, but I'll just add that as someone who,

00:54:32.160 | when hanging out with other people's children, was never all that excited about children.

00:54:37.120 | Nieces, nephews, it's fine, but I didn't have this immediate attraction, like must have this,

00:54:45.040 | and so I was always asking myself, I was like, "Man, what if that's the same way I am with our

00:54:49.680 | kids? You'll never know," and I couldn't have been more wrong, and the more I bring this up

00:54:54.480 | with people, the more I find out that your opinion towards kids before having kids is completely

00:55:00.880 | different than your opinion after having them, so I will echo some of that sentiment.

00:55:06.400 | People ask me what's the best parenting advice, and I will tell them the thing that our pediatrician

00:55:11.520 | told me when my daughter was two, and I had some obsessive thing about bees where I was panicked

00:55:17.120 | about the possibility of her getting stung, and she just listened to this whole diatribe,

00:55:21.760 | and then she told me, "Yeah, I would just try not to think about that," and I think there's

00:55:27.680 | many things in parenting where I will step back and be like, "I'm just going to try not to think

00:55:31.840 | about that," because it's getting in my head, and my rational mind tells me this isn't important,

00:55:37.520 | and I'm just not going to think about it. Love it. Where can everyone who wants to get more

00:55:43.760 | and stay in touch with everything you're working on go? Aside from the books I'm linking to,

00:55:48.560 | the site I'm linking to, all that will be in the show notes, but say it here as well.

00:55:52.400 | Yeah, so parentdata.org is where I would start. That is where we have 1,500 articles about

00:55:59.120 | everything in parenting. There's an AI chat bot you can ask a question to. It is intended to be

00:56:04.480 | the place where you go instead of late-night panic Googling about your parenting questions,

00:56:08.560 | and you can find me on Instagram @ProfEmilyOster, and you can find my books on Amazon or wherever

00:56:14.880 | you buy books. Yeah, I'll link to all the books. We had a great time reading them, and reference

00:56:21.520 | now the family firm regularly when we're making decisions.

00:56:24.480 | Amazing. Thank you, Chris. This is really fun.

00:56:27.120 | Yeah, thanks for being here.

10 Biggest Parenting Myths, Debunked (ft. Emily Oster)

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