How much of the parenting guidance out there do you think 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 comes with a, "If you don't do this, terrible outcome X will happen." You know, "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 what we're hearing, 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 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 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. And 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. And 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. My sense is 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 really that they think is very important for you to do with your baby or you're doing something with your baby and your mother says, "Oh my God, that's so wrong. 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.

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. That starts with this idea of framing a question, of asking, "What am I trying to decide between?

What are really the realistic choices?" Then it goes on to spend some time collecting all the data that you need, collecting all the information, the logistics, whatever is going into that decision. Then you want to make the decision and 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 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 just point you to the answer.

Can you give an example first of how you might frame the question better so that it makes it easier to look at that data and make a decision? First of all, I should say data is almost never going to give you an answer. 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.

I'll give you a specific example, which is the decision of, "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? Then you get some data. In that case, for most people, the information that they would need would be both some information about what do we know about outcomes for daycare versus nanny versus stay-at-home parent.

That's the kind of data I talk about in my books. 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 quite important choices, important parts of the decision that go along with the data. 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. Do you think a lot of the decisions people treat as irreversible? I'm curious if they actually are. In business, 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 or at least not irreversible forever. 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. This is, I think, what happens in many cases, both in business and in parenting and in life, is I made this choice. I chose to send my child to this childcare option. Even if it's not working, admitting that it's not working requires me to say I made a mistake.

That's hard. 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, like your psychology there, by planning to revisit. In six months, we'll come back and ask if it worked. That's an opportunity to then frame a different choice, a reversal of the decision as like, "Well, this was an experiment, and we knew we were going to revisit it as opposed to we made a mistake." There are some decisions which are irreversible.

If you choose not to breastfeed at some point, you won't be able to restart. There's some biology, things like that. 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.

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. 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. When your kids get a little older than yours are, but there becomes this pressure to engage in very extensive extracurriculars, which take all of your weekends. There's this story about sitting in -- a friend of mine was 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 what are you going to do about it?" The answer is like, "Well, quit. You're going to quit." But it's so hard to quit. We put all this time in and some combination of remembering like, "Look, now you've learned.

Everyone hates gymnastics. You couldn't have known before, but you learned you hate it, and now you should quit." Some combination of that and just the idea of 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, but I'm biased -- 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. What can people do?

Because it seems like you said very beginning at the outset, 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 than when I was a kid? My sense is some of it is a feeling of -- at least in certain groups, you're having kids later, you've achieved something.

It's like there's a set of things I tried to achieve, going to college, getting a job, getting promoted, whatever it is, and then this is another thing. I'm going to totally win it. I'm going to win my kid the way that I won partnership at Ropes & Gray. That's what I'm doing.

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. The corollary of a lot of the choices we make probably don't matter as much as we think is that you could do everything right, even if that were a thing.

Then your kid might not turn out to be an Olympic athlete like you had hoped or whatever was your dream. That loss of control, that's really hard. That's really hard for a lot of people. 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?" It's not that we don't want to look… I mean, our job is to raise our kids to leave us and 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.

Sometimes you just want to have fun. Yeah. 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's a little bit of a kind of tension in the academic literature here because there are many, many individual things that people do. What does your kid do? Do this kind of extracurricular? Do you enroll them in these math things? Whatever. All this kind of stuff that people think a lot about where then when you look at the relationship with outcomes, you just don't see much.

That's true for something like breastfeeding also. People are like, "I just let the breastfeed for nine years." Actually, the correlations between breastfeeding and IQ are just correlations. Those are not causal in the best data. 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 how kids are coming into kindergarten in terms of their readiness to learn, in terms of their readiness to 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, some pretty basic things which, unfortunately, not every kid in America is getting.

But most of the people who are most worried about investing in their kids in these ways are doing all of those things. So we're obsessing about a bunch of small stuff on the margin that doesn't matter because we have heard the first three years are really crucial. The answer is the first three years are really crucial, but you've already done it by the time you are starting to think about, "Is it really important that my kid go to a Montessori school?" By the time you're down to how many master's degrees do the preschool teachers have to have, everything is fine.

Everything is already as much as you can do. 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, sort of effectively overthinking a lot of parenting decisions is helpful.

The fact that I thought about it and was careful and made a thoughtful decision, that helps me psychologically because 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 or paralyzed, or they're constantly messing up, I think that's where stepping back and saying, "Hey, let's embrace a little bit of the second best parenting, like kind of good enough," 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 is the author of what was once, I think, the most popular discipline book for parents called 123 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 it's one of the things that you want to prioritize is connections between each of those dyads.

Then he said to me, he said, "What is the most important dyad in the house?" I said, "I don't know, the parent to the oldest kid?" I had some idea. He was like, "No, it's the two parents." I was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah." I think that's part of this for me is as we get so focused on our kids, we can forget ourselves and we can forget our relationships outside of the kids.

Those are both pretty important to prioritize for the family because parents are people also. I assume children are watching those things also. 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.

I think that's probably right. Our kids learn a lot better from seeing than from being told. That's not their preferred mechanism of learning is to have things explained to them. Certainly, the image of my parent is willing to prioritize themselves communicates something. I think we worry that that communicates, "I don't care about you." But at some level, it doesn't.

I will say this is something just at a personal level I struggle with quite a lot. I do not do a good job, mostly, of saying that I need time. For me, actually, the only thing that works is running. I just because I, for whatever reason, have convinced myself that running is important for health, even though it's definitely not true at the level that I'm doing it.

It's the one thing where I can tell my family, "This is really important to me. I'm going to do it. I'm going to leave you for it." They kind of accept. They're just like, "Okay. Yeah. Mom, it'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. I come from a family of many replaced knees, so I've just accepted that 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. I want to go back to something. Throughout the books you've written, and I've 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 misconceptions.

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. My first book is about pregnancy, and there I think the one that really sticks out to me is bed rest.

Bed rest in pregnancy is something that actually is still pretty commonly prescribed, and it just isn't effective for anything. There's basically no complication for which bed rest has been shown to be a good idea, and it also has some pretty negative outcomes. If somebody is concerned about preterm labor, they'll tell people to just lie down.

I guess the reason I find this so interesting is because it strikes me as an example where the 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.

If you tell people, "Lay down for six weeks," most of the time that will appear to work because it just would have worked. So it's such a clear example where 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 this is a good idea and you just start doing it, it looks like a good idea because 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 is self-reinforcing. Now 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 the evidence slowly updates over time. But I think there's a lot of hysteresis in practice.

So if you are an obstetrician and 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. Yeah. 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. Uh-huh. Yeah. And we were like, "Oh, wow. We want more information." So we get six or seven times. So we go to the first meeting and they asked a bunch of these preconceived myths 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 went through them.

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 like, "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 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 coffee or sushi or even little bits of alcohol, I would get people to be like, "Yes, I looked at that data.

You've convinced me with the data that some amount of caffeine in pregnancy is okay, but I still wouldn't do it." Instead of pushing, "But why?" It's like, well, and I think some of it is just the feeling of if something bad happened, I would blame myself. And especially early in pregnancy when people worry about miscarriage, whatever, 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.

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 it's totally fine to say, "I think that we should have the evidence there. 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 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 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, "This person doesn't have the data," into, "This person is willing to step over a line that 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, to take the coffee out of her hand, to touch her belly, to say, "Well, I hope that's decaf, but why isn't your baby wearing a hat?

Did you know babies get cold?" It's like, "What do you want me to say?" 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.

That's just not okay. Yes, I agree. At some point, we talked about having a line of cards that said, "Well, actually," on the front, and then on the back, there would be information about caffeine or whatever in pregnancy, and you could hand them out to people. As someone who enjoys confrontation, I would have really enjoyed having that deck of cards.

I think my wife would much prefer to just walk away. Yes, just walk away, buy your coffee elsewhere. One other topic that I feel like maybe falls into the camp of "Heated with Controversy" that I'm curious about. I don't remember where the data ends up in that chapter of the book, but it's around sleep training, which I know is very polarizing.

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, when we talk about sleep training, we're generally referring to some system where a child is crying for some period of time during the night, and with the intention that they fall asleep on their own.

I'm guessing most parents that find this not a great method haven't actually learned about this Romanian study. This is the first I'm hearing about it. Do you think people just don't want to hear children cry, or why has it become so polarizing, absent knowledge about this Romanian orphanage? 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. There was this very unfortunate, tragic episode in Romania where they took away birth control, and there were a lot of unwanted births. 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.

Many of those kids did very poorly, for reasons that I'm sure are obvious from that description, did very, very poorly as adults and had many long-term psychological and other consequences. When people from the West came and visited these orphanages, one of the things that they saw was that the babies were very quiet, that if you didn't ever come and help a baby for many days, it just would stop crying.

Then people took that and were like, "Sleep training is a little bit of a Romanian orphanage, and so it probably is bad for kids. It's going to have all these same negative consequences." The thing is that there's just no evidence for that, and the difference between having your kid cry it out in a world in which they are loved and cared for and adequately fed and not abused, and etc., etc.

The difference between that and a Romanian orphanage is so vast that I'm not sure that you can -- I think the comparison is a bit -- it seems ridiculous. 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 kids cry it out and then they sleep.

We can see that it does improve sleep. It does actually improve parent sleep, decreases postpartum depression. 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 this kind of attachment, these attachment issues.

I think, first of all, there is a fair amount of talk on the internet, not so much about the Romanian orphanage, because I think people recognize that that doesn't seem that parallel, but just in general about the idea of attachment theory and people saying, "We know this must be bad for your baby because babies are made to be with their mothers all the time." 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 don't want to sugarcoat, it can take a few days for this to work, and it's really unpleasant to listen to, and it is not for everyone. There are people who will tell me, "I just couldn't do this," and I think 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. 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. Then if you don't do it, people are told, "We have to sleep train. You don't sleep train, your kid's never going to sleep, and you're ruining them forever." Somehow, both sides feel like they're 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.

There's no evidence that it would cause any long-term or short-term problems, but it's certainly not for everybody. If it doesn't fit what you want to do with your family, then you should feel free not to do it. 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. It has the same feel of people really disagreeing and falling in these very sharp camps, and people feeling judged.

The evidence to suggest that breast is best is there are some small benefits, largely in the short-term, but many of the benefits that are dated about breastfeeding are not actually supported in the best data. There's a lot of data around a lot of these topics. 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 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 is that 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 topic.

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 the differences that you see across groups are driven by the treatment rather than by preexisting 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, "Where's the first place I would look?" and say, "Go to the Cochrane Library and see if they've done anything on it," and that's often a very good starting point.

I've just searched your site and you've usually done some of these things. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the core things we're trying to do on parent data is give people some depth and then citations. So it's like, if you want to go further, here's the paper to read.

Here's kind of the core of this literature, but you get some depth already with the parent data posting. And I know 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?

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 friend, a colleague from Sweden, and at some point, she was telling me, she was like, "In Sweden, no one would ever swaddle their baby," because everybody knows if you swaddle them, their hips will be ruined.

They'll never learn to walk. There was some specific thing. And it's just like, not only is that not supported by data, but I had never even heard that. This is not in the US. No one is anti-swaddle. Swaddle is just like a regular milquetoast thing that we're doing. But she was like, "In Sweden, that is a 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, "Everyone I know in China, when they're pregnant in front of their computer, they wear this canvas radiation vest to protect themselves from the computer radiation." I was like, "Okay, there's no evidence for that." But it was just like, that's the cultural norm. And there's so many of these places where you see these differing cultural norms.

There are also then, when we're studying some of these things, 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 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 closer to at random or that is not really wrapped up in demographic differences across groups. Given the wide breadth of opinions all around the world, one challenge, and this probably the answer spans way beyond just parenting or pregnancy, but what advice do you have for someone who's read your book, done some research, come to an opinion, 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 our books will do is help that my books will do is help people have better conversations. In a sense, rather than framing that as an opportunity to say, "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 use this as a jumping off point. Sometimes the answer will be, "Well, that's the advice I give everybody, but I don't really know why." It's like, "Okay, well, that's more informative than just this is what we tell people." Sometimes the decisions you might discuss with a doctor or a nurse or even your partner are either small or they're a little bit easy.

Sometimes there are 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 kinds 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 like that. I think that there's a core reason, which is that with one of these very, very hard, complicated decisions, for different people, those are different. I think 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. We really want to know that we made the right choice. For many of these choices, you're never going to learn that. You are never going to find out if you did it, if you would have been happier in the other option or things would have worked out better the other way.

You just won't. You're going to have to live with the idea that you made a good choice ex ante, you made whatever is the best choice you made, and you're just never going to find out if it was right. 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 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.

One of the things I will talk to people about sometimes is this idea that there's no secret option C, that 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. People ask me, "So the classic example where I will talk about this is people who are thinking about a second kid, and one person wants a second kid, and one person doesn't." It's like, "My spouse is really committed to a second kid, and I'm really committed not to.

How can we make this decision?" 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.

You're just going to have to make the decision knowing that one person is not going to get the thing that they want. 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 as people. When things are hard, we just put them off. Sometimes we just have to force ourselves to make a choice. Yeah. It's funny. 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.

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. I just accepted this thing that I'm completely out of control for. Now, I'm really, really more motivated to figure this out for myself and our family." Yeah.

The will one is a good example, because I think when we think about that, we're thinking about, "Should I make a will or should I not die?" Well, actually, not dying is not on the table. It's really just, "Do I decide what happens after or not, or do I let the state decide?" I don't know.

I think people think about the prenups also. It's like, "Should I have a prenup? If I have a prenup, then I'll get divorced." It's like, "Well, you might get divorced anyway." Yeah. I think the data shows that that's at least a reasonable, likely outcome for almost any relationship. It does happen.

There's a couple of 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 in the 3, 4, 5, 6 range starting to go to school about the value of private education.

The thing that I think is different than this about a lot of other decisions is the financial impact it can have. 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.

It's one where it's hard to be like, "Oh, I don't care about my kid's education," but maybe good enough actually isn't as bad as you think and not worth stretching your finances. I guess I'm curious how much a "better education" 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, very different than the average, particularly if you're talking about the kind of private education that would stretch your finances. In the US, there's public education, there's a large share of private education is Catholic schools.

Actually, they tend to serve a pretty similar demographic to the public schools, and they tend to not be that expensive. Then there's this space of independent private schools, which can be very, very expensive, which is closer to what you're 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 on test score-wise than others.

We would also frame that as some of these schools are better than others. There's 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?" It 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 just what your kid is like and what happens at home and genetics and all the kinds of other stuff. 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 amount 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. It is true that private schools tend to have smaller class sizes than public schools. That's the one very clear thing in the data, which does differ across school types and which shows up as impactful.

This is a long-winded and very academic answer to this question, which is 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, which I will bring back. There is data that shows that a sauna can have some positive health impact, but if you're eating cake and not exercising, the sauna is not where you should be focused to improve your health.

I'm curious. Private education might have smaller class sizes. That might have an impact. But what are the things that are 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 toddler beyond ages that are really important for parents to keep top of mind?

It's an extremely good question because I've thought a lot about this. In some ways, some of the answer is it's a lot of the same stuff that matters when your kid is little. Which is 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? The answer to that is kids are more resilient when they feel that home is a safe place. Making home a place where kids feel 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 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. Yes. 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." People are making decisions that cost 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, but it sounds like there are other things that if you're never around for your children... Yeah, I think there are always trade-offs and thinking about what am I trading off for this. You always want to have that in mind.

Yep. 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 there wasn't an iPad that I could sit on all day, every day.

And our kids are not quite at the age where they're playing games on iPads and watching TV all day. But I feel like in a few years, their peers are going to be doing that whether we let them or not. And I honestly don't know how to think about it or whether the data is even developed enough.

Yeah, it's a messy space. And I think it's worth separating out the passive screen time piece from the active social media phone piece. 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 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 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.

So I don't know. I think we're in the middle of a bit of a reckoning. John Haidt'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.

Yeah. I haven't had to deal with it yet, but I had our nephew over this weekend, and I was working on something on the computer. 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, particularly around sleep. We have a fixed wake-up time during the week, which is 6.50 for the kids, and on the weekends it's 7.05, and that's it. We do not deviate from that ever. There's no sleep in on the weekends.

I have a teenager now. There's no sleep in during this. Everyone in the house is rigidly associated with these bedtimes, and I think it just comes from having decided sleep was the most important possible thing, and we just do it. I think when people visit, they're like, "Everyone's very rigid in this household." What happens when they wake up early?

I would love to set 6.50, but today it was 6.10. Yes, fair enough. One of my kids does wake up early, and then 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?

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, and so while you're hearing about...

We should talk about the parts that are hard, but 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 a lot of the time. Not all of the time. Yeah, not all the time, of course, but I'll just add that as someone who, when hanging out with other people's children, was never all that excited about children.

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, 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 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 panicked about the possibility of her getting stung, and she just 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, and my rational mind tells me this isn't important, and I'm just not going to think about it.

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. Yeah, so parentdata.org is where I would start.

That is where we have 1,500 articles about everything in parenting. There's an AI chat bot 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 @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.