When economist Emily Oster became pregnant with her first child in 2010, she found stress relief in numbers and facts about parenting. Data abated her anxieties and answered questions that her pediatrician, books and the internet often couldn’t agree on — questions like is it OK to drink coffee during pregnancy and what is the risk of miscarriage in prenatal testing?
Pregnancy seemed like “a world of arbitrary rules,” Oster, an economist at Brown University, later wrote in the introduction to “Expecting Better,” her 2013 parenting guide that debunked conventional parenting myths with data and research. The book sold around a million copies, was translated into 19 languages and catapulted Oster into the spotlight as a modern, relatable and fact-driven parenting guru.
Amid the anxiety-generating landscape of parenting guidance, filled with conflicting and sometimes patronizing advice, Oster offered women the best research so they could decide for themselves what worked best for them. Comedian Amy Schumer called Oster “the non-judgmental girlfriend holding our hand and guiding us through pregnancy and motherhood.”
Oster went on to write three more parenting books: “Cribsheet” and “The Family Firm” for parents of toddlers and school-age kids, and “The Unexpected,” which she co-wrote with Dr. Nathan Fox. She also founded ParentData — a hub for data-based parenting advice, which includes a newsletter and a podcast and has around 230,000 subscribers.
While Oster’s data-driven approach has earned her a large following, she’s also drawn sharp criticism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Oster’s advocacy to reopen schools put her in the center of a heated political debate, attracting pushback from public officials and teachers.
Now in “Raising Parents,” a new podcast in partnership with The Free Press, Oster continues to venture into controversial subjects. The episodes tackle some of the biggest, most provocative questions about our culture: Are we over-parenting our kids? Are we over-medicating them? Are boys being left behind in education and society? What does the data actually say about the most effective approach to disciplining kids? Her guests include big names such as Becky Kennedy, Jonathan Haidt, Richard Reeves and Hanna Rosin.
Oster doesn’t always agree with her guests, but she welcomes others’ viewpoints, bringing in data to support or challenge their arguments. And she doesn’t tell parents what to think, but instead distills thorny parenting issues into practical take-aways — you shouldn’t discipline your kids when angry, setting consistent boundaries is important, and kids need independence to become confident adults. In a climate fraught with suspicion and discord, can Emily Oster cut through the confusion with the cool reason of data?
Unpacking the nuance
Oster, who is 44, wore a black top with a black pearl-like necklace to our 9:30 a.m. Zoom meeting on a recent Wednesday. Before our conversation, she had already gone on her daily run, gotten her two kids off to school, and recorded a few Instagram stories for her 430,000 followers. Every week, Oster fields questions, some which arrive in a panic. One follower, whose message began with “Urgent!,” asked whether she should cancel a birthday party due to hand-foot-and-mouth disease exposure (no need to cancel, unless they get the disease, Oster said.) She is matter-of-fact in her delivery with hints of a deadpan sense of humor.
“You’d think that she’d have her brain in data and spreadsheets all the time, but she’s really warm,” said Tamar Avishai, a producer of the ParentData and “Raising Parents” podcasts, and a mother of two. “And (she’s) very straightforward, which makes her a great boss.”
Today, Oster will answer a series of written questions that came in on Instagram that include “What’s the data on eating your placenta after birth?” (There is no data on that, Oster said, but it’s not recommended to just eat raw placenta) and “I worry about accidentally breaking my baby’s fingers every time I dress him. Crazy?”
“It’s not crazy to worry, but also — don’t worry,” Oster responded. “Also, the fingers are surprisingly malleable.”
New parents are famously nervous about whether they are doing the right things, but the modern way we get advice is fraught from the outset, Oster told me.
If, for example, you do an internet search looking for answers to “Is it safe to co-sleep?”, the information that comes back is very “un-nuanced,” she said. The advice is often framed as binaries of do’s and don’ts without much explanation about the underlying reasons.
“There is just very little that’s in the middle, that acknowledges that different people might make different choices and helps people make better choices,” she said. ”And even when the answer is ‘definitely you should do this one thing,’ I think people would make that choice more confidently and frequently if we explained why.”
Economist and parenting expert Emily Oster dives into complex and controversial parenting questions in her new podcast “Raising Parents” in partnership with The Free Press. | Aisha McAdams
A passion for numbers
Growing up as the daughter of two Yale University economists in New Haven, Connecticut, Oster saw how concepts like opportunity cost and comparative advantage operated in everyday life. Oster’s mom, who saw the high opportunity cost of grocery shopping long before grocery delivery was commonplace, arranged with the local store to deliver the family’s groceries in milk crates. When Oster was 10 or 11, her idea of fun was fiddling with a regression program her dad taught her to use. In high school, Oster pored over historical records to figure out why the local canal in New Haven was converted into a railroad , which later became a trail. “It really hit this spark for me that research is a thing, that data is a thing where you could answer a question that you might care about,” she told me.
It was only natural that during her pregnancy, she wanted to know the numbers that backed up her pediatrician’s advice. But “the numbers were not forthcoming,” she wrote in “Expecting Better.” So she went to randomized trials herself to parse out the risks and benefits of various decisions. What she found clashed with the existing conventional wisdom: coffee (up to three cups) was safe, she concluded; an occasional glass of wine was fine, too, especially in the second and third trimesters.
She later wrote: “The key to good decision making is taking the information, the data, and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses.”
After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, Oster taught at the University of Chicago before becoming a tenured professor of economics at Brown University in 2015. In her day job, Oster focuses on health and statistical methods. “It’s doing a lot of math,” she explained. On the parenting side of her work, Oster applies those skills to evaluate studies and isolate the central ones from the weak ones. “A lot of it is about figuring out whether a study is showing a causal effect,” she said.
Ultimately, there is not one single way to be a good parent, said Oster, who is married to economist Jesse Shapiro. And taking into consideration your personal preferences doesn’t make you a bad parent, she believes.
“Oster gave agency back to mothers,” Avishai told me.
One mom, who read classical pregnancy books like “The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy” and “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” told me that reading Oster’s work was the first time she felt treated like a woman capable of digesting complex information and making responsible decisions on the basis of that information.
Oster’s breastfeeding advice alleviated the feelings of panic and shame for another mother, Abby Swensen of Salt Lake City, whose milk supply plummeted when she returned to work. “It helped me feel that I’ve done my best – and should not beat myself up about it,” Swensen said.
Oster writes in her 2019 book “Cribsheet” that breastfeeding improves digestion and helps with allergic rashes in babies, but “the data does not provide strong evidence for long-term health or cognitive benefits of breastfeeding for your child.”
‘I’m OK with people yelling at me’
But not everyone is a fan. Oster’s stance on moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy sparked pushback from many parenting experts. Critics have argued that Oster’s reliance on statistical analysis oversimplifies complex emotional, social and medical aspects of parenting. Some took issue with the fact that an economist, without a medical background, was dispensing medical-related advice. Business Insider called her “one of the most controversial health experts in the U.S.”
During the pandemic, Oster became even more controversial. She advocated for the reopening of schools, with proper safety measures, based on her findings that COVID-19 transmission rates among children were low and that in-person learning could be conducted safely with appropriate measures. She collected data from schools across the country, tracking case numbers, safety protocols and outbreaks to track transmission rates, and created a database, COVID-19 School Data Hub, that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Emergent Ventures, a program at George Mason University supported by Peter Thiel, among others.
In October 2020, Oster wrote a piece for The Atlantic entitled “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” where she wrote: “We do not want to be cavalier or put people at risk. But by not opening, we are putting people at risk, too.” In response to Oster’s other viral Atlantic piece about vaccinations, one activist wrote: “She does not care about the impact of an infected kid on the rest of society.”
However, subsequent data from the CDC and other experts have supported many of Oster’s findings.
Looking back, Oster says she has no regrets about standing her ground on school reopenings. “It felt very important and I think something that is true about me is that I am OK with people yelling at me,” she told me.
It’s not that she’s not affected by criticism, but Oster said she tends to move on quickly — in a way, “it’s like childbirth,” she said. “I have aged into understanding what it is to have people be upset with you.”
The controversy over spanking
The “Raising Parents” podcast is well-crafted, with Oster offering data points to unpack her guests’ comments. We even get to hear children’s voices, which are rarely included in conversations about parenting.
Oster and her producers interviewed over 50 people for the limited series. Hearing from a range of experts was “clarifying” and helped her construct a more balanced narrative on topics like ultra-processed foods (they’re not poison, but should make up an occasional snack and not the majority of the diet). For the episode titled “Are we feeding children the wrong foods?”, Oster spoke with Vince Caguin, who runs food services for a school district near Sacramento, California, and explains how he makes a blood orange appealing to school kids by likening it to fruit punch and letting it drop from his chin. “It was just cool to listen to someone who was so passionate about something that is so important, where we deeply undervalue that kind of expertise,” Oster said.
But there were conversations she found unsettling, too. On an episode about discipline, Hal Chaffee, a pastor, blogger and father of six, shared his view that spanking, when it’s done “in love and respect,” can help kids. The interview was a hard one for Oster, she told me, and she told listeners about her disagreements with Chaffee’s views. She noted that studies show that physical punishment leads to worse behavior at older ages. She continued: “To surface my personal views, I do not believe in spanking, completely independent of anything in the data.” But she wanted to hear Chaffee out.
“I think it’s really important in these conversations for us to understand where other people are coming from,” she told me. “If we’re going to go out and say that every single one of those people is evil and bad, and we’re not going to listen to them or engage with them — that’s a really problematic approach.”
That bit of the podcast didn’t sit well with some listeners. One mother told me she stopped listening when she reached that point in the conversation. (According to the 2021 American Family Survey, 52% of men and 42% of women believe spanking as a discipline method.)
Others have questioned Oster’s choice to align with The Free Press, a media company started by Bari Weiss, an editor who left The New York Times, citing a hostile work environment and the stifling of intellectual diversity. (One comment on Instagram said: ”A big fan of you, Emily Oster. But a little disappointed this is under the umbrella of The Free Press, one of the most biased ‘news’ outlets of our time.”)
In partnering with The Free Press, Oster said she hopes these conversations will get a broader audience, she told me. “The Free Press ethos is to have conversations even if we do not always agree, which felt right for these big questions.” And while Oster doesn’t agree with everything The Free Press publishes — ”which is part of the point!” — she respects the outlet. “I knew that we could make something really interesting together,” she said.
While the ParentData podcast, Oster’s other podcast, draws mostly female listeners, “Raising Parents” has been drawing more men, she said. “I think it’s really good — we could use more people of both genders engaged with these questions,” she added.
More questions to answer
At one point in our conversation, I confessed to Oster that my seven-year-old daughter doesn’t eat fruits or vegetables despite my attempts to change that. “It’s really hard,” Oster offered empathetically. The other day, in a moment of desperation, she said she resorted to telling her 9-year-old son that he’d get scurvy if he didn’t finish his vegetables. Her husband intervened because of the fib, and Oster clarified: “You will not get scurvy, but I recommend more vegetables.”
Now that Oster has looked at data on nearly every major — and some not-so-major parenting issues (think: rotating toys) — I wondered how that knowledge of best practices colors her own parenting. “It’s much easier to tell people what to do than do it,” she said. But data relieves her anxieties and boosts her confidence as a parent.
“After spending much time in this literature, you realize — there are some core things that matter — giving your kid a stable home and enough to eat, and making sure you love them,” she said. “But most of this stuff around the edges is not as important.”
There are still many “answerable” questions she could work on, she says — like what the data says about milk storage or treating mastitis. But good, robust data is still lacking on many issues. The ongoing debate over phones in schools is one of them. “I think it’s a good idea to take (the phones) out of schools, but I also think it would be great if we could show why it’s a good idea,” she said.
Oster, the economist, often sounds just like your fellow mom friend. Parents don’t prioritize themselves enough, she says. And Oster is not talking about just getting an occasional massage.
“I think the most important thing for parents to hear is it’s OK to structure your life in a way that gives you something you enjoy that you get to do even every day,” she said.
Oster’s message to stressed-out parents is simple: “Give yourself a break. You’re doing a good job.” The data is there, Oster assures us: chances are your kid is going to be OK.
