Parenting Expert Emily Oster: The #1 Parenting Mistake That Causes Unnecessary Stress (Use THIS Data-Backed Framework to Debunk the Biggest Parenting Myths!)

One of my favorite things about what you do is using data to bust myths. Manicurins and pedicurins are safe during pregnancy.

“Is sex okay, can I exercise? Can you eat spicy food?”

Can you drink wine? We created a debunking myths game. Oh great. Pregnant women shouldn't drink coffee. That is a f*ck.

You can't eat sushi while pregnant. Also f*ck. Natural birth is better. I eat the phrase, natural birth. Breast milk or formula. People will tell you breastfeeding's free.

I'm sorry, it's my time. I have no value. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. The place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed.

And today's topic is one that you are always asking for.

And today's guest is someone that has been in high demand. So I'm so excited she's here. Parenting has never come with more information or potentially more anxiety. And today we're joined by bestselling author and economist

Emily Oster, who's books expecting better and cryptocurrency sparked a global conversation about what the data actually says. If you've ever wondered whether all this advice is helping or just making parenting more complicated,

this is the conversation we've all been waiting for. Emily Oster, welcome to On Purpose. Thank you for having me, I'm so happy to be here. This is such an important subject matter that I feel deserves to have time, energy, effort put into it's

going to transform our lives, the lives of the children you love the most. And I'm so grateful that you've dedicated so much of your life to doing this work. So I'm packed for you.

“Now I'm so delighted to be here at May I think parenting is hard,”

but also incredibly fun. And I feel really lucky to get to be part of people's journey, even a little bit.

Absolutely. We've probably never had this much data on parenting.

That's right. Has that made parenting better? Or are we still just overwhelmed? I think, yes, I know. I don't think there's a simple answer to that question. If there are clearly places where we have gotten data,

we can talk about specific examples where we've learned something from the data that has improved survival or the experience of parenting or something that makes everyone happier. And I think they're really good examples of that.

In the evidence, it is also true that living in an environment where one is constantly fed, the data says, the data says, the data says, or where people are constantly looking for, well, what is the evidence that's going to tell me that I'm doing this right?

I think that's actually quite stressful and sometimes makes parenting much harder. So some of the time I wish I could sort of help people think more about, you know, here are the pieces of data that are going to help you craft your approach.

And here is the stuff that really doesn't matter. What you do when stuff trying to look for the right answer because anything is fine. Data is really useful, but it is really overwhelming.

“How do you approach a different way that's actually helping people?”

Yes, I think there's really two sort of core pieces of what I'm trying to do for people. So one is trying to help them understand which of the pieces of data they're seeing are real and which are not.

So there's a lot of confusion of correlation and causation. You know, people told, well, if you do this for your kid, they'll be better in this way, but if you dive into the data, you find that link is not, oh no, not causal. And then the second piece is trying to help people prioritize

and say, you know, here are some things that are really important. And then here are some things which, even if they matter to a little bit, they can't matter a lot. And so recognizing that parents have a limited capacity,

that we all have a limited capacity to focus on a million different things.

It once our goal should be to figure out what really matters and then what really matters enough that it should be sort of top priority. And then we kind of do the pieces that we can do in the constraints that we have. What's the most shocking piece of data that you've come across looking at parenting research that really struck you?

So when I was working on expecting better, I one of the things I looked at was bed rest, which, you know, is actually prescribed to a fairly large share of people for a lot of different complications. So people are just told, you know, and you can sort of see logically where that might, you might feel like, well, if you're at risk of preterm birth,

maybe you just lay down, like, I don't know, the baby will stay in. Like, there's some kind of logic that connects there. But when you actually look at the data, there's almost no condition for which bed rest is helpful and many conditions for which it's in many ways in which it's actually harmful.

This is something where it's so obvious in the data that we're doing is not the right thing. And it was one of the things that galvanized me. I think, okay, we actually really need to show people what the evidence says so they can make better choices. Absolutely. I want to talk about today, like, lots of different,

kind of phases of the journey of parenting. And I wanted to start with getting pregnant from what I'm hearing from

getting everything right, having some control.

“What's your take on how much we can control when you're trying to get pregnant?”

It's a lot more limited than people think. You know, people getting pregnant is very stressful for many people and particularly in an environment where, you know, the environment, I think a lot of my readers come in where you've waited a, like, a long, you're, you're a little older, which does, you know,

fertility declines with age. It doesn't drop off a cliff, but it goes down. And also people have, like, waited and made a lot of investments and thought, you know, okay, this is the right time in my life and, like, now they want to be pregnant now. It's like, I waited, I decided the right month, like, this is my month.

And then it, like, doesn't happen that month and you're, like, wait, but this was my month.

And so I think there's, uh, there's a kind of tension that that comes with that. And that unfortunately makes people were trying to get pregnant quite vulnerable to being told all kinds of stuff that they could do that is not based on evidence, but often costs quite a lot of money to improve their chances. For example, buy these really expensive prenatal vitamins.

For me, that's like the most, you know, it is important to take a prenatal vitamin. The, the one at CBS that costs, you know, 10 cents a pill is fine. It has the things that you need. People are buying these prenatal vitamins that cost you, you know, $150 a month and say, you know, this is, don't you want to give your baby the best start with the best, it's like vitamins are all the same. You know, you don't need to spend,

so that's like just one sort of small example. And so much that marketing is praying on this

feeling. Oh, like, well, I got to get this right. I got to get this right. The reality is when you think

“about, you know, what, what matters for getting pregnant. There's a, there's a few things.”

So one is having sex at the right time. So it's pretty clear. There's only a small number of days in the cycle where you can get pregnant. And so some cycle tracking and knowing when you're abulating is important. And then you, you need sperm that is working. So I think the other piece of this that maybe I think people are almost under investing in. It's been so much time with women thinking about all the things that that we need to do and it is true that that is half of the

equation, but you also need good sperm. And I actually think we're probably under investing and having men do some like preconceptions sperm testing. It's not that hard to do. That really, very hard at all. And there are a bunch of things that men can do to improve their quality of the sperm if it turns out you have a sperm issue. So people said to me like, what should I do? I would say track your cycle so you can figure out when you're abulating, make sure you have sex

at the right time and get your partner sperm tested and then you know, don't binge-drink and quit smoking. That's kind of it. Those are the things within your control. Those are the main things within your control. Yeah. And what were some of the recommendations for men who wanted to improve their sperm count on, improve their sperm quality as well? So a lot of those, but there's sort of like a category of substances. So smoking cigarettes or marijuana

heavy drinking. These are all known to affect sperm mobility. You need enough of them. They need to be good. This one may need to have the right shape. And smoking and drinking affect all of those parameters. The other thing is heat. So a sperm don't like to be hot. Testicles don't make good sperm when they're hot. And so sometimes people keep your testicles too hot if you're doing a lot of hot tub or a lot of sauna. You're wearing like very tight underwear that can affect

sperm count. So sometimes loosening up the underwear quitting the sauna can be helpful. I like how you're already simplified it to a few things that we can control. I think that's that's both very helpful and often for many people very frustrating.

“Thank you so much. Actually, you know, I think the way if you want to get this done,”

you want to be doing something about it every day. Like that's at least for many of the people like for for myself when I was in this position. Like we were trying it pregnant. I wanted to be investing. You know, every day I want something to do that's going to move me forward and the advice of sort of like, well, okay, if as long as you've done these things, you pretty much just like it's just a dice roll. Like, you know, if you get it exactly right, maybe it's a 30% chance

in a given month that you will get pregnant and get another try that the next month and that's sort of all there is. I think that can feel like, well, I wanted to like, but what can I do? And I think that is where we get into people feeling willing to do a variety of other things that feel more like investment. Well, often tell people like you can track, you know, you want to like track your cycle, like get yourself up spreadsheet, like enter something in an app every

day if that's the thing that makes you feel like you're moving forward. What are some of the mistakes people can make during pregnancy that have post pregnancy complications? So there's certainly some behaviors during pregnancy that have, you know, potential very long-term impacts. So you've been striking heavy alcohol consumption during pregnancy, smoking cigarettes during pregnancy also, you know, not good and there of course are some medications that are very

counter-indicated during pregnancy. Those are kind of the big like a behavioral issues that we would point to in terms of contributing to birth defects. I get an awful lot of questions from people that are very, very, very worried about extremely unlikely exposures or very minimal concerns.

stuff that you shouldn't be doing that matters a tremendous amount to just isn't. And there is research, we just saying that the research doesn't show anything having that bigger. Like we have studied these things deeply enough and looked at them. Yes. And, and of course,

we can always do more research. But I would say there's a sort of a couple of pieces

of how I might think about evidence in that case. So one is, you know, there are places where we've studied this and we can see, you know, there's no correlation. In some of those cases you say, well, what if there's a very tiny effect? You know, we don't have an infinite amount of data. And I'd say, yeah, there are almost anything you could say, well, couldn't there be a very tiny effect? But those effects are kind of be so tiny that we probably shouldn't care about them.

They are in the rounding error of everything else that you're going to do. And so in some sense, getting back to something I said at the beginning, they go a lot of this is about thinking about prioritizing and understanding that we want to make choices about things that are important and not obsessive at every tiny thing, even if, you know, maybe doing this one thing could

on average, cost your kid point. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, one IQ points. Like that's not important.

“It should be worried about that. So I think that's one, it's kind of one reason we don't know this.”

And then there are many things we're just mechanistically, it's impossible. You know, the other day somebody asked me, you know, my lawn was treated with pesticides. And then I went outside and I touched it and I washed my hands really carefully, but now I'm really worried. There is no mechanism whereby touching a lawn even recently treated with pesticides and then washing your hands, what actually impact your pregnancy, like literally no mechanism. And so it's not an interesting

thing to study, but it is impossible. Yeah. Yeah. What's the study that hasn't been done that you would love to see happen? There are almost an infinite number of things like that. I mean, I think what would be a top three? But one I would really, really like to see is a large randomized trial

about SSRIs. So a lot of women come into pregnancy using anti depressants, anti depressants are

really important for a lot of people's daily functioning are evidence on the safety of anti depressants a little more complicated. So there are some evidence suggesting they may raise a risk of postpartum hemorrhage, so not much in the direction of affecting the baby, but some things about health. And just in general, that evidence isn't perfect. We don't have a randomized, we don't have like large randomized trials. I would like to see large randomized trials because

“I think many people are avoiding these medications because they're worried about the quality of the”

evidence, but they're avoiding them when they would be very helpful. And I suspect that those trials would give us a much better platform from which to make decisions about this thing where there is just a very clear tradeoff between some potential risks. We don't know that much about and the very real benefits. So SSRIs trials, what I think. That would be so fascinating, I feel because with the amount of rise in people needing mental health medications, anti depressants,

whatever it may be in that space, only going up, knowing how that really correlates would make for a very, very insight. What does it take to get something like that done? Like, what do you -is hard? -It's hard. -It's probably already happening, is it? That's definitely not happening. I think it's very hard to do a study like that for like a bunch of different reasons. So one is even the design, you worry a little bit, ethics. So you know,

we wouldn't, you couldn't do a study where you're forcing people to be anti depressants. Now that's something you could get around and you could say we have a bunch of people who are on age to depressants with some of them we're going to encourage them to go off. We're going to not encourage them again. That has some ethical issues but you probably could get it. You're probably at that

“through. I think the other issue is I'm not sure who's going to fund that. So if you think about”

like how science works, like a lot of what gets drug companies fund a lot of trials, all these drugs are on generic at this point. So we're like a large share of them. So the drug companies are not going to be interested in funding those those trials. And it isn't clear that like the NIH is interested in funding that trial either. And so I think we're sort of up against some ethics and also some real sort of funding limitations. And it's people only to experiment on pregnant women

that's it. -Which is a good reason. Good reasons, but it has some costs. -Yeah. I was going to ask you, what's one thing that pregnant women worry about that you'd like them to stop worrying about and stop focusing on something else? -One thing is people worry a tremendous amount of what they eat. I think that that's overblown actually most of the food restrictions that people are told about don't make any really don't really make any sense. People worry a lot about

exercise. There are a lot that people are told you know don't don't exercise in this way and actually most of those again are totally overblown restrictions that people should be encouraged to kind of keep doing what they are already doing. And I think people should if you sort of said like what should you replace that with. I think people could could do more to prepare their

-What would you recommend? How would you go about thinking about that? -If you think about what happens when you have a kid to your marriage you are introducing a new person somebody who you there's a new project. There's a new group project and you care more about this group project than you have ever cared about anything in your entire life but you have no idea how to do it. And you're working with another person who also has no idea how to do it but really, really cares

and you might not agree and also you're extremely tired because you haven't slept and you don't

“have as much money or time as you did before. Is terrible good a project environment? And so I think”

during the pregnancy is a good opportunity for prayer for like how could we make this group project as good as possible knowing that it comes with some challenges. And so one thing I tell people all the time and I think everyone should do is put meetings on your calendar for after the baby is born that there should be a bi-weekly check-in meeting with your partner where you sit down and you talk about like what's going well, what's not going well, what could we do differently? This

is sort of comes a little bit out of some of what we know about kind of marital satisfaction which is people like a marital check-up. It's an opportunity to say here's the things I'm doing

here's what I'm feeling resentful about like an opportunity to connect in a kind of low

sort of you know cool state rather than in a hot state but I think early on in people's life you need this much more and if you don't put those meetings on the calendar before you have the baby you will never have them because you will not once once the group project starts you're not going to schedule meetings because of all the other stuff. Yeah I mean that sounds like really wise advice especially when you explain it like a group project that the environment isn't really set up for.

A lot of parenting is about you know if you're parenting with another person is about managing that relationship we assume that it's all going to be great because we love the other person

“and I think there's a little bit of saying like you could love someone but still running a”

business with them is different and this is a little bit more like running a business than I think most people think. Yeah yeah we almost think that love is good enough when you're having a baby because it's a byproduct of your love but the project is still a project. And love is so important it's the most it is such an important thing but the project is still you know things still have to happen in the project. Yeah absolutely absolutely I was going to ask you what you mentioned

this a bit earlier what are the key differences between trying to get pregnant in your 20s and in your 30s and what should people be considering both ways. So you know our our fertility is very high when we're in our late teens which is not a convenient time for many people to have kids and then it's sort of slowly declines kind of through their slowly through their 20s maybe getting a little faster through the 30s and sort of eventually kind of falling off towards

towards menopause. So I think one thing for people to understand is just you know this is a real factor in in fertility. So there are plenty of opportunities to extend the life of fertility

IDF is very effective. Egg freezing can be an interesting option but the reality is that it is

already a pregnant when you're older than when you're younger and that is something that I think people should know and at least understand that there is some trade-off there is not a possible

“but it is harder and then you have to trade that off with the fact that you may or may not be”

ready to have a kid when you're 20 you know may not have the partner you want you this may not be the right time and so I think just being realistic about the existence of those trade-offs is kind of all you can do in terms of making decisions. Is the other piece I would often remind people is that your kid doesn't go away after like the first six months to a year and so there is a little bit sometimes not sort of pair of people be like well this year is a really good like this is a

good year for me because like it's a down year of work and it's like well after this year like they're still gonna be a he's still gonna be around and so I think just sort of understanding that your life is going to no matter when this happens aspects of other parts of your life are going to change and evolve as your kids get older they're gonna be an easier but also another ways harder

and this is gonna be part of your life forever and so I would almost never tell people like

like find the best year it's like not the best you need the best 18 years so like if you have a a good solid 18 years possibly more yeah yeah I used I have I have a mental that used to tell me when you have kids you've got a right off he used to say and he's you know raised three kids and they're all adults now and has a great relationship with them and he's like JJ's right off seven years of your life per kid like that was his his advice and I was like yeah that's

interesting I don't have kids but that same point as in like it wasn't just a one year thing or two year thing but but I appreciate what you're saying because I think and this isn't just about kids it applies to so many things but to parenting as well I think the question we often ask

how this is going to change our life right do we know how to adapt do we know how to build the environment for the group project like do we know what that's gonna require yeah is more of an important question than is this the right time because time is kind of undefined as to what it's

“valuable for yeah and I think it's very very hard to ask is this the right time and and be confident”

about that over the period that we're talking about you know it's just like you just can't know and so I think it is really much more as you say about kind of crafting like is this the how can we make this setting work for this project that we are embarking on. One of my favorite things about what you do is using data to bust myths and also bust these things that we get stressed about and overwhelm us so what we created for you was a debunking myths

okay game for creating childcare so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read a bunch of myths cliches things that we've all heard and then you can give us the data driven answer and the

insight behind it so the first one is it's okay to drink one glass of wine when you're pregnant.

Yes special in a later trimesters I mean if you look at the if you look at the data it's very clear that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad and binge drinking and anytime of pregnancy is very dangerous but if you look at the data it looks at occasional drinking during pregnancy it just doesn't show those it doesn't show those kind of effects and we actually do have a lot of data on this because in many places outside the US this kind of alcohol consumption is much more common and we have

you know reasonably good approaches to sort of figuring out causality there and so that doesn't mean everyone should is going to choose to do this but I think that that it is uh that is something that looking at the evidence many people are comfortable with the occasional drink. Got it okay it was no expecting that in another uh next one pregnant women shouldn't drink coffee. That is a myth that is a myth so there is some discussion about links between caffeine in the first trimester and

miscarriage. Uh it turns out that those links don't show up pretty much at all until about four to six cups of coffee so if you are consuming a sort of typical person amount of coffee a day you know one in the morning one in the afternoon that is there's no evidence of downsides there but even when we look at people who consume like a tremendous amount of coffee is like data from Sweden or people are consuming eight cups of coffee a day it's probably the case that any links with pregnancy

loss are just driven by uh by nausea so people who are really nauseous don't drink coffee and that's also correlated with lower risk of miscarriage. There's a lot of stuff going on in the data but the bottom line is that some coffee is totally fine. Well okay uh you can't eat sushi well pregnant. Also not true. How do people got to come up with this stuff then? So sushi is you know you can get food more known as from sushi uncooked fishes more dangerous than cooked fishes just like that

but that's always true and it is not more true during pregnancy. So this is something I sort of

“talk a lot about is thinking about okay you should generally think about trying to avoid the”

norovirus from your from your sushi and you should be thinking about that when you're not pregnant and when you're pregnant there's no particular risk to sushi during pregnancy. Okay uh you can't get Botox while pregnant or breastfeeding. Okay Botox you know this is the number one question people ask me. Really? Oh yes. This is like the number one question which is amazing. Uh that's fascinating. I know it only it's only started like in the last five you know I mean do you

was it before that? Something really something. It was much more like coffee. No it was it's always like style stuff but like Botox like really people really into Botox. Yeah so you're not gonna all define someone to get you do your Botox when you are pregnant although there is no evidence that it would be dangerous it's just like no one's gonna do that during breastfeeding it is it is

“fine the Botox doesn't go into your milk and you can do it if you want to have your Botox.”

I always tell people that you're faceless great you don't name Botox. People are like oh my god thank

you so then then they're like oh but what about GLP ones that's their next question. Oh and what's the take on that? So you shouldn't be on a GLP one when you're pregnant because that's not a time for weight loss but during breastfeeding you know generally if you're sort of early on in breastfeeding and this apply is still being established. Being on a GLP one can lower your breast milk supply and so that is probably a reason to avoid it but if you're later in breastfeeding it's actually good

evidence that they don't pass through to the milk so people want to go back on their GLP one should be fine. All right I think this one's a big one. Okay we have some milk share of breast milk

to breastfeeding lower risk of gastrointestinal illness some slightly lower risk of

eczema but a lot of these like long-term things people are told like breast milk makes your kids smarter, a fan or they can fly or whatever that stuff is all correlation not

“causation so both of these options are very good ones. Are there any negatives for formula?”

I mean I guess you could sort of say well if breast milk lowers a risk of gastrointestinal infections formula raises it depends what you're thinking about as your baseline but I think in that sort of in that comparison there are some of these things where breast milk shows up shows up as positive but I think it's just much much much smaller. The data shows it is much much much much smaller than what a lot of people are told. Right and it sorts your economic

conversations interesting there as well isn't it? Yeah so one of the reasons why I think we are so

frequently hearing you know breast is best breast milk has all these positive benefits is because the people who are breastfeeding are very differently selected than the people who are who are not so breastfeeding tends to be associated with higher maternal education, higher maternal income, other resources and those things themselves are associated with higher performance on IQ tests and so one of the things that's really interesting in something like the breast milk IQ linkage

is you can see you if you just compare kids who are breastfed to kids who are not the you see you big differences in IQ if you control for you just for some differences across the moms those effects get a little smaller if you adjust for more differences if you adjust for say moms IQ tests they get even smaller and then if you compare siblings so one kids breastfed ones not but the same mom you see no effect and that sort of tells me that these initial effects

we're seeing are really about differences across who's breastfeeding and who's not as opposed to the effect of the breast milk it's all right and and then I've spoken to moms as well who are like also formula is really expensive too so it's like well both things are very I mean both things are very expensive people will tell you you know only breastfeeding's free it's like I'm sorry it's my time I've no value actually these things are both expensive for me I cost money breastfeeding

costs time and I think it's not it's not obvious that one of these is cheaper I mean I will say like you know in my mother when I was writing all these books of pregnancy I read both the set of pregnancy books of my grandmother had and like then you know 1940s and the ones that my mom had in like the early 1980s and there's a there's Dr. Spark Spock was like the core to the 1980s and in his book from the time and I when I was born he's got this discussion of breastfeeding and this is a

time in which people were sort of still coming back to breastfeeding after a long period of like formulas the best and he says something that's like you know like breastfeeding you might try breastfeeding a lot of people like like it a lot of people think it's good you know enjoy it and that's sort of how he puts it like this is something that you should you should try because it might end

“up working for you and I think like that message I think is really good like you should try this and we”

should help people figure out out of breastfeeding which is not that easy and we should be supportive of it because it may work for a lot of people which is different from saying we should be telling people that if you don't do this your kids gonna suck which is how a lot of people are hearing that messaging and that is not a healthy message and is not true and it is not helpful to anything yeah it's it's it's a lot of pressure it's a lot of not taking into account what people do

for work come it's time they have how much income they have like it's not taking in account all of that yeah I mean one of the reasons so I had written expecting better which is the book about

pregnancy and then I was not sure if I was gonna write a second book is like a long time between

the two books had had a second kid and all kinds of other stuff but I think the thing that ultimately pushed me over into writing cryptocurrency which talks all about breastfeeding among many other things is the emails that I kept getting from dads and I remember this one very vividly that was like my wife is so like is he's like killing herself over breastfeeding and she's depressed and she is all like this is she said you know she thinks he has to do this and I really like

“I want to help her like I think she would listen to you can you tell me how important is this”

really like what is the data say and I think that moment of someone being like this is really harming my family and I think that it would make it would make people feel better to know what the data really says that was kind of I think that's just really important yeah and I think we underestimate and this applies to other areas of life as well where stress about something you care about totally doesn't end up having a good impact on it or for example staying healthy is important

but stressing about staying healthy is kind of working counter intuitively against you as well and it doesn't really help and so similarly if it's it's a hard thing with children I can imagine

than it is even to your own health but stress is always going to be reflected poorly as well

that's more likely to have a bad impact yeah I think we also have to recognize like some of what we're like like the reason we're having kids and we're doing this is like because it's fun and because we want our family to be functioning in a nice way and if somebody is very unhappy if mom is very unhappy that is negatively affecting how the family is functioning and I was gonna say parents or people too because I think we often forget that they're an

important part of the family what do you wish men knew about pregnancy that maybe they don't because they don't experience it and they don't really understand what's going on and they get it is very hard to really understand the experience of pregnancy and these various things I tell men you know like you have fun fact like you get a P on women P on some lot because there's a lot of pressure there's like things like that which I think it's good just good to know the stuff that

“is that is going on but I think much more important is sort of understanding like how can I”

engage when the baby arrives like that you know that's the time when we often get this sort of bifurcation of mom and dad where the woman ends up doing more of the work and sort of just learning more and then she knows more and then he doesn't know and think there's like a real opportunity in that moment to kind of both lean in to learning how to do everything at the same time I would worry much more about that than about kind of understanding all of the nuances of of

pregnancy which are just it's hard to explain yeah got it yeah and I'm just asking for myself right yes yeah yeah I mean people will be like oh you know you should understand uncomfortable it's like yeah it's pretty uncomfortable even died I think it's what you're saying

make sense to me it's almost like it's the preparation piece I think it's you can never

fully empathize with how painful it is how difficult like you never that isn't even it but it's yeah how can men better prepare for example I had a lot of people that I know who's partner's went through like postpartum like afterwards and a lot of men I knew just didn't understand what was going on and they were just like she's gone crazy she's just depressed all the

“time like you know those kind of things and it's almost like I think we're learning a bit more”

now I hope and and conversations like this are all to help raise awareness to have the right conversations to prepare for the project to set up homes in a better way to know what make come next you know and so I think there's all of that where it's like you don't you don't know what that person's going through and if it's pregnancy brain a real thing for example like is that real? not not really you know I think it's just so you're tired yeah but I think there's something to

come back to like the pre-pregnancy something I would say is you know for for people who are going through like IVF which can be very like time consuming and huge amount of work spending that is a place where women will often take the vast brunt of this experience and we're actually there's way more they could be shared because there's a lot of logistics there's a lot of like paying attention to when are we doing this and what and just keeping up to date and that is a place where

“I think men could lean in far more you know you can't take the shots you're not going to be”

you know having your eggs harvested but fundamentally like there's a lot of logistics one of these high-end diaper versus every day diaper affordable diaper doesn't make a difference I wish I could tell you the answer to this I my kids are 10 and 14 and we use that diaper and it was fine I will say people swear by the code or diapers but I haven't seen any any anything outside of the anecdote on that so this yeah this was me those works great like that you know no no complaints about the

like no complaints about the big brand diapers on my side okay amazing good tonight talks

me about the difference between wooden toys and plastic toys plastic toys that make noise are super super annoying your kid will love that and it will drive you out of your mind I love it it's all right you like it but we had this so to look at at the data you know people will say you could ask to have wooden toys at the you know it fundamentally there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that some toys aren't real toys can be developmentally appropriate right and so

some of these making sure that your kid has some things to do that are kind of matching their developmental phase is good you know stacking blocks are good for certain ages sorting things are good for it looks so stuff like that but does it need to be made of wood or you know carved in some particular way no and kids do like the electronics stuff super annoying I've definitely talked to parents who believe in like monetary techniques or all of that which is all about wood

you know but there's no data behind that there's no no there's no data on that may I think that's

is a little as much about kind of shaping and experience that you feel good about as it is

“about you know optimizing your kid in some way and I think that's so some of those help people like”

that's that's something you enjoy like that's great I'm going to be over here with my like poll lady bug poll toy the same song yeah it's it's so hard because it's so hard to think about it like I my mom was extremely loving but extremely disciplined and so I had a very clear schedule after school but a lot of love in my life I look back on it and feel very grateful I have a very disciplined life I have you know and it's like but who's to say that that's was the thing that I don't have no

idea right it's it's so hard to point to where some of those great qualities come from and the challenges come from and also to separate out genetics yes you know your mom was very disciplined

you're very disciplined well is that because she gave you discipline is that because you were always

going to be a disciplined person you could have grown up at any environment like we you know we know genetics matters a lot yeah and so does environment yeah okay back to the myths yeah breastfeeding will help you lose all the weight quickly no sorry it will that uh there's the I think the data shows you breastfeeding women lose an average over like the first year like 1.5 more pounds so no because you eat more you breastfeed a college it's calories and then you can

do more calories just like anything else okay so there's a magic pill for that you know there is a magic pill it's called a septic pill yeah you can't die your hair while pregnant that is a myth there was some discussion of hairdressers having some but we turned out there's really no data on that paradise mind okay you can't sleep on your back while you're pregnant this is also a myth uh so people for a long time which will not sleep on their back because of concerns about

compressing a vein and it is true that that can happen but it turns out you know that's happening to you like you'll be uncomfortable and you will move and when we got better data uh to walk at some of the things people are concerned about the risk of stillbirth uh actually turns out

“sleep position as I think to do with that so uh if you should sleep in is very hard to sleep when”

you're pregnant and if you are comfortable on your back you should try eventually that is likely to become uncomfortable okay uh you can control whether or not you're going to have a boy or girl you cannot control this outside of like if you have embryos you can implant embryos of particular particular sex but a lot of people have this idea that like male sperm swims fast and doesn't live as long and so if you have sex close to obviously no just know

that doesn't work uh natural birth is better I hate the phrase natural birth uh but it is not better uh there is epidurals are very and different kinds of pain relief are very safe and effective and uh there's no better there taking Tylenol during pregnancy is not safe that is a myth there is many people heard the president and RFK say the Tylenol causes autism but when you look at the best data on this we do not see that link okay you can't use

retinal during pregnancy uh so you cannot use acutane during pregnancy so the the sort of oral form of vitamin A is linked acutane is one of the small number of things that are very very clearly linked to very extreme birth defects like what they get missing limbs a lot of silver like

“I mean they they so actually the restrictions on pregnancy if you are on acutane you have to be”

on multiple kinds of birth control there's like this is like a very category X which is means like we cannot have that in pregnancy retinal is a form of vitamin A and so there's people will sort of say okay was this the same here but turns out the the absorption through your skin is so so so so so so so much less uh then then taking something in an oral form and so most people will say like out of an abundance of caution don't take this but there's nothing in the data

that would suggest it's risky and a lot of people use retinal throughout pregnancy sometimes

by accident they don't see much of a negative effect so I always tell people like you find to

quit this but uh if you were taking if you were using this early in pregnancy you shouldn't freak out yeah going back to the Tylenol example and and what you said earlier it's so hard some day it was so hard to trust when you said like you were like you know the big drug companies for example are funding a lot of the research so it's like who would almost go against Tylenol for example and that may not be the best one to pick on but I'm just looking at it from that perspective

of that's one that's like isn't just because the drug companies would do the research and then who else would pay for research against that yeah so I think in the case of something like it's really people talk a lot about these issues of sort of funding funding conflicts and

me Tylenol's engineering drug the the company it makes Tylenol is not you know is not doing

these kind of trials these are studies done on very large datasets that are collected you know by the Danish government on everybody in Denmark and they have whether they took Tylenol and then things about their kids and they follow them over time so this is all sort of like large scale government funded data set databases when we look at drugs in in general yeah a lot of the studies of drugs are run by pharmaceutical companies but in a very heavily regulated way like

the pharmaceutical company doesn't just get to decide like what to do whatever they have to do a study to get their drug approved that is itself approved by the FDA and so think that those

“kind of conflicts are more complicated than many people think got it understood you should not do”

screen time before age two okay screen time is perhaps the best example of correlation is not causation in parenting and so people you send me these studies that say you know screen time before the age of one is linked with you know all of these terrible outcomes you look at the study and you'll have one group because they're watching more than four hours of screens a day before

the age of one and then another group that never watches screens before the age of one and then they

they compare them later the thing I was want to ask you was like imagine those two households do you think there's anything else different other than the screen exposure like of course those are really different households there's many things that are different in terms that you can see some of those in the data but there are just all kinds of pieces of the differences that we're not going to be able to see in the data and it is not surprising that we

would find different outcomes for those kids but that's just a correlation is not a causal link and so then we're in left in a place with screens where people have to make a choice about how much to expose their kids just screens at different ages without very good data so all the data we have

“is very crummy but it is a set of choices you have to you have to make I don't think is anything”

is to we would see in the data with suggest you know your kid watching a half an hour of miss Rachel you know a few times a week would be problematic it's very difficult to imagine how that could be bad and actually what's interesting is the AP has recently kind of dialed back their screen time restrictions to a set of guidelines that more or less say just kind of think about it a bit more like give it some thought and I think this is not a terrible piece of advice

that you should think of our screens fit in your day if your kids watching eight hours of screens they're not doing other things that they should be doing if they're watching a half an hour of screens so you can get dinner ready so you guys can all sit down together like that's probably a good

thing and it's ultimately about making a plan that works for a family for when these screens will fit

into your day as opposed to saying like no screens all screens which isn't very helpful. Yeah is there any data to suggest that a mother's anxiety affects the child when pregnant? Not anything that you would think of as good so there's there's a little bit of evidence that very very very stressful events during pregnancy and we're talking here not like you know this was a bad week at work but like your spouse died that can show up in some small like long-term effects

on on kids but general anxiety stress during pregnancy not so much very hard to study that because of course maternal anxiety and child anxiety are linked but probably for both genetic and other environmental reasons I mean nothing to do with pregnancy. One of the questions that we got when we announced that you'd be coming on the show and we're trying to get questions in from our audience was how do you deal with mom guilt because that seems to be

such a widely held challenge that everyone feels guilty anxious stressed that they're doing it wrong and everything they see online makes them feel like they're doing it wrong and even the myths we just covered would make you feel like you're doing it wrong. Yeah so I think there's the biggest problem for a lot of people is you make a choice you do something and then someone there's like why would you make that choice and then you feel like a crab I mean that's like a very that happens

all the time. Yeah I think our best defense against that is to make our choice is thoughtfully is to say I thought about whether you know breastfeeding was right for me or whether sleep training was right for me or whatever is your like topic of choice like sit down actually make those decisions deliberately like these are important decisions are going to shape your life they're going to shape

“even if they don't matter for your kid they're going to shape how your life is like what your”

experience is like you should make them deliberately and decide what's the right choice for you and then recognize that that can't be the right choice for everyone else but that you thought about

right choice for me and I thought about it and this was the right choice and I could ever be sure if it

“was ultimately the right choice but it was the right choice exit ante I think that's a little bit”

protective I think people could spend less time online probably be helpful for some of this but you know I mean it's very bomb guilt is a topic that I experience and I think you know some of it is kind of just trying to recognize you're doing a job some of the time. Yeah no thank you for saying thank you for sharing that and it's again I can only reflect on it in other areas of life but it's almost like it's the human trait of needing our choices to be validated

and wanting other people to agree with our way of doing and thinking totally and also how uncomfortable it is whenever and does tell you you're doing something wrong because they did it another way so even if you're very happy with your choice you get triggered by someone else you says well my kids got this idea level at this age and whatever and all of a sudden you're triggered by or someone actually comes to you and says can't believe you did that like you know my

kids are doing great and I never did that and so I think there's partly us crowdsourcing and

outsourcing and being overexposed to lots of other people and how they do it then you have some frustrating people in your life who are telling you how to do it to be honest and then there's just that coming back to what you kind of said which I really appreciate which is know what you're making the choices you make and be really clear about it in your group project again yeah and have some conviction and confidence that based on your set of beliefs background socio economic status

you're making the best decisions you can. Yeah I think that the point of recognizing

“that like your best decisions may not be other people's best decisions is so crucial because I think”

in these moments we are we want our decisions to be right and we sort of want them to be still right that they're right forever and when else and so when you make a different choice for me it's it's like hard for me not to read that as as like you thank my choice is bad or like well you you know I failed or I failed as opposed to just being like yeah this person had a different set of constraints and you know they made a different choice and you know different set of

preferences different set of constraints and like if the both choices could be right we could adopt that approach a bit more in some of this discourse would be like a little less yeah what is the date to say about raising confident kids not too much uh it's really hard to look at that kind of data you know we have pieces of data about you know raising kids who are willing to take risks so there's a lot is like a literature about like grit and sort of how to develop grit in

kids and and some of this is things like you know grow like the growth mindset stuff right like

“you sort of want your kid to understand that sometimes things are hard and you have to you know push”

you like you can get better at something just because you're not good at it now doesn't mean you couldn't eventually be good at and I think that's that's kind of part of this is exactly the same as confidence but it's something that people are often trying to to develop what I will say is I think people take pieces of advice like that which are very good and are based on data that like we shouldn't discourage kids from having a growth mindset and they kind of get the

it gets up getting distilled into advice it is ridiculous right so people end up we go from you know a growth mindset is good so it's good for kids to understand that like it's the values in the effort

and it's you know worth trying into and they get to parents as never tell your kid good job

and it's like well what do you mean like where's the ins like there's no evidence that telling your kid good job is you know is is a problem you we could develop a growth mindset well like it's a good job you know so you have these conversations for while we're having these conversations my kids would come home it kids are a bit older and they would come home name you like you know this is a score I got on this test and we were reacting like you know

well how do you feel about that and finally my daughter was like stop saying that like super annoying and it was like okay fine you know we're like it's okay to say good job yeah that's so funny that's amazing I think there's just like there are many things like this where it gets parents are sort of looking so hard for these like here's here's something you can just do like super concrete super concrete piece of advice and we distill things that are very complicated into something

very simple which is often wrong well I think it's hard because it goes back to the point I ask you earlier about when I was talking about my mom and my qualities and things like that I was like we we almost are mind for some reason likes to think that there's a point to point connection to every action choice and decision that impact something so if a kid is struggling at school we're like oh it's because I did this or you know if they struggle later in life in a

feel very linear even though they feel extremely cyclical random disconnected and complicated quite

frankly it's just too complicated for any of us to know why or how that ended up happening absolutely

“and I think we have somehow this kind of idea has translated anything for a lot of people into”

feeling almost that every moment with your child is an opportunity to mess them up forever and I think that's you know so there was an episode of maybe a year ago where people were very worried about hurry we got this idea of hurried child syndrome you are a guest you did that's so lucky for you so there was all of us on all this stuff on social media about hurried child syndrome which was conveyed to people as if you're hurried your child out the door in the morning and being

like get your shoes on we have to go that that's gonna lead them to have terrible problems with anxiety later and again this name if you were like oh my gosh like but then it sort of for parents they were like oh my god but like sometimes they do need them together shoes. Do we have to go because we have to go to school like what am I doing you know but every and again to have this feeling of like every moment every morning when you get out of the house is an opportunity

to screw it all up like you could be doing everything perfectly and then there's that one day where you're like get your shoes on and that's it then later when they're an unsuccessful failure adult it's because of that time that you said the thing about the shoes right and that that is how

“it's like no but I mean I think it's it's sort of ridiculous when you put it like that but I”

think it is how people were it's everything yeah and in the end actually hurried child syndrome is a totally different thing completely not at all like this which is what is it actually it's an idea coined by some guys in the 1970s that if we push kids to do sort of too much like pre-professional like sports and like just sort of grow up too quickly that that they miss out on some of the fun of childhood but actually very interesting set of issues related to some of this after

on hi this talked about like interesting set of issues to discuss completely unrelated to getting your shoes on to know evidence that pushing your kid out the door you know so I mean it was just an example of something that kind of got into the into the zeitgeist but is is the stuff parents are hearing every day and if we could just dial down a little bit you'd be like hey there are some ways you could mess up your kid but like they're much bigger than this then these kind of

tiny daily choices that you're making yeah definitely and again it's like I often think about growing up because that's my only experience of parenting and that sounds of being parented and it's like both my parents worked I don't think I got a lot of time in the week days with

my parents although we did on the weekends but the great parts of the parenting were not I never

felt left alone or abandoned when I was at daycare or picked up at my mom and back out to work like that and if I ever felt lonely I would just go to work with her in the evenings and lie by her foot and fall asleep or she did work and then we'd come home again and so it's like there was not a long term you know and again I'm not saying that my experience is everyone's experience or I can say is that yeah it's just that isn't as causal as we believe it is. People often say you know

“they're like the first three years is really important and that's true like it's true but when”

when we sort of look at that like what is that mean in the population well what it means is that it's really important for kids to have you know a safe place to sleep enough to eat you know someone who loves them maybe some books like some pretty basic things which unfortunately at least in America like it's actually don't have that that's something we could work on but many of the things that at least the kinds of parents I talked to were worried about are kind of like you're already

doing like 95 percent and now you're telling me like you're spending all your time obsessing about like you know the the 0.3 percent over here like you're you're good. What's your take on that coming from people's own unhealed stress pressure trauma childhood like how much of that is coming from their own is there any data to suggest that we I don't think there's a lot of data to suggest

that I I actually have always read this as something completely different which is it's coming

out of the demographic shift and when can when people are having kids so we you know used to be you had kids you know kind of bedroom college whatever you could maybe you didn't go to college and you had some kids like in your twenties we're now in a demographic space where a lot of people have kind of thought about like okay I'm gonna you know I'm getting I'm gonna work on again to college I want to again the college I'm gonna go to college I'm gonna get the job I want

I'm gonna get them and I made part of I'm gonna go to the graduate like did did did to dive like sort of incliming a ladder of like professional personal and professional things and I've got to this point and it's like okay like all of these things I put a lot of effort in and I got it and now I'm gonna have a kid and I'm gonna put a lot effort into win right like kid like as sort of the children become the thing you're gonna win next and I think that generates an enormous amount of

it's not like going to not like getting into college you know it's not like if you work harder like

“like it goes better that goes much worse but I think that's that's part of it is this feeling”

of kind of like this is a this is something that I could that I could win much more so than some of this unhealed I mean that's hard to know for people do have unhealed traumas but I would guess the demographic shifting is more yeah it's it's the hard toggle between saying it is a group project but it isn't because it's it's what you said earlier I agree with you that has to be a business plan almost but then it's not a business in that it it's so it's this it's not for yeah yeah

it's like a limit to what you can control yeah you can control there are things you can do to set up to make the the experience of doing this easier but that is different from being able to control the outcome and I think that's sort of the core the core distinction wanted to talk about one of the other big debates around sleep training yes uh this is probably what you're doing it's filled with because there's no parent who's not struggling with sleep in some way shape or

“form is there an ideal way to sleep train one size fits all model definitely not um I think so”

so first of all uh there are oh yeah there there there is definitely not a good one size fits

all sleep training is not going to be the right choice for many parents I think the but it is going to be the right choice for some parents so when we talk about sleep training one thing people worry about is you know is it's going to cause long-term terrible attachment problems for my kid and leave back up and say like what do we mean by sleep training yes please yeah can you define sleep training and we talk about sleep training usually people mean some form of like

encouraging independence sleep which usually involves some crying there's a wide range of things so it ranges from kind of the the sort of firbur extinction method where you kind of do a nice bedtime routine put your kid in the in the bed close the door and and you know decide we're not going to come back for some amount of time and kid will often cry for a long time usually it's a few nights of that and then they basically and then there's versions of this where you're

sitting in the room with them where you're coming in so there's a lot of variations but it

almost always is in the service of trying to encourage a kid to fall asleep independently and to

sleep to sort of connect sleep cycles so when we sleep all people including kids we wake up every about every 90 minutes between sleep cycles and so good quality sleep for kids and for their parents it means sort of the kids need to connect this sleep cycles in some way and so then they are sleeping through the night we say baby sleeping through the night you don't mean that they're literally sleeping in tire time you mean that they are going back to sleep on their own after they

they wake up okay so sleep training usually involves some kind of crying some of the people worry that this will cause long-term attachments we have a lot of data on this that suggests that that's not true including some randomized data some community based data there's a lot of evidence that sleep training is not damaging to children and also a fair amount of evidence that improves sleep for parents and that it sort of causes improved sleep for kids in the sense of allowing them to

“connect these sleep cycles having said all that I think that means for me based on the data that”

this should be in people's toolbox that when you think about like what am I going to do about the fact that we need to sleep my kidneys to sleep sleep sleep is really important we have to decide this should be one of the things in the toolbox it's not going to be the thing every parent pulls out of their toolbox often find this a little bit of a hard conversation that people kind of end up in sort of doing one of two things like one of two things is sustainable one is some kind of sleep

training where the kids are going to sleep independently and they're going to sleep for extended periods of time and the other is co-sleeping these can work really well for different families the thing that actually is very hard is like I'm not sleeping in the room with my kid but they're waking up every 90 minutes and I have to go put them back to sleep that's really unsustainable for almost every family they tend to find that people kind of come into one of these two

these two options but that really means that you want to ask yourself like which you know where are we trying to go like are we hoping to all be sleeping together in the bed which can work for a lot of people or are we hoping to be sleeping independently and from there to kind of back out you know how are we getting how are we going to get there is there a right age to stop sleep training if that's the choice you may not so not before for five months and at that point you are not

looking for your kid to sleep all the way through the night so many of these sort of sleep training approaches there are kind of about learning some independent sleep then sort of putting together a schedule where you think okay at some point they will need to eat in the middle of the night and then as they get older and they need to eat last they'll kind of connect more of those things and eventually have a longer sleep all right go there are there any I mean I guess it's just painful

for a parent to go to sleep thinking that they child's crying and takes a second you know

you are not ready to do it so the people who are ambivalent about this who think like down that comfortable with this I don't this doesn't feel right to me this isn't going to work so well because like you're not consistency is important and it's just like that's not going to work

“as well for that group so I think a lot of it is about being sort of deciding that this is”

something that is safe something that is effective something it's going to work for a family and deliver at the other side of it which is often you know just a few days kind of going to deliver a better environment for for your family yeah anything else in sleep training that we've missed so we haven't talked about things that you get asked the most about it so I think one thing that people really struggle with is actually sleep training for little kids is it can be a heart for

like babies you know like a hard decision but like it's not that hard to implement like if you're committed to doing it's not that hard to implement because your kids in a crib and they can't move I think it becomes really hard is when people have toddlers and their kids are coming out of the room and we sort of there's often another period where people are spending a lot of time a lot of complicated bedtime stuff and that's actually a very different problem it's not

it's more of a kind of a need for behavioral modification then it is a sort of sleep training

“and so there I think the main point for many people is just you've got to decide where you're trying”

to go and then like decide a moment they're in a consistently implemented kids tend to respond really well to consistency where did the theory of belief come from that if kids are left crying that they'll end up feeling abandoned where did that come from so it's based on this psychology of attachment theory a lot of which was developed out of observations of kids who had very very problematic attachment like childhood so one one place this we saw this

was in Romanian orphanages so there was a period of time in Romanian in which there were a lot of

children who were unwanted and they ended up in these orphanages where they were like basically just

left alone for you know with very very minimal care there was a lot of abuse and when researchers came to like observe these because they found the babies really didn't cry these they sort of had learned nobody would come and then these kids had problems for very long periods of time the difference between a baby that is left you know alone for days at a time with not enough food and you know not and sexual and physical abuse and also the difference between that and kind of

crying for even a pretty long period of time for a few nights in the context of an otherwise

“like loving and stable and happy household like those are really different things and I think”

that they sort of know that but there's kind of a porting of porting across this which I just don't think is is appropriate but that's where it comes from yeah got it that didn't know that that's

fascinating yeah yeah it's incredible what connections we make when they're not really that

connected yeah I mean I think this space is a very um the space is a tough one because it is hard to hear you kid cry and it is hard to think about sleep training for a lot of people um it is also relatively helpful for many families uh and I think that's worth noting yeah other any day to dream techniques to help babies stop crying quickly just consistently implement this it's possible you know all over time I think that's that there's no like this track

it doesn't work for every baby but it really does work on average. Wanted to revisit screen time from the point of view of like as kids are growing up and not looking at you you could advise whether it's valuable to look at specific ages or not but is there any connection now I know earlier you said well it was really not about causality or causation it was just the fact that it's just a different socio economic condition

and different opportunities and different education level of parents and availability of funds and resources and time and energy and everything else if that's all it is is there any

data to suggest it matches on any level yeah I mean I the answer is probably yes this is space

it's really where data is really new so you know if you wanted to ask you know what's the what's the impact you being exposed to an iPad at the age of two on like high school graduation or college graduation like we don't know because the kids who are exposed the age of two have been graduated yeah um so we're really in a data poor environment um you when we look at younger kids a lot of the the sort of questions we would ask or are about

displacement of other activities so asking you know as kids do more and more of these are

value like anytime with their family going outside like what you know what are we replacing is kind of the question I would ask is opposed to thinking about the screens per se as like go to our bad they are an activity which must be displacing something else and so if they are displacing sleep for example that's really bad we know kids don't sleep enough and they need a lot of a lot

of sleep there's been a second question as kids get older about kind of the social media the

“sort of social media part of screens where again we're in very data poor environment but I think”

there's you know reasonable people have reasonable concerns about girls in particular and the kinds of exposures that we get and then you're layering on top of this like a whole other AI thing which like out of that that's you yeah and so we just there's a lot of choices that parents are having to make that are hard because we have no context for them and and also our kids are much better at screens than we are so a lot of the tools people would put you know people

I had this tool to my kids iPad to do this and that's like they know are you kidding me you know like you know these kids school is putting up like these restrictions like you know they can't

play this game and they're like oh I just went to the website that's like called like my school

blocked blah blah and that's where you get the games totally totally tilting and with mills on this stuff given the you know demographic given the generational shifts yeah I'm a I'm a at least a support of most of all of John of the Nights considerations around that as I don't know an older age like I just feel like there's no need to be on social media before a certain age because like there's no need for schools to have phones like I just don't you know we all went to schools with

“our phones and yes I think there's a few of these things which are like these things all have like”

little different pieces I think like phones and schools like yeah that's distracting you don't need to distract me no need for that I think the social media stuff I also agree like there should be some sort of thought about ages maybe gonna be different for different kids and there should also be a fair amount of of kind of scaffolding by parents once your kid gets these social media tools like you don't you know it's like a car right you don't just hand them the keys and say enjoy you

like teach them and I think this is kind of like a car like you gotta be willing to take the keys away you gotta be willing to like help them learn you know what's the reasonable way to interact with this I will say I think that the relative to the kids who are now like 18-19 the kids who are now 13-14 at least in some cases I think are actually much less into this there was sort of a period of time when everyone had Instagram when they were 12 and this is actually dialed down a bit

into some which you know maybe it's just reflecting my my kids school but I don't know yeah there's there's it's different between just having screen time and then being on social media and being

“exposed to other people's lives and messaging and I think there are two totally different”

conversations and I like where you just said it that if you look to getting a phone like getting a car and if we were able to start helping society think that way then it becomes a point of I remember wanting a car and being like excited nervous that I had to pass a test preparing for the test you know

all the levels that you go through to get there and then you have your first accident and you know like

that's scary but it feels like a whole journey to get it rather than now a phone is almost like this expected piece of life that you have no idea what it's exposing you to or you kids to and it's a tough conversation with parents I love discovering idea but I do think that it's hard when it's like oh well your friends parents I gave them a phone at 12 but I'm weighing to you to a 14 and they're like but wait I'm in every school how do I want to attend and where is

if there's just rules that are not parents set yes I think parents could use help on this for sure and you know ultimately there's like no substitute for knowing your kid on these things and every kid is gonna be different and it's gonna be supposed to be differentially affected by these things and you know need different things which is part of what makes parenting so difficult yeah absolutely it's tough stuff a couple more things I wanted to talk to you about

this one was about vaccines uh yeah because I know there's a lot of conversation about that some vaccines and CDC guidelines change over time of course uh how would you consider parents think about not being that I think parents should vaccinate their their children um on the whole I mean I think that you know the AP has a set of guidelines for many years the AP you mark and I had Academy of Pediatrics in the CDC at the same vaccine guidelines and they are this sort of primary

childhood vaccine series are have been in force for decades and have been a really safe and effective

the number of vaccines that the CDC has recommended I think there's a fair amount of holdover from COVID where people were uncomfortable with some of the way that the COVID vaccine was pushed on people I think some of that is actually fair probably we do not currently need all healthy children to get a COVID booster your up doesn't do that I think it's a perfectly reasonable position what is not a reasonable position is people shouldn't get the measles vaccine and so I think for

“for parents it's kind of thinking about um you know what is the if you want to think about what”

the evidence says about these vaccines these vaccines are really good at preventing disease and they are really safe and have been in use for for decades so I find the current vaccine conversation really difficult to engage with because it feels like what are you getting me like kids are going to die of the measles like kids are going to die of the two kids died of the measle blessure work kids are going to die of the measles this year in a single week in January

2026 there were more measles cases in the US than all but a small handful of years over the past

two decades because people chose not to yeah so if you look at the graph basically we

had like 260 cases of measles in a week in almost all full years in the past two decades we had like far fewer than that so because people stop vaccinating and then measles is super super contagious and so if you get a small amount of outbreaks and the outbreak grows and we had a lot of cases and I just think you know that means kids are going to die of measles who didn't need to die of measles and that just feels terrible yeah do you think kids are being over Medicaid in general

“I mean if it's a totally different question yeah um it's interesting I mean I think there's a lot of”

probably to some extent I think there if we look at the data on something like ADHD and we look at what's happened to those kind of prescriptions over time we've gone up a lot and we do see some evidence that those are increasing there's a higher force say kids who are younger when they are

first in kindergarten and I think that's reflecting our expectation of kids in schools

which is totally different than it once was and particularly probably poorly suited especially for for boys and so if we sort of think like okay we're going to bring a bunch of kids and who kind of aren't that great it's sitting still and when they're not that great it's sitting still which totally age appropriate behavior we're then going to give them something to make some sense still I mean is a good argument that we've been over using that approach yeah no no I'm totally too different

but which is a totally different conversation yeah I think it's become hard it's it's almost hard for there's some people who never question it at all and then there I think some people who question it because there's a lack of trust or there's for example like you see the other medication you see the rise and then you go wait a minute there's so many updates and what's happening here and is it really helping and where's it you know so I think there's a lack of trust

there's curiosity there's you know there's all sorts of versions of it on the spectrum of why and why we disagree or where they sit yeah and I I think the other I mean the other thing about vaccines is like we haven't done a great job of helping parents to understand you know

even like which vaccines are most important and I basically think everybody should get all

of the vaccines on the schedule because they're all safe but I I'm curious whether we should be having more of the conversation of okay look if you were only going to do you know if you is it real hesitancy for good reason to have a conversation that's like look if you were only going to do three these are three and I see why we don't want to have that conversation because it implies that you know maybe there's some rest of these other things which there are not but it could

encourage people to get some subset of the vaccines that it feels like such a complicated messaging messaging play you know if we really think the most important thing is for people to get like the measles vaccine and the T-Dap vaccine and the flu vaccine like maybe we should be like pushing the road of virus vaccine last even though that is a very good vaccine I don't know this is very complicated I wish people would just get all the vaccines. Got it understood you have written Emily four

books on parenting I believe if you had three messages for parents that you thought they really needed to hear so one is that there are a lot of right ways to do it I think that's probably the core message of my second book which is you know here are some data on stuff but in almost every choice you're going to make there are a lot of different good options and you just got to find

“the one that that works for you so I think that's one pretty core message I think a second key”

insight in everything I write is that correlation is not causality and you should be really really skeptical of a lot of the evidence that people tell you because a lot of it is correlation

their plans and too much time in therefore in sort of reactive reacting to things that that happen and we're very reluctant to put time in up front because we're busy but there are many situations in parenting in which putting some time in up front thinking about how you want approach something is going to save you a lot of time and conflict later I love that yeah I leveled through those and that last one especially I just think we think like I was here the

advice of you never ready to have kids which I agree with like that makes full sense but at the same

time you're definitely not ready if you never thought about it like that you could be more ready yeah exactly let's you're pleased to everything right it's just that mindset of you never know what it's going to be like it's like you're right yeah I definitely like as someone who doesn't have kids I have no idea what's going to be like to prepare and hopefully hold my hands up I lose I you know I get it but I can think I can prepare I can try and and I probably will still fail

“and make mistakes and I think that's I think that's the problem we think planning means perfection”

as opposed to as opposed to planning just means planning and that's all it is and it doesn't mean it's going to be perfectly executed absolutely Emily last two segments we are a this all that

okay and then I'll final five which we do with every guest on the show so this all that parenting

version gentle parenting or helicopter parenting I don't like either of these explain why I mean I think the gentle parenting as a lot of people have interpreted it is kind of permissive parenting is sort of like I'm not going to put knee boundaries and I think that's really problematic so what is good gentle parenting or what is the best I think there's a good version of kind of punishment parenting without rules and without consequences which is much more about just

setting boundaries it ends up looking really similar to parenting with rules and consequences but you know they kind of like saying what the boundary is falling through on the boundary that's a very clear part of almost any evidence based parenting approach but gentle parenting as many people

“seem to interpret it I think does not does not work so I think I'm going to go with helicopter”

parenting which is being over-envolved which I also think can be quite problematic but perhaps less so

what is the proven approach to parenting so I think the the best sort of evidence based approaches we have to like behavior modification I have are things where you have a clear set of expectations where you know when you there's a behavior kind of a behavioral issue there's a clear set of kind of expectations consequences and and rewards that's often what we see supported best in the in the data so something like one two three magic or one of these what's one two three magic

so one two three magic is a is one of these sort of evidence based parenting approaches which is just it's a particular way to kind of scaffold like when somebody in your kid does something bad you give them like three warnings and then there's a timeout it's very effective all right yeah I mean it seems to follow the common sense of what life looks like yes I live as choices and actions

“they have consequences and then there's either what like that's kind of what that's what it's”

works as an adult yes yes yes as an adult that is life yeah got it natural remedies or medicated products generally medicated products I think that there's a lot that we have learned over time about say antibiotics which are the reason that many people are not dead so I'm gonna go with medicine although there are certainly places where we sort of overuse antibiotics maybe better off just like not using them because people don't have a bacterial infection

but overall medicated products strict schedule or flexibility can both work personally so personally like my family has a very rigid schedule one might say two rigid but that is no actually as much for because I mean yes it's a combination of me and my husband but I think that he is even worse than I am but like that is what works for us like for us and our kids like really we like to know what's expected like on the weekends like we know what we're

gonna do there are calendar invites like if we're going on a hike my husband puts a calendar in my with the drive time in it because he's insane and like but that's for us that's really great I think for other people like flexibility can totally work this is one of the core things I think you need to figure out about your family which is like what version of this is gonna make us feel confident and happy there is not a right answer but they're probably is a right answer for you you know

if you're a person who just wants to like wake up on Sunday morning and be like let's find out whatever you're gonna be really annoyed when your spouse is like why don't you put the calendar and invite her for the drive time but if you're a person who like really wants to have the calendar

while I will take to get there yeah exactly yeah you just gotta find you gotta find what works

absolutely uh two under two or waiting oh two under two is tough um again I would say for me I wanted to wait I like the four year age gap worked real well for me one kid carry their backpack while the other kid is you're carrying the other kids the hunter gather birth spacing it's a data to that so you like this was the common hunter gather or birth spacing if we think because one kid can kind of walk on their own when you're carrying the the other one

“and my sister and I have a four and a half years yet so great um but I think you know if you're”

if you're like a little older or there's sort of some other reason why you want to you want to get them get them in close um that is very tiring it's very very tiring to have two

two little babies at the same time you need good scaffolding got it uh plastic bottle of

glass bottles people are so worried about microplastics this is not an important source of microplastic exposure relative to the other sources of microplastic exposure we don't know that much of my microplastics it's like a whole other episode you could do with somebody else I think people should avoid glass bottles because they share that's it yeah and then glass will be everywhere and cut the kid and hurt the kid or you yeah yeah timeouts or timeins I didn't know

what a time it is I'm a fan of timeouts I think timeouts work well I think that they how is it good timeout work the good timeout works when your kid knows that the timeout is the punishment they know that we're gonna have a set of like you know they know there are risk for the timeout and they have an opportunity to fix their behavior this is why something like a counting approach or warning approach is good that you follow through on the timeout when you say that

you're going to when the timeout is appropriately timed for the age of the kid shorter if they're younger longer if they're older and then when after the timeout you don't discuss it anymore it's not like there's no shaming there's no it's just like you're in a timeout you're calm you put them in the timeout they have a chance to cool down you have a chance to cool down nobody is yelling if they could it can work extremely well yeah I was gonna ask you are there

anymore strategies like that in parenting once the kids are growing older where that a you found extremely useful you have a 10 year old and a 14 year old yes when the kids were a little we found the timeouts very that to be a very helpful approach getting a general way of hand consistency is very good I will say now a lot of my considerations are how can I get my children to continue to speak with me and I have found that that my very best approach with older kids is to be available

and so I spend a lot of time like after dinner when they're sort of in their rooms like do doing homework or whatever like sitting in the den of our house which is like kind of near their rooms just like sitting I'm like working on making pewter whatever and then if they happen to want to come out and talk I like immediately close the computer and can talk to them and that that sort of like just being there when your kids are ready to talk to you I think is a strategy

that works pretty well yeah the only other strategy really like deep the seeded strategy that we have

“is don't lie try not to lie to my kids that's why they knew about Santa Claus before everyone else”

it was like one time my son was like was like mom is the tooth fairy real and I was like do you want that he was pretty old it was like I was like I was like I could do do you want to the truth he was like yeah it was like no it's not he was like I didn't think so because other fairies aren't real I'm like yep you got it that's so funny now when he loses a truth he's just like can you put it and put money in my allowance yeah that's so funny that's so funny it's even even the fun

white lies that yeah you know it's interesting I think this Santa thing comes up all the time be washed my life now it's like I don't know I think my my husband is Jewish and he was just like I had till I could stand that's real yeah it's not for me yeah got it Emily this has been so useful thank you for busting all the myths thank you for providing all the data and and being so open and honest about so much that we're still figuring it out I'm still researching and still

trying to find good data to back so we end every episode of on purpose with a final five these questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum and so Emily these are final five the first question is what is the best parenting advice you have ever heard or received try not to think about it question number two what is the worst parenting advice you've ever heard or received don't put

mittens on your child because she'll never learn to use her hands that's brilliant that was my mom

said I'm almost so great but that was that was bad advice that's not funny did you have a

“following that no no I did look it up I like went so far as to research that's good that's what”

it's like never maybe question number three something you used to believe was true about parenting but now you disagree with that if you do the same thing for two kids you get the same outcome no fastening yeah you have to adapt you have to get kids or it's so easy to think you did a

need different things yeah question number four is there a list of three qualities you're trying to instill in your kids like three things you think are universally important in my own kids yes I think respect for others following through on your commitments and you're trying to pursue

“excellence and the things that you should do how do you do that as a go to like what what's your”

approach to that some of it is that we say that some of these are core values so following through our commitments is something we will tell the kids are is a core value and some of it is how you is like what you try to the things that I try to do in my own life and model and uh yeah those I mean I think it's sort of modeling and and then some explicit yeah like this is how we operate yeah so I express and then be the example exactly but I explain it make sure they get it but then

they've got to see it through you uh fifth and final question we ask is there every guest is have it been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be I'm going to go with comprehensive fertility education for people at multiple times of their lives ideally through the education system or it's a lot we could sure I'm going

“to be able to implement it in whatever way I want but yeah I think through at least we spend a lot of”

time telling people like how not to have kids when they're in like the younger and then we never

tell people how to have kids when they're older and I think there's a piece of that that's about parenting but there's another piece which is just like I think that people don't understand their own bodies very well and I would like them to understand them better I love the answer I can agree with you more do you think that's even if you think that's even realistic it feels like it needs to be realistic to get it is ridiculous that's not it's like you're saying

I'm like yeah this is the thing that every human's not every human but you know human humanity is going to need to do for a long long time and the fact that you literally walk home of a hospital

“with a baby and they're just like you know nothing about yeah it's and you have to self educate”

and read a book but like it's listen to podcast I'm like it's insane yeah I mean I think you're part of it is we used to like live in in a in a society you know we used to live in in larger groups where like you didn't have to know this you're like everyone was having babies all the time and also like the older people were we're doing this and I think as we have moved away from religious communities as we have moved like away from our families it does feel a little bit more like

there's missing both some of the I mean there's like basic fertility stuff but then also just sort of like shared there is a need for somehow the parenting advice is filling this gap but

I'm not sure we're filling in quite the way we need to yeah no I love that I think that was so powerful

and and I also think that even though we did get away within the past because of bigger communities and bigger groups of people I don't think that was really solving the problem either it was just covering it up exactly Emily it's been such a joy talking to you today thank you so much where would you like our audience to find you of course I can follow you across social media we've mentioned your books we'll put the links in the comments and you can find me at

parent data.org which is where I have links to all of these things and then many, many resources

to help you make it easier amazing parent data oh thank you Emily such a pleasure and

look forward to doing this again. Awesome thank you so I didn't get it. If you love this episode you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabel Matay on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. At there, this one said to me that if your parents didn't know or hold you you developed a mind you hold yourself with. It's a fate of pain and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain. This is an iHeart podcast

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