Emily Oster's Guide to Data-Driven Parenting, Pregnancy Myths, and More

Published Jul 30, 2024, 7:01 AM

Today we’re launching a new recurring segment called “Mom Friend,” a judgment-free zone to explore the often-overwhelming work of parenting. Helping guide us on this journey is Emily Oster — economist, founder and CEO of ParentData, and bestselling author of some of the most-talked-about parenting books of the last decade, including “Expecting Better,” "Cribsheet," "The Family Firm," and "The Unexpected." Emily brings research-backed data to the conversation, so you can make the best, most informed decisions for your family. Can you drink during pregnancy? What about while breastfeeding? How worried should we be about screen time? And when is the best time to freeze your eggs? Listen and find out.  

Have a parenting question? Send an email or voice memo to hello@thebrightsidepodcast.com.

Hey, fam, Hello Sunshine.

Today on the bright Side, Award winning economist and New York Times best selling author Emily Auster is here for an all new segment. It's called mom Friend. We're talking about mindful parenting, cutting through the noise and bringing the facts. Emily brings research to the questions that we've been asking for years, everything from can you have wine or sushi during pregnancy to what the data says about screen time.

It's Tuesday, July thirtieth.

I'm Danielle Robe and I'm Simone Boyce and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten near day.

So Simone, you know, I'm not a parent yet, but I am very excited about today's guests, mostly because she's freaking brilliant.

She's such a genius, and she is such a gift to anyone who is a parent or is considering becoming a parent. I can remember exactly when I came across Emily Oster's work. Tell me I was nine months pregnant. I was a reporter on the campaign trail when word of this highly contagious virus began to spread and we were in an information vacuum at the time. I'm normally a pretty chill person, but I started to get really nervous.

I mean I can imagine why.

Yeah, first baby, first time giving birth, obviously, first pandemic. And I turned to Emily's research to help me understand, Okay, what do I need to do to keep my baby safe during this time? What kind of precautions do I need to take? I mean, we all remember what it was like then, we were washing our groceries, all that crazy stuff. But since then, her research and her platform parent data, they continue to add so much value to my parenting. Like take sleep training for instance. I don't know if this has made its way into your algorithm, but there are all these accounts online, these mommy accounts that love to parent. Shame anyone who decides to sleep train their kids. You're gonna love this because this means that you get your kids and yourself on a nightly sleep schedule.

Yeah, which is a lot of my friends do this.

Yeah, it's paramount during that time when you are so sleep deprived. And also I just think I think it's the best thing for your kids. It's the best thing that you can do for them, and after doing my research, my husband and I decided that this was going to be the best plan for our family. And Emily's research actually shows that all that parents shaming that takes place around this topic is not founded at all, because sleep training improves sleep for babies and parents without causing long term harm to children.

What you're talking about is really taking a lot of the guesswork away because I hear stories from my friends who are parents all the time, and a lot of the advice is anecdotal, it's behavioral, and Emily comes from data. She's a numbers and data person because she's an economist and she earned her PhD in economics from Harvard and is now a professor of economics at Brown University.

And she's a sensation.

Online and I understand why she's bringing peace to people during this constant barrage of parenting advice, and she's determining what's fact from what's fiction. What I think is really interesting is that her career path came from this personal pain point that she had because when she was pregnant with her first child, she felt really overwhelmed by all of the information and the options that she was given. So she decided to put on her researcher's hat and began crunching the data to guide her decisions.

And thank god she did, because from that work came her book Expecting Better, Why the conventional pregnancy wisdom is wrong and what you really need to Know. And in the pages of that book, she debunks all these long standing myths about pregnancy to empower women while they're expecting. That word is so key to feel empowered. You know. I've heard some people refer to this book Danielle as the Bible of modern parenting, because it is that comprehensive, that thorough, that clarifying. I mean, she breaks it down from trimester to trimester, from conception all the way to labor and delivery.

She also sources data on fertility too.

I have a feeling everyone listening is going to want more Emily even after our conversation, so I want to share with you exactly how she supports families. She's the founder and CEO of parent Data, which is a data driven guide to pregnancy, parenting and beyond that includes a weekly newsletter and a podcast.

Well, our new favorite mom friend is here. Let's bring her in, y'all. Emily welcome to the bright Side. I am so delighted to be here. Thanks for having me, Emily.

You are in Rhode Island, which I am so jealous about. There is no summer better than a summer on the East Coast.

It is true. We suffer. We suffer in the winter, and then we get a couple of incredibly nice months to go to the beach, so wonderful.

Well, today is about data driven parenthood, and that's a term that is that actually new for me. Can you explain data driven parenting and what does it mean to be a data literate parent?

So my core belief is that we can make better decisions in our pregnancy and parenting if we have evidence and data that can inform them. And data comes from studies typically, So I spend a lot of time in the academic literature looking at what we learn from surveying people or from doing experiments on people, and so a lot of what I do is I try to provide people with answers to the questions like can I have sushi when I'm pregnant? What does the data say about that? Or what does the data say about potty training? And it's not so much that data is going to give you the answer to your question. But for many things it's either very relaxing or it will help you frame how you might make the best decision for yourself.

So what I think is so interesting about what you do, Emily is that most of the parenting advice out there as a mom that I run up against is feelings focused. It's all about centering emotion and the child's feelings, and it's all very nebulous and abstract, and having the data is so helpful and it's so grounding. So can you talk about for a moment, why are numbers so important in this conversation that so often skews into behavioral territory.

I think numbers are really important because they ground us in something we can connect on. If we're not able to say what we're trying to accomplish, or how could you measure what you're trying to accomplish with a number, I think it's very difficult to imagine making a decision. So for me and I think for many of the people that I think this approach resonates with a lot of what resonates is being able to say, Okay, this is the question I'm trying to answer here's what it would mean to get the right answer, and here's the piece of evidence that I need to answer that we can like touch and connect on and be like, we agree on this number being important, and let's figure out what it is and let's use it in our decisions. And that, I think is the key part. That it's a concrete fact that disciplines the way that we approach decision making.

So what do you do you, Emily Auster? Whenever you run up against a parenting situation that you feel unprepared to deal with, do you start thinking of that thesis question first and then you go seek out the evidence? How do you approach your parenting philosophy?

So my kids are pretty big, My kids are old, and so one of the things about having old kids is one encounters fewer problems, but when you encounter them, they're very large. And so when something comes up that we really need to engage with, it does require often much more time. So usually I first I just panic and say something I don't mean, and then later I say, well, actually let's revisit that conversation. But it is I think very amenable to this kind of more discipline and approach to say Okay, what are we trying to decide. Let's think about what's the question we're trying to answer, and then let's think about what's the evidence, logistics, data, what are the things we need to know to answer this question?

And then let's try to make a decision.

And with bigger kids, it's more like, let's make a decision with together with the kid. With smaller kids, it's more like, let's make a decision with your partner. But in my own parenting, one of the things I try very hard to do is, at least for large decisions, make them very deliberately, So actually try to not make decisions on the fly, but really think through carefully what the right approach to the decision, and then how can we make a decision we're happy with at least feel like we have made the decision in the right way, even if it turns out to be wrong, which sometimes it does.

What does the data say about the generational divide in terms of parenting approaches between boomers, gen X and millennials.

So there's something things that are very clear in the data that have changed because evidence has changed. So sometimes when I see people running into generational conflict around data, it's like, literally what we know has changed. So, for example, should you put your baby to sleep on their back? This is something where people are always coming to me and saying, oh, my mother in law says, you put it to sleep on its stomach, it sleeps a lot better. Like, yeah, but since you were a kid, we learned it's safest to put your baby to sleep on the back, and that's the new rule.

And your you know, input is not changing. That we're done with that, you're just straight up wrong.

And then some of these things are places where maybe we've gotten a little bit of data or a little bit of a sense of something, but also just norms have changed. So when we talk about discipline, it is true that the presence of physical punishment has declined a lot over time. Some of these kind of gentle parenting strategies have risen. Some of that is for data reasons, some of it it's not. So you can certainly see in the data that change in the way people approach this. And I think it's useful sometimes to separate out the places where we learned more versus the places where we just decided that one thing was better.

We're learning so much, but we have to take a quick break.

We'll be right back, and we're back with economist Emily Oster. I have a lot of friends who are struggling with their parents and explaining why they're doing things differently. Do you have any advice in that realm in terms of effective ways to defend or explain a new approach to the older generation.

I often tell people two things. One, your parents or parents in law did raise you. So there's sometimes I think, a moment to listen and to hear what they think about how you could do things differently, And then there is a moment to just say, thanks very much for your input, this is how we're doing it.

And I think.

People feel often so strongly about explaining and so strongly about like I've got to convince you that I'm right, and sometimes you just have to let it go. My mother in law, when I was pregnant with my daughter, told me that she knew it was going to be a girl. So before we knew about the jenner and knew it was going to be a girl because the heartbeat was fast.

And then I had pulled up this.

Paper hundreds of people which showed that there was no correlation between heart rate and the baby's sex completely, like, totally clear, obvious with tables.

Anybody could see it.

I explained it to her, it's my job to explain things, vinature, not to be a girl. And she was like, see I was right. And I was like, but here's this evidence, and she was like, nah, I don't know. I just think probably I was right, and like, I've never been able to convince her.

I had to let it go. I had to let me. Why would any mother in law go up against you?

Though?

No, she doesn't read, she doesn't read my I love her very much, but she doesn't really think much of She doesn't.

You know, Ah, you could be right, but I'm not sure to that point.

What does the data say about mother in law daughter in law relationships?

They're fraught, they are fraught. You don't need data. You don't need data that's not really We get.

Plenty of anecdotal Here's the thing about being pregnant. Everyone has an opinion about how you should be pregnant, what you should do with the baby after it's here. And in your books Expecting Better crib Sheet, the Family Firm, The Unexpected, You explore parenting and pregnancy myths, and there were so many that I turned to you for and you helped me sort through a lot of my own questions. But one major area of ambiguity for a lot of women is drinking during pregnancy and then also drinking during breastfeeding.

What does the data tell us about that?

Can you have that one glass of red during your last trimester pumping dumping?

Sort it out for us?

All right, So let's start in pregnancy. So we know that heavy drinking, especially early in pregnancy, is very damaging and can cause birth defects and long term neurological problems. The question people often come to me then with, though, is like, what about having an occasional drink particularly later in pregnancy? And when we look at data that focuses on that level of drinking, and there's a lot of this because it's much more common to having occasional alcoholic beverage in Europe or Australia, and there's a lot of data that comes from there. When we look at data on that, we actually don't see those kind of negative outcomes. We don't really see much of anything in terms of outcomes. So this doesn't mean everybody should drink during pregnancy or has to. Obviously, but if one is asking about an occasional drink, particularly in the second and third trimesters, there just isn't any data to suggest that that would cause bad outcomes.

And then in terms of breastfeeding, and then in.

Terms of breast feed it's in some ways even more encouraging because with breast milk, it's actually very easy to test for how much alcohol is in the breast milk. Right, So the only reason your baby would be exposed to to alcohol is through the breast milk. So you could have somebody drink a lot and then you could test the alcohol content of their breast milk. So in studies that do this, they would have women drink say four tequila shots in an hour, which would definitely impair your ability to parent and is not an encouraged amount of drinking at all. But when you test the breast milk after that level of drinking, it has the same alcohol content as a glass.

Of orange juice. Basically wow.

So it just turns out this idea that breast milk is an important source of alcohol is not true. So people ask me, oh, I'm going to Cabo and I want to have like one margarita, Absolutely have two MARGARINAE.

Four, you can have four tequila shots in an hour exactly.

Don't do that because you will feel terrible in the morning and you will regret this nighting kavo. But from the breast milk standpoint, it's okay.

Wow, that is wild. I feel like this is new data.

Even since I was breastfeeding, I didn't know that the transferable alcohol was so small.

So if you think about it, it's about the same concentration as in your bloodstream. If you really were like I definitely am nervous about any idea that there would be anything one drink two hours and then it's out of your bloodstream. I sometimes people have this sense with pumping and dumping, like it like builds up in the breast milk and then you have to pump to get it out. But that's not the way it works. You don't store tequila in your boobs.

That was a myth that I heard, and I investigated to the best of my ability and discerned that it.

Was not valid for my life.

All right, let's talk about screens, because this is a huge part of the national conversation right now around parenting. We're seeing so many schools starting to crack down on banning cell phones in kid twelve classrooms. Florida, Indiana just a couple of the states who have implemented some of these measures. What does the data say about introducing screens to kids even before we get to the classroom? What is the day to say about the right time to introduce screens to kids?

I want to totally change how we talk about this because they think so much of the conversation around screens adopts this idea that like, screens are bad and at some point you'll be forced to introduce them. But every moment that your kid spends in time on the screens is basically a moment in which you're a bad parent, and you're just like bad parenting it up. And I would like parents instead to just think about time and think about screens being something that is a part of a balanced diet of time, and thinking when you use screens, when you have your kids in front of screens, about what else they would be doing with that time. Are kids on screens ten hours a day and so they're not really engaged with school, They're not really engaged with their family. Is everyone watching screens at dinner instead of talking to each other. We are screens getting in the way of homework. Those are the kinds of things where you say, like, that's not a good use of screens. If your kids are watching forty five minutes of television every night so you can cook dinner in peace and then everyone can get together and be more relaxed, that is a really good use of screens. If the alternative is you screaming at them and not having any time to yourself and not being able to parent, it is clearly better to have them watch screens. So I would just really encourage people to think about screens as not good, not bad, not any particular way, but just something that you incorporate in a way that balances with your families overall life.

Emily, I could kiss you through the screen right now. I just I think this perspective is so refreshing because I beat myself up all the time when my kids are watching TV. My oldest son, Logan, he's four years old. He's obsessed with movies. I genuinely think he's going to do something with movies day, but it's such a point of contention because he always wants to watch it, and we're always trying to moderate how much TV he gets. And I am really committed to raising kids who are outdoors more than they are hooked up to a screen or they're reading more, Like that's very important to me. But the amount of times I have beat myself up and felt guilty over like my kid's screen time, this was like a godsend for me, this whole conversation.

And people ask me things like is it okay for my kid to watch television on the airplane?

Like what are you kidding?

The alternative is they're ruining everyone else's day, Like of course. So I just think that is almost like we've gotten into a place where it's not the conversation is not helpful, and it's not helping people make good decisions.

It's just making people feel good. Yeah, but I will.

Say I would separate this, and I think in general we should separate some of the screen stuff from the question about phones in schools. Yeah, So I wish that these conversations didn't get quite so mingled, because there is a reason not to have phones in schools, which is that they are distracting that it's just not a good idea to have kids with effectively a handheld video game when they're supposed to be doing math.

Yeah, Emily, can you share an example where the data contradicted a widely accepted.

Parenting myth or traditional advice.

So there's a good example in pregnancy, which is about bed rest.

So a lot bed rest.

Has been like a commonly prescribed both folk wisdom based and medical based treatment for a lot of complications in pregnancy with preterm labor or other things, more or less just like why don't you just lay down and then you know that'll fix it right up. And it turns out in randomized trial data there's basically no complication for which bed rest is actually helpful.

Huh.

Interesting, and it seems like it would be helpful.

I mean, this is what it's really tricky about anecdote versus data, and why studies are so important.

Because if you have a bunch.

Of people who were in threatened preterm labor, you know, they start having contractions at thirty three or thirty four weeks, and you put them on bed rest, most of the time they will go to term. Because most of the time people who were in threatened pre term labor will go to term.

But that would happen if they weren't on bed rest.

But if what's happening is you're just putting everyone on bed rest, you kind of never learn that, Like, it isn't the bed rest, it's just that's the baseline rate. So when they do randomized trials, that's how you learn, Oh, actually the group we didn't put on bed rest also had the same outcomes, and then you can do better.

Still a lot of people are put on bed rest. But yeah, that's a great example, Emily.

If you are chronically online like me, I am sure that you come across parenting videos that just set you off, and I'm sure you've got some hot takes locked and loaded in there. This is your opportunity give us a hot take something you've come across on social media recently that you got to sound off on.

So I spend a lot of time talking to people about daycare, and a lot of people send their kids to daycare. And I will preface this by saying that the evidence is quite clear that high quality daycare is great for kids, and it does not lead them to have terrible outcomes and turn into serial killers. And in fact, the outcomes are very very similar for kids who go to daycare.

Kids.

It's all very neutral, and I spend a lot of time in my books talking about these data.

The other day, I saw a.

Reel on Instagram in which someone was interviewing someone else and the person said, do you know what happens when you dropped your baby at daycare?

They think you died? I just Lenny.

People sent me this like, oh my god, does my baby think I got I was like, first of all, how would you know? Okay, one of my friends was like, well, when you come back, do they then think that you're resurrected?

Because that all so it seems kind of amazing.

But it was such a clear illustration of the way we like hit people with these panics, like your baby thinks you're dead. Every day they think you're dead because of this selfish choice you made. It's like, there's no evidence for that, there's no reason to think that, and yet we're pushing this out on people, and you're just opening up your Instagram trying to look at makeup ads or watch Ballerina farm and then it's like here, that's right there, your baby thinks you're dead.

This is why the world needs Emily Oster. It's like, see, your baby doesn't think you're dead.

Wait, while I have you here in your brilliant brain, I have so many parents in questions. I want to ask you the whole toxic dies in children's food like popsicles, candy.

Okay, I'm getting an eye roll. I like where this is going.

Should we be as panicked about red dye in our children's food red forting?

Yeah?

No, There's a lot of this evidence is in this flavor of like coral versus causation. People are like, oh, you know kids who there's more hyperactivity, kids who eat a lot of foods with red dye. Well, also, all the demographics of those families are really different, the diagnoses rates are really different.

There's tons of things that are really different.

It's like a very classic place where seeing that people who consume a lot of something are different, how do you know it is that versus any of the other differences across the groups. And we do not have any direct evidence, in fact, some small amounts of direct evidence that this does not matter.

So no, okay, So we can't just keep all of this delicious Emily Oster wisdom for ourselves. We've got to broaden it out with questions from you, our listeners about pregnancy and fertility.

Yep, that's what's coming up after the break. Stay with us.

We're back with economists and New York Times bestselling author Emily Oster. So Emily, our bright Side besties have some questions for you when it comes to pregnancy.

I'm ready. Here's our first question from a bright Side bestie named Antonia.

Hi, I am thirty two and trying to get pregnant, and i recently had a blighted ovum and I'm curious how common they are and also if there's anything that can be done to try to prevent having one again in the future.

Thanks.

Can I just ask a question? Yes? What is a blighted ovum?

A blighted ovum is a type of early miscarriage in which there's an implantation but it doesn't develop into an embryo.

Got it.

It is a reasonably common issue and a reasonably common cause of early miscarriage, and often you would not necessarily know if an early miscarriage was because of this or because of something else.

In general, we.

Talk about early first trimester miscarriage. It is very common, much more common than many people think. Something like a quarter of pregnancies will end in miscarriage. In the first trimester, and fortunately most of those people will go on to have healthy babies later, and having had one miscarriage does not put you at much higher risk for later miscarriages. If people have had two or more, it's good idea to have more follow up on that, but for the most part, there is very very good prognosis.

Here's another question from Natalia.

If you're thinking about delaying your motherhood, what age is a good age to start thinking about freezing your eggs and when is it potentially too late.

The answer to this is a general answer about how fertility changes with age.

Our fertility is very high.

When we are teenagers, but mostly we're not ready for other reasons to have a baby at that time, and your fertility is declining to some extent throughout your entire reproductive life, and it then declines more precipitously in your forties, typically leading to menopause in the early fifties. So if people ask it when is the optimal time to freeze eggs, it's probably in your twenties when you are most likely to have the most number of eggs that are healthy and are normal genetically. As people age, their eggs are more likely to pick up chromosomal issues, and so you're less likely to have many eggs which could be fertilized. But there's no point at which you'd say this is a complete waste of time to do. We don't actually know that much about egg freezing and how likely it is to result in live births later. We just don't have that much follow up. Egg freezing is a pretty new technology.

I did it.

My doctor's office said the same thing, Emily, But that under thirty five is really preferred.

Yeah, I mean this under thirty five rule relates to a kind of general idea that we have that like, after thirty five you enter the realm of geriatric pregnancy and begin to fall off some kind of old Lady cliff, And that's not really well supported in the data. Fertility doesn't tank at thirty five. You know, it's lower at thirty five than at thirty four. It's lower at thirty four than at thirty three. There's no sharp cliff at thirty five. But many places will nevertheless adopt a kind of thirty five cliff, not for super data based reasons.

That's interesting. Our next question comes from janus Hi.

Emily, so I am just starting to learn about perimenopause, and I wanted to ask what are the chances of getting pregnant during perimenopause?

So first of all, I have to plug on parent data. We have a newsletter written by an endocrinologist called hot Flash which is all about perimenopause and menopause. So for those of you like me who are in perimenopause, it is very helpful. Fertility declines through your forties as it keeps going, but it is possible to get pregnant during perimenopause. Women continue to have avulatory cycles. Maybe not every cycle is ovulatory, but about a quarter of women in their last cycle, the last menstrual cycle before menopause, will have an ovulatory cycle, which means that they could get pregnant during that cycle. So it is less likely that you will get pregnant during perimenopause, and particularly less likely that you'll have a pregnancy that would carry to term, but it is definitely still possible, which is why if you do not want to get pregnant, you should be using some form of birth control.

If you are sexually active. I have one quick question follow up. As an economist and a statistician, I mean you are assessing data all the time. I'm curious, when you are surrounded by so much evidence, do you still continue to form deeply held beliefs or do you hold everything a bit more loosely.

Yes, it's an interesting question.

I think that because of understanding better how evidence evolves, I am probably more comfortable with the idea that we might change what we are thinking as more evidence comes in. So there are things where I'm more convinced, say, like I think the evidence for that is really strong for this reason or that reason. But the idea that we think something now, but later we might think something different when new evidence comes in.

That's like the core of.

Being an academic, of doing science, and so I think it's much easier to be in that mindset than if you have this idea that like, some of these rules or guidelines are stated by some authority which knows for sure that they're true.

Do you find yourself parenting similar to how you were parented in some ways?

Yeah?

I mean I think in some ways very similarly. And then there are some things which I want to try to do differently. But there are so many, like simple things which I remember as a kid, my mom would get this peanut butter, you know, the natural peanut butter.

That you have to like stir up. And I was like, I'm gonna get Jiff.

There was this commercial that was like choosy moms choose Jeff, and I always wanted.

I was like, I want that, Like it's spread so nice.

You know.

There's like this commercial and it looks like peanuts and then you spread it. And it was like, I have such a vivi memory of being like, when I'm a parent, we're gonna have Jeff.

And here I am with like the stir up natural peanut butter. And it's like you ended up not being a choosy mom.

I was not a choosy mom. Just like I'm just like an old lady mom with natural peanut butter.

I love it.

Emily Oster, We love your brain. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Asker is an award winning economist, Professor of economics at Brown University, and New York Times bestselling author. Emily is also the founder and CEO of parent Data, a data driven guide to pregnancy, parenting, and beyond.

Emily will be back soon for another iteration of mom Friend so if you have a parenting question that you'd like her to answer, please send it to us at Hello at the Brightside podcast dot com.

That's it for today's show.

Tomorrow, financial therapist Lindsey Bryan Podvin is here to talk money and mental health for another iteration of Wellness Wednesday. Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Simone Boye. You can find me at Simone Voice on Instagram and TikTok.

I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's r O b A. Y. See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.

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