How to Talk to People - How To Build a Happy Life: The Right Choices in Parenting

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

The mandates of modern parenting can be dizzying. But in the effort to optimize our parenting, we may lose sight of the values we hope to impart to our children—and the skills necessary for individual decision making.  A conversation with economist Emily Oster helps with understanding the nuances of choice-making in parenthood. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), and Gregory David (“Under the Tide”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure that they're using their new tools to change our institutions. their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.

You know, Becca, being a parent is a little like not seeing a gorilla. What? No, no, hear me out. So there's this experiment that two psychologists at my university undertook in 1999. It's a famous paper that they wrote called Gorillas in Our Mids. What it was was a psychology experiment that looked at when people are focusing on one trivial thing. how they can become effectively blind to a much bigger thing. And here's how the experiment went.

They had videotapes that they were playing to undergraduate students, and they were of basketball players, teams of basketball players, two teams of three people, and they were passing basketballs back and forth, and the people watching the tapes had to do just one thing, which was count the number of passes between the players. Okay. and see how accurately they could count the passes.

It was kind of complicated because they were passing it back and forth and back and forth. And then in the middle of the Tate, a guy in a gorilla suit walks into the frame and just walks back and forth and back and forth behind the people were passing the ball. And then at the end, the researcher says, how many times did they pass the ball back and forth and they give the number? And then they ask, what about the guy in the gorilla suit? and in like 46% of the cases, the people in the experiment said, what guy in the gorilla suit? If you see this and you can see this on the internet, you can get this on YouTube, it's the most obvious thing.

But all they saw was passing the ball. Now, that's what it's like to be the parent of a little kid. How so? I'm not seeing the analogy here. You're counting the passes and you miss the gorilla. This is how to build a happy life. I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

You're not paying attention to being happy and having a happy baby. You're worried about whether or not you boiled that pacifier. You're not worried about the big picture of what's going on in your family and the relationships that you're building because you're so completely distracted by counting the number of times the kid went to the bathroom today. I mean, there's a gorilla back there. Right. The gorilla is the most amazing thing. Right.

I'm guilty. I mean, when my kids were little, it was, I'm telling you, I could tell you every bit of minutia about what was going on in their little lives. But a lot of the times I wasn't thinking to the stuff that I would really like to remember today, which is what were we feeling? Where were we going? How were they developing? You know, sometimes they didn't even take as many pictures as I wish I had because I was. was so occupied with the ball passing that the funniest thing, the most amazing thing, the guy in the gorilla suit, slipped right by me. There's a bunch of ways that you could modify your vision that

would deliver on some of the things that you want, but they require acknowledging sacrifices. If there's any area of life where our expectations for ourselves seem impossible to me, it's parenting. We tend to be fixated on parenting outcomes. And that really never works. I want to understand how parents can actually make good decisions, or maybe just good enough decisions, and be happy at the same time. Thanks for doing the show. Appreciate it. Of course.

I'm excited. Can you start by introducing yourself on tape the way you like it? I'm Emily Astor. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better Crib Shite and the family firm. Emily Oster is an author on many sensitive issues in parenting. As a trained economist, Oster takes a data-centric approach to parental decision-making, teaching parents how to best understand the data behind the so-called mandates of modern parenting. Now, Oster is an economist, not a mental health professional,

but her analytical approach to this personal subject provides a new lens into the complexities of any individual decision-making. A lot of my work is on data and is on data in parenting and using data. to make decisions in pregnancy and around our child rearing, and then also writing about the decision-making part of it, the part of economics where we think about trading off costs and benefits and trying to have structured approaches to how we make choices. And in some ways, the sort of central pieces of everything I do is that those tools which we might ordinarily think up as useful

in kind of business settings are also pretty useful in our personal lives. Yeah, yeah. And they think about being an economist, as you and I are, is that you feel like you don't know anything until you get the data. So did you feel that about being a mom? Like, yeah, I kind of know, but I don't have really strong opinions. I better go out and get some data on it. Was this me search rather than research?

Oh, absolutely. No, there's no question, yes. It's hugely me search. And I love that. So expecting better, which is the first book I wrote, was really a book that I wrote while I was pregnant. I sold the book at 35 weeks pregnant, having, you know, basically done all of this research,

just so I could know what to do. Right? Like, you know, some people are like, well, could I have a cup of coffee? Like, maybe I'll read a few different sources and kind of, you know, just kind of decide what works for me. But I was like, no, I have to go. Like, I got to go down the rabbit hole in this. Like, this is how I'm going to approach the world

as I'm going to find out, like, what are all the studies about coffee say? And what's the interesting empirical issues associated with this question and how can I explain it to people? So there's almost a sort of statistician approach even more than an economist approach. But at a minimum, the difference,

the decisions that we make should be made with all of the facts in mind. And it's almost never the case that the data is going to tell you the decision. We almost can't approach the decision without knowing the evidence behind it. So give me an example. You're 35 weeks pregnant selling a book, by the way. That's just, that's awesome. Tell me something that the data overruled some preconceived notion that you had and that you started to behave differently.

So there are pieces of data that were surprising. I mean, I think one place where the data probably pretty clearly affected what I was doing there was about epidurals. So an epidural is pain relief during labor. And I think I'd sort of assume that I would do that. Epidurals are really good at preventing labor pain, but they have some sort of limits and some downsides in terms of recovery. It's a place where actually the data doesn't at all make the decision for you. So it's a sort of example of a place where when I got the data, it wasn't, definitive in one direction or the other, but it was the thing that let me make the decision

that was different than the decision I had anticipated. So it really is this sort of structure of like, we're going to get all the information and then we're going to make a choice, and that choice is going to be informed by the information in the data. Do you think that since subsequent to the birth of your children that you do a lot of stuff differently with your own kids on the basis of your research? Have you kept this protocol up of, you know, I don't know what to do with these kids. Is this how you're approaching parenting, day to day? Particularly when they were younger.

Yeah. So I think that there's a little bit of a progression. So you have your first kid and I like everyone else have my first kid and then I guess I thought I would have time to like figure out how to do it. You know, I would have time to do the research. But actually when you have your first kid, there's no time to do anything except just like basically hang on to the roller coaster and hope that like they buckled you in correctly, right?

And so that was a sort of chaotic mess for a few years. When we had our second, I felt like I was in a much better position to be prepared. and that's actually when I wrote the second book. So I sort of wrote the second book post the second kid because it was much easier to focus on the questions or the areas of decision making that I thought were really important. When you write things about parenting and particularly when you write about kind of how to work through the hard parts of parenting,

getting your kid to sleep, like dealing with discipline, you know. It's very easy to write what you should do. It's very hard to implement those things. So I would say in my own parenting, I'm frequently trying to implement things that I'm failing at implementing, even though I know that I should implement them. It's much easier to tell people what to do than to do it yourself, I find. Yeah, for sure. I'm a happiness research. I'm well aware.

So give me an example of something. So we can make this more concrete because, you know, we're talking in the abstract about parenting. So give me an example of something that, you know, that data say you got to do this and then you wind up never doing this. So here's the thing. It's about sleep. When you are encouraging your kids to sleep or trying to enforce a sleep schedule, particularly with an older kid. Data tells you basically three things. You need to have a bedtime routine. That's easy. You shouldn't have screens before bed. That's also not that hard. And if your child is coming out of the room routinely, you know, disrupting you, which is a common thing that little kids or older kids do, you should be consistent every time in the way you react. So if you have said that was the last hug, then every time they come out, You should take them back into the room, put them in the bed, don't do another hug, you know, leave when they come out again.

You put them back in the room. So it turns out like that will work. If you can implement that, that is basically a very effective. It actually works pretty quickly. It works like within a few days. But it is almost impossible, I find, to implement. So I have one of my kids is older. She's very good sleeper.

But my other kid, it's sort of like a little more variable. And we have many nights where he will come out a lot of times. and I will say, this is the last time I'm going to do this. But I cannot follow through on that. I just know if I just do it one more time, then eventually he will just go to sleep. And the kind of investment in the moment of like, do I want to be like holding the door closed while he screams?

Like, is that what I want to do with my night? Even though I know that if I do the other thing, it's going to have these long-term consequences, you know, it's just things like that are just hard to follow through. Yeah, yeah, let him cry it out. I was fine letting it cry it out when it was, you know, when my kids were babies because I think partly it was a much more controlled environment. It was just like much easier to achieve.

With an older kid, you know, it's a whole other. Yeah, they're like, they're claiming they're dying. Right. They're like, oh, but I have to pee. I don't think you have to pee. You've recently peed. So, okay, the picture that I'm getting here is that you should keep an open mind and be open to evidence. And you, Emily Oster, have a boatline.

load of evidence because of what you do for a living. But parents have evidence, too, based on their experiences, and they should be willing and flexible to update what they do and not be dogmatic on the basis of what people are telling them, right? So everybody can be kind of their own kind of economist, but you have to think like an economist, which is let's see what's really going on and change our behavior on the basis of what we see and what the patterns actually are as opposed to what the Internet is telling me. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think it's particularly important as kids get older. So it is going to be much less frequently the case that we can make statements like the data shows X. So to give you like a concrete example,

there's a lot of really good data showing that introducing allergens, like peanuts, eggs, things like that that introducing those to your kids earlier rather than later reduces the risk of allergies later. Okay. So that's, it turns out, it's just like a really good idea to give your kids allergens early. It's shown in randomizing. trials, it's relatively straightforward to implement. There are more things like that in little kid parenting where the data will tell you either this is important or this is not important or you know do whatever you want. As your kids get bigger, the things that are coming up are more complicated and they get really wrapped up in questions around what are our family values,

what are we trying to achieve, what do we want our days to look like. And once you're in that world, there is, I think, more space for just these kind of differences. and the outcomes that we're going to get to. But what I think people should share or what I think would help people in these spaces is just being more deliberate in the way they are making those decisions. It's not that you should or should not rely on the internet.

It's that when you come into some complicated decision or some choice, you should sit down and think about the choice and give the choice the space that it needs in your brain. And I think that's often what we are missing in this era of parenting. You realize people, are almost struggling with even articulating the different options. And that's kind of getting in the way. So let me give you like a concrete example of this. So sort of discussing with someone the other day, the following issue. Before they had kids, what they envisioned for their sort of family meal

situation was that they would all sit down, they and their spouse and their kid would sit down at the table at 6 o'clock every night and they would eat an interesting meal that they had prepared. And then her 18-month-old would love the food. You know, it would be like a wonderful family the activity where they all sat there and enjoyed the food and they got to cook interesting things and so on. Like fast forward 18 months, the reality is that her kid doesn't really like her food that much and is kind of picky. It's just what it is. It is impossible to achieve this thing that she was envisioning achieving. It's just it's impossible. And it's not her fault. It's not that she did something wrong. It's just like kids are picky and like there's not,

there's a limited amount of time and that's just the reality. Rather than recognizing, okay, I can't have this first best, but let me figure out what are the things? the key things I do want to have. Is it more important to sit at the table or interesting foods or is it more important to eat together as a family or be able to have more time for cooking? There's a bunch of ways that you could modify your vision that would deliver on some of the things that you want, but they require acknowledging sacrifices. And so we sort of talked about the idea that by not confronting the limitations that had arrived, she was not able to get to a second best. She was envisioning the first best, she can't have the first best. Right. So I was saying, like,

let's think about what's the second best. And instead, we were in like the 27th best. So one of the things that we noticed is we became less and less and less scrupulous with our parenting as the children were born. So our first son was born. And, you know, the pacifier falls out, right? Oh, my goodness. You're out of a passifier. And so you've got like a ziplock bag full of pacifiers and you take the old pacifier home, you boil it and you boil it for 15 minutes or whatever it is, and then you make sure it's completely sterilized. So the second kid comes along a couple years later, and the pacifier falls out. And so you find a drinking fountain, you rinse it off, and you give it back to him.

Third child comes along, and the pacifier falls out, and the first thing you do is to look and see if anybody's watching, and then you wipe it off and put it back in her mouth. And it turns out that she's the best adjusted... You wiped it off. That would be number four, you know, but the third is like the most, the best adjusted child, the least stressed out, probably because that's this, you know, bad parenting behavior is correlating with all sorts of other standards that we're developing here. And I mean, one of the first themes is, you know, be deliberate thing for yourself, but also one of the themes in your research is,

relax, man, right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers, could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.

Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win. But we are very, very, very, very large. likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Now, you're not a pediatrician and you're not a psychologist. You're an economist. What led you as an economist to take up this topic of parenting and families and how to be parents and how to be

kids? Yeah, so pretty much becoming a parent was sort of the That was my entry into parenting and into writing about parenting. But, you know, I think for me, I kind of came into parenting with the tools from my job. I was familiar or comfortable with the idea of using tools of data analysis and structured decision-making in my life before my parenting. And most of the writing that I do about parenting uses those tools, takes those insights. I married a non-American. So my wife's from Barcelona. she thinks that Americans are all about fads and panics,

that all of American culture is a combination of fads and panics. It's like, we're all going to do this. We all stand for the current thing. Or we're all freaked out and protesting this thing all the time. So she said, you know what? I don't think anything matters that much except love. And she's sort of a monist in this way. How terrible is that rule?

I don't think that's a terrible rule. I mean, I think if you look at evidence on almost anything, individual parenting choice, you would struggle to find concrete evidence that it sort of matters in some meaningful way. We know on the one hand, if we compare sort of across resource levels, so if we compare across income groups in the U.S., that there are big differences in, say, school achievement for kids based on what happens in the first years. So obviously something that is going on is really important for various aspects of kids' development. And yet it's very difficult to identify any individual piece of that. Any individual thing that you as a parent could do to like enhance this achievement metric or whatever it is. And I, I think like your wife, have always sort of interpreted that result as sort of something about not so much love, but even just sort of stability. That the idea that like there's a lot of value to sort of a kind of stable, well resourced home and that that is something that we could be thinking about policy solutions to. But that, that is a lot of value to sort of a kind of stable, well-resourced home. And that that is something that we could be thinking about policy solutions to. But that.

is not the same as like does your Montessori preschool have only wooden toys or whatever. Yeah. And did you listen to a lot of Mozart when you were still pregnant? That turns out to be garbage. That those like Mozart studies are total garbage. You know, that's some combination of fat and panic, right, which, you know, gets back to the point, right? And now, speaking of fads and panics, you write about parenting mandates. So give me an example of a parenting mandate. So there's a, there's this idea that like if you're making infant formula, you have to boil the water. And it's an example where it turns out the reason to do that is like effectively a hypothetical risk for something that is more or less not definitely not going to

happen or it's like a tiny, tiny, tiny probability thing. And I talk about this as like parenting mandates, unfunded parenting mandates, things where you were told, you know, here is all of the 57,000 things you need to do. And if you like add up the time for all of those things, it's, you know, 72 hours every day. And it's like, well, I only have 24 hours. Like, which of these things should I do? It's like, well, all of them. Okay, but I already told you, like, that's 72 hours of things.

So it's like, well, I guess do them faster. It's like, well, you know. So what should we do instead? I mean, I understand why there are rules. I mean, I get it. I guess that some of our listeners would say, well, what a privileged conversation. You know, these people that have all access to all this, you know, good data and were raised in really stable homes. And they can sit there and say that we don't need parents.

where a lot of people didn't have access to this information and easy rules are the best way to do it. You're not saying that we should get rid of all mandates or I don't know. What's your mandate on mandates? What's hard, I mean, this is a sort of key issue in public health communication, which is one that came up all the time in the COVID pandemic as well. We somehow need a way to communicate to people levels of risk. So co-sleeping is a good example of this. So the kind of rhetoric that we have on co-sleeping is like under no circumstance should you sleep in the bed with your baby. This is like the public health advice on this is, you know, that's extremely dangerous. And we don't provide that with much nuance. And in fact, if you look at the data on that,

it is pretty nuanced in the sense that there are safer and less safe ways to co-sleep. So I think even in the safest, it carries some small risk. But it is much riskier if one of the parents is smoking, if, you know, there are a lot of covers in the bed, if the baby is premature early on in life. There's all kinds of subtleties to that, which I think could be communicated but aren't. And people are left in a situation in which they almost may find it impossible and you haven't provided them with another alternative. So people say literally you've told me I can't sleep with my baby and my baby will only sleep with me. So there's no solution for this. And that's where you get into situations and this is the real things that happen

where people say, well, I'm going to try really hard to stay awake. I'm going to hold the baby because that's the only way it'll sleep. I'm trying really hard to stay awake. I'm going to go to, I'm going to sit on the couch. You told me the worst possible thing is to sleep in the bed with my baby. Well, it turns out the worst possible thing is to fall asleep accidentally on the couch with your baby. That is like 50 times as dangerous as co-sleeping in the safest way. Now, by not providing any subtlety in our public health messaging, we've left people in a

situation where the choice that they will make trying to achieve what you want is a worse choice. And I don't have a solution to that, but I do think that we need to be far more thoughtful about the way we're sending these messages because we're sending them to people and not to autonomous robots who are able to just say the things that we want. Yeah. Now, there are obviously really bad ways to do that. I mean, they're really irresponsible ways to throw out the rulebook and say basically, You know, I don't believe any of this, so I'm going to smoke while I'm pregnant. And there's a ton of evidence that says you shouldn't do that.

Even less should you drink while you're pregnant, for example. And there are all kinds of ways that you can put your baby at risk. But there are some people that are, you know, more nuanced about that. You know, there are parents who are kind of countercultural parents. And they say, I'm going to do these things because I want to do these things. And I want to have a deep connection with my child. And I don't really care what, you know, daddy Internet says. What's your view on sort of countercultural parenting where you, you figure,

figured out like people did for millennia. The broader answer, the broader thing I think a lot of people struggle with is whiplashing between decisions. So probably the worst decision-making approach is to do one thing because one book says it and then as soon as you read a different book or your mom comes to visit, do the other thing. The more you can make one choice and try to stick to it, the easier is your parenting going to be since many of these choices that you make don't matter very much.

I mean, I think up to these issues that you raise, which is like there are some things which you, you know, which are very dangerous, you should not do. I think that's actually completely, like that's completely great. What I think many people struggle with is that they struggle to implement that. Right. So that in the reality of it, the kind of, I'm just going to go with my gut, doesn't work for everybody. Because for many people that can lead to, well, I actually wasn't really sure. And now I'm rethinking it because of the thing that's person at the playground. ground said to me. So when people tell me, like, I'm, I'm, like, really confident in my decisions,

and I'm not really reading books, and I'm not really making them based on data, and I just, like, this is what I want to do, and this is what works for me, I think that's, like, that's absolutely fantastic. When they say, I'm going to go in this direction, but then as soon as you say, well, this, you know, here's this piece of data, it's like, oh, I don't know, maybe I made the wrong choice. Then I think we're in a space where you actually aren't, almost aren't able to go with your gut because the stimulus of the information is, you know, the way you want to go, but you haven't managed to process it correctly. Yeah, one of the reasons that people, they don't follow mandates, is, as you point out in

your work, is because kids force a deviation from the script. The kids themselves actually kind of force the deviation. Lots of cases of this. You know, I want another hug, and it's really compelling, and it turns out you want to give the child another hug, for example. Or, you know, when they get a little bit older in bilingual households, one of the things that we, all of us in bilingual households, find is that the kids don't necessarily want to talk to the parent who speaks a non-English language in the United States in that foreign language. We see this again and again and again that the non-Native English-speaking parent will be forced into English with the kid by the kid. It happens all the time, path of least resistance. So talk to me a little bit about kids forcing

changes to the rules and if this is good or bad or should we care. Kids are people too. One of the most challenging aspects of being a person who likes control, who has children, is the realization that, like, there are some things that you basically can't make them do. There's many moments in parenting, whether it's sleep or food or something else, where you realize, oh, actually, I can't force this person to do this thing. It closely relates to a set of questions around how much autonomy your kids have

and how much of the way that your family operates is going to be driven by the things that the kid wants, and when you should start thinking about that. When does your kid get a say in what extracurriculars they do? You know, when they're 10 months old and you enroll them in baby music, presumably you're not like, you know, well, like, would you want to go to the baby music about Rafi or do you want to go to the Mozart baby music?

You're just like enroll them in whatever thing is available. When your kid is 15, presumably they do get a pretty significant say in what extracurriculars they're doing. But where's that line? Like, when do you listen to them? What's the time that you make that choice? And how do you know it's going to be the right choice or not the right choice in the long run? I think that part of kid autonomy around decision making is just really challenging.

You've heard about the free-range parenting debate, which is this debate about whether or not we over-structure our kids' lives and we over-protect our kids. Within normal boundaries of the current conversation, where would you put yourself in this debate? So in terms of physical autonomy, which is almost how sort of I think of the free-range parenting. So how much do you let your kid like walk to the library by themselves or walk home? Or I actually think where I'm relative to my peer group somewhat far on this. I actually think there's a lot of value to kids in having them navigate the world outside of your four walls on their own is pretty important. Yeah.

Okay. So you're more free range than most people of your generation, most parents of your generation, for sure, right? And you have this view not because you don't believe that risk exists, but because you, as an economist, are trying to assess risk versus reward. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say, yep. I think probably also you would assert, and I would agree with you, that the reason that more people don't subscribe to this point of view is because all they hear about is the risk. They don't hear about the reward. I mean, you don't hear on the news. You know, child walks to library alone and has a great time and becomes better adjusted. Yeah. That's not a headline, you know, when the kid doesn't get snatched.

And so that's a problem, isn't it, when it's all risk and reward in the way that we hear about parenting? Yeah, I think it is. And this goes along with the question of, you know, do I bring my kid their shoes at school when they forget them? You know, if my kid forget their soccer shoes, is their job to bring them and they forget their soccer shoes, what is my approach to that? To what extent do I bring them the soccer shoes or to what extent is it a learning experience? And I think that's a really complicated question. In some ways, it's complicated for the same reason that it's complicated to know whether I should go in

and give my kid that last hug because I know that they will shut them up now, but it will have consequences later. If I bring my kid their soccer shoes when they're 10, it's like, yeah, then they'll have their soccer shoes and it would be very bad if they had to play, somewhat bad if they had to sit out of this game. But like, am I still bringing them their soccer shoes

when they're 19 and they like went to college? So I find those conversations just really difficult to navigate to think about what's the right thing to do. Yeah, and by the way, helicopter parenting is all about bringing your child her soccer shoes at age 19 when she's a sophomore in college. I mean, that's...

Absolutely. And there's a ton of data on this. There's a ton of actually interesting research on this that shows that helicopter parenting lowers a sense of autonomy, increases rates of depression and anxiety. It attenuates the relationship with the parents. All the things you think it's not supposed to do, it does.

Yeah. All the good things you think it's going to bring. It brings the opposite is the bottom line. That's why freedom and autonomy are so critically important. but habits are habits and habits are ingrained when the kids are little, right? It's almost that you need a deliberate break in those habits because it's really hard to break those habits when your kid is older because things feel more consequential. You know, because it's like, well, now it's the soccer game that the, you know, recruiters are at. And so I can't like have them forget their shoes for that game.

There does have to be a point at which you say, you know, now this is your job. Like you as a kid, this is your job, but it's going to mean that you're going to have to follow through on some consequences. and that's a choice people have to make. Yeah. We started with being pregnant and getting up, you know, epidural. And now our kids are forgetting their soccer shoes. Yeah, and soccer shoes in college, but we're making this progression. It's interesting, you know, my kids will bring up that, you know, I had a technique that I used when my kids were in high school.

So I made my kids write a business plan. And they made very original business plans and they all kind of did their own thing. I mean, one went to, you know, Princeton University of Famous. University. He did really well. Another one worked on a farm for two years, and I was a sniper in the Marine Corps. And one of them made a run for the border and is studying in Spain. And they were all part of their, you know, what they were going to do. Do you agree with that approach? And how do you feel about trying to tease out the way that our kids can be, you know, their own person from the very beginning? Or is that a dangerous way of approaching parenthood? Should you be giving them more

parameters or trying to encourage them to be kind of free? Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I would tell everyone when they need their kids to make a business plan, although I like, what you're getting at that I really find resonant is the idea of your kids not being an extension of your dreams fulfilled or unfulfilled. We all have these images or these ideas for what our kids are going to be or what they're going to be excited about. And a lot of times they're the things that we're good at or the things that resonate with us. And for many of us, a part of parenting that is challenging is seeing,

you know, okay, well, this is what my kid wants to do. And maybe it's not the thing I envision for them. Maybe it's not the thing that I envision for myself, but it's the thing that they like. And it's the thing that I need to sort of celebrate the ways in which this person is in fact a person. And that becomes so much more vivid and visual. As your kids get older, you sort of realize.

And that's a part of my own parenting. I find both very, very rewarding and also very hard. It's easy for me to connect with the pieces of, like, my daughter, that we are very similar. But much harder on the things that she's good at that I'm not. But they're also the most fun things. They'd be like, oh, my gosh, I could never do that. Like, I could just absolutely never do that.

And I'm so impressed that you can. No, it's amazing. And when you actually see these things, they know when you're amazed, too. They know when you're blown smoke. They know when you're, oh, that's wonderful. They can sense a participation trophy at 100 meters. Exactly. But boy, oh, boy, do they know when they've amazed their parents.

So it courage them to do amazing things and then be authentically amazed. No, my daughter plays a violin. she's, like, quite good at it. And I, like, I listen. I'm like, wow. Like, I don't even know what you're talking about. You know, she's like, oh, that, da, that. I'm like, I don't understand the words, but it sounds nice.

Right. It's fantastic. What do you think is the single biggest mistake that American parents are making today? Probably overthinking it. And, I mean, I feel like that's such a ridiculous thing for someone like me to say whose entire thing is, like, think more about your parenting and be more deliberate. But, like, probably there is a sort of mistakes. somewhere in here around planning it too much or relying too much on this idea that, like,

if I could only get this one, like, if I could only find the one key, there's like one key to getting it right. There's no key to getting it right. Thank you to our how-to listeners who helped make this show what it is. We asked you to tell us about your most clever parenting moment. And here's what you said. Hi, this is Marilyn from Oak Park, Illinois, and I think one of my cleverest parenting moments was when my daughter was in middle school, and she posted something that we thought she shouldn't have on social media. As punishment for her irresponsible use of technology, we took away her phone and told her that for the next week she couldn't use any technology that wasn't available in 1976, which was when I was in middle school. That mostly meant that she could only use the landline phone in the kitchen and had to stand next to the wall pretending,

the phone was on a cord. Years later, we still talk about how fun that week was, and I think all of us learned some good lessons. I remember, for example, that I kept reading that if my baby was crying during the night, you should just let him cry it out. Cry it out, cry it out, cry it out. They call it crying it out. And it's like, I don't want to let him cry it out. I don't want to do that. So I decided I wasn't going to. And it was fine. He didn't grow up to be a bank robber. He didn't grow up to be a horrible, spoiled person. You know, he's great.

Did well in school and took responsibility for his actions, despite the fact that I didn't let him cry it out all the time. And I remember I was kind of worried at the time that I was stunting his growth because I was trying to, you know, do something that would satisfy my own desires. But the truth of the matter was that as time went on, I realized that there's just a lot more flexibility in the things that you do. I recognize why. they have these guidelines, it's probably good advice, but it's just not something to, you shouldn't set your watch to, you know, parenting regulations is what I found. And that was important for me to

figure out. And it turned out that it's not as bad as they say, or at least, I don't know. I mean, the truth is, I still don't know. I still don't know. And, you know, I'll be a grandfather and not know. So I guess I'm more comfortable with not knowing. That's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ibath. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers,

I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve? very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.