Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Introducing: Raising Parents

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Raising Parents with Emily Oster premiers Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

Here are the top three potty training mistakes that we see parents make. Here's how to balance milk feeds and solid food intake for your baby six months plus from a pediatric dietician. Here are some tips for open cup success. Now you want to start with a thick liquid or a puree. We get told a lot as parents, do this, don't do that, no, do this, but in this way and not in that way. Having another baby, here's a tip to help. Remember the number three. And we get sold a lot. Which is why we're excited to partner with Energizer and bring to you the world's first coin lithium battery designed to help keep kids safe.

And as a mom who struggles with anxiety, this was super stressful. Thankfully, Neato has my back, which is why I'm so excited to be partnering with them. I had my second baby a month ago and I thought i'd share my top five breastfeeding products just like toppy tod is literally the way to go hi guys come with us to target to restock on millie moon diapers and white the doctor brown's bottle warmer i love using our nannet baby monitor they are 100 the softest diapers i've ever felt these are a must-have to stay dry in these nursing pads. Get the disposable ones. Don't get the ones that you can walk. The parenting industry is now a $100 billion industry,

which is really something, considering that the very idea of parenting is only half a century old. Before the 1970s, the goal of parenting, which wasn't even a word, really was just keep as many kids alive as possible. Now, parenting is an all-consuming obsession with moms and dads, especially moms,

expected to spend every waking, non-working hour with their children, attending to their every need with kindness and thoughtfulness and the wisdom of 12 TikTok videos. Constantly concerned about how their kids feel about themselves, how they feel about us, how we feel about them. Preparing them to be the next Chopin. Potty training them in utero, all while making a roast chicken and green beans and a side of toxin-free goat milk eczema cream and never ever yelling or screaming. I know because I'm a parent. I see the same courses and products and targeted ads as you guys do. And I feel the same guilt and pressure. And sometimes a new gadget can help. Snoo, anyone? But for some of the hardest questions in parenting, gadgets and products can't cut it. I'm talking

about the things we really need help doing, like learning how to discipline a child who just hit her sibling, or deciding when or if to get our kids a smartphone. We've got questions like how to set up our boys for success in school, and when to let your kid walk down the street by herself. For these questions, gadgets aren't going to do it. We need information and data. We need to hear from experts who've thought carefully about these questions, and we need this information so we can separate hype from truth and make our own best decisions. Which is why we made this show. I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents, a show that tackles parenting questions with data, not trends.

Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have like a lot. Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to

why schools should reopen. What kind of reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist, you're not a doctor, I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really show women here is what the evidence is. And why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself? I'm an economist and author of The Unexpected, Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm. Basically, a bunch of parenting books, not based on magic or feelings or trends, but based on data and evidence. And it turned out

that's what parents want. They want to be treated like adults. And that's exactly what this show will give you. It is incontrovertibly true that we've built a schooling system that is more amenable to the way girls develop than the way boys develop. There are parents that believe everything has to be talked out. I'm sorry, it's not a democracy. That's wrong. We've become a very drug-oriented society. Kids are being medicated for ADHD and depression and anxiety. Oh God, at such early ages. You get this overprotective, concierge, paranoid parenting.

And that's really bad for kids. I spent a lot of time asking all the hard and controversial questions. Is your impression that the kids would be happier if they were getting more external restrictions on this? The answer is yes, but. Do you think that marriage is a moral obligation to children? I mean, that's a loaded one. This is perhaps going to sound like a silly question, but like, why is this so bad? What's the problem with childhood obesity? What's at stake? What happens is that growing obesity rates among kids sets up kids for a lifetime of these health risks, really threats to their health and actually to their

lives. Is it possible to set boundaries without consequences? No, because I don't think you're really setting a boundary at all. What you're doing is you're turning yourself into a slave to the child so that you can have all the information you need. Kids who are growing up with a single mom are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up with married parents. Very few kids complain their parents don't have time for them. Instead, what kids complain is that their parents are too angry, tired, and stressed. All of the data we have suggests that young people growing up in a social media-dominated social landscape, spending less time with friends in reality and more time with friends in the virtual, are unhappier.

And all of the valid perspectives, sometimes from the little people themselves. Like the boys are acting bad, then the teachers will get mad, but then when the girls act bad and do something, the teachers don't get as mad because, yeah. My brother and I walked to our friend's house. It was the first time. We were in the third grade and we told all our friends how we walked. It was fun for us because we got to see the shock on all of the friends' parents' faces, like, oh my gosh. By the time my friends started getting phones, I didn't want one because I had been noticing these gradual, perceptible changes to me in my friends' behavior. So that you can confidently raise good people in this strange

new world. I think that parents today are contenting with forces that are bigger than any one family, any one school, any one community. There's nothing wrong with your children. There's something wrong with the way we're living. We're so desperate. I mean, we really just want someone to tell us what to do or to tell us that we're doing okay. We really need to hear that. Raising Parents is coming to you September 18th. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.