WHOOP Podcast - What Data Can Do for Parents with Emily Oster

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Senior Vice President of Research, Algorithms, and Data is joined by Economist and Parenting Expert Emily Oster. The pair discusses Emily’s background (1:50) and journey from economist to parenting expert (2:55), the lack of research in pregnancy and parenting (3:45), navigating caution in pregnancy (5:36), receiving pushback from physicians (8:11). Emily Oster gives insight into creating her business, ParentData (12:28), navigating social media (15:56), and presenting some of the biggest surprises in parenting research (19:58). The pair continue to discuss policy changes and parenting aid (21:41), when the best time to have children is (22:15), family planning (28:37), and unpacking some listener Q’s (41:01). Resources:Emily’s InstagramEmily’s TikTokPodcast: Raising Parents with Emily OsterPodcast: Parent Data with Emily OsterParentData.org Get Emily’s BooksFollow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

this idea of just caution above all else in both pregnancy and parenting. Of course, we all want to be very cautious, but at the same time, there's literally no evidence for something and you yourself would benefit from doing it. It's not always obvious which direction caution goes. Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. If you have no idea what Woop is, go to Woop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial. It's a good deal. You get the full experience for 30 days. We got a great episode for you this week. Just a reminder, if you're looking to kickstart the holiday season, we just released

our jingle band and new Woop Beanie, so you can check those out at Woop.com. All right. This week's episode, Woop, SVP of research, algorithms, and data, Emily Capital Lupo, is joined by another Emily, Emily Oster. She is an economist, university professor, an author specializing in development economics and health economics. Emily is also the CEO of parent data, an organization focusing on making scientific research digestible for parents and families. By collecting data and research about parenting, pregnancy and overall personal health, Emily aims to use her expertise to clear up many of the questions she herself had during her own pregnancy. The pair discuss how Emily went from economists to parenting expert, writing her first book in dealing with pushback,

starting parent data and delivering analytics and research to parenting, preparing for pregnancy and life as a parent, the lack of research on pregnancy and how we can change that, and debunking some common parenting myths. If you have a question to ask you answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Here are Emily Capitalupo and Emily Oster.

Hi, everybody. I'm Emily Capitalupe, WOOP, of Research Algorithms and Data, and today I am joined by the incredible Emily Oster. I'm personally a huge fan of Emmleys and the work she's done as CEO of Parent Data. Parent Data shares scientifically backed information through weekly newsletters, articles, and podcasts, which I personally religiously follow because I found myself facing so many of the same questions Emily has tackled, and I'm so grateful that she packed up thoughtful and easy to understand ways of thinking about those questions in her best-selling books, crib sheet, expecting better, the family firm, and the unexpected,

and in short form, on her parent data podcast and on parent data.org. Emily, thank you so much for having kids before me so I could be the beneficiary of your very comforting research. And thank you so much for being with me here today so even more of our listeners can find your work and understand why your work is so important. Well, thank you for having me, and I'm pleased that I could have children before you. That's very kind of you. Very nice. Let's start with how somebody with a PhD in economics becomes one of the leading

experts on family health. I think the short answer is that first you become an economist and then you get pregnant. But the slightly longer version is that my work in economics is about health and is about data and how we learn from data and think about policy and think about decisions. and my work in parenting and pregnancy is about taking all of those tools and applying them to the decisions we make in parenting and pregnancy. And so it was a much more natural shift than it might have seemed, but what happened is I got pregnant. I started doing all this research in the service of my own pregnancy,

and things sort of occurred from there. One of the things you talk about a lot in your books is just how shocked you were that somebody hadn't done this research first. Yes. Like this almost, of course somebody's done it kind of attitude. What do you think happened there? It's a great question. And one that I did ask myself a lot at the time and continue to.

I mean, I think one thing is, you know, when I wrote expecting better, when I started writing it, it was 2010. And I think some of this kind of used data for your life wasn't quite as hot as it is now. And so I think I was sort of on the beginning edge. of some of the idea that we could use data to make evidence-based life decisions. But I also think most of the people who would think about writing about pregnancy are obstetricians, and that is a group that has a tremendous amount of information and knowledge about babies. But there isn't often a lot of data training in obstetrics or in medicine in general.

It was a sort of unusual thing to think, hey, I can take this training that's really about data on causality and bring it to this other space where the data is very similar, even if the topics are somewhat different. It seems like one of the things that I frustratingly ran into over and over again in my own pregnancy is just how confidently physicians talk about things that they don't know anything about and how there are weird gaps in training. Like you hear about this with nutrition. Apparently, doctors get something like four hours of nutrition.

education in the average US medical school. And then pregnancy is another huge one. And I got told things like, you know, not to let your heart rate go above 140 beats per minute when you're exercising, which we actually know from our own loop data is totally nonsense. That doesn't make any sense at all. Agreed. I'm curious, like, was there one nonsense moment where you were just like, all right, I'm writing a book? I can tell you the thing that really frustrated me the most, which was all of the discussion of prenatal testing because it, in some ways, was quite well understood because it's something that involves medical procedures taking and out, testing them, sequencing genomes and so on. But the guidance was totally not data driven. It was like,

if you're over 35, you do this, if you're under 35, you do that. And for someone who understands data in any deep way, you will know that, like, there's no biological process that's, like, different the day you turn 35. It's just the way people work. So I was trying to push into like, well, why? Like, what other factors you want to consider? And they were just like, well, you're over 35. Then you're old. Like, I get it. I'm old. But like, say more. And so I think that was for me a very frustrating experience where I felt that very clearly there was a right decision for me, not necessarily the right decision for everyone else. And I wasn't really able to grapple with the decision in the way that I wanted. I think there were all kinds of things like the 140 beats a minute, which when I

eventually encounter them, you just ask a question, well, how do you know that? You know, how do you know? Often the answer was, well, we're just trying to be safe. That's another piece of it's sort of interesting to unpack, like this idea of just caution above all else in both pregnancy and parenting. Of course, we all want to be very cautious, but at the same time, there's literally no evidence for something and you yourself would benefit from doing it. It's a lot of not always obvious which direction caution goes. Yeah, and I think sometimes there's a lot of blinders around caution, right? We know that exercise is so good for you during pregnancy. So, like, what might look like caution, you know, there's no benefit because it actually doesn't

protect you from anything and it might keep you from doing something. Exactly. Yeah, there's no, there's often very little sense of a tradeoff. Yeah. I think it's interesting, right, when you think about these best practice guidelines, right, the day you turn 35, the recommendations change so much. But, you know, for someone like you where you're like, I'm super healthy, I'm a runner, like, you know, not that much more than 35, right? Does this actually really apply to me? And like, what does the 35-year-old prototype cutoff line? Like, does that look like me? Does that apply to me? Yeah, and you could ask the same thing about pregnancy. You know, 140 beats a minute is pretty different depending on who you are and how you're coming into things.

Blanky guidelines almost never make a huge amount of sense. Okay, so you get this recommendation to do testing and you're like, I'm not sure if this advice is legit or applies to me. And then you start to do this deep dive and you're like, okay, I'm going to write a book. Have you found any pushback or do you find that, you know, physicians appreciate the way you're creating clarity here? Things have evolved in how people receive me over time. So when I first, expecting matter first came out, it's sort of interesting to go back. I wrote that book mostly in the year after my daughter was born and very much informed by the immediate experience of the pregnancy. which when I read it now, it's quite raw, like I was quite frustrated, and you can feel that,

and I can feel a lot of the frustration I have with the medical system. And that, when it first came out, I think there was certainly some pushback from obstetricians, even to some extent sort of things where people agreed, there was a little bit of, like, this person's an economist, what exactly are they doing? Over time, I think that that book has gotten more acceptable to a larger number of people in part because many doctors realize they have a lot of patients who are just as neurotic and crazy as I am. And so this book is a great way to understand better some of what's going on. I think my second book, Cribsheet, which is about smaller kids, it's much more popular with pediatricians because a lot of that book is about making choices where your pediatrician is going

to tell you any of these choices are fine. And the book is about, you know, how do you really understand what's the choice that works for you? Yeah, I thought one of the things you did so beautifully is, if you're not a parent, there's this whole phenomenon with like the mommy wars, which is basically like the things that moms choose to do or choose not to do and then get like myopically religious about like there's one right way to do this. And, you know, it covers everything from like, you know, do you nurse to sleep or do you put the baby down awake? And like obviously like, you know, breastfeeding versus formula and daycare, right, working, not working, not working, daycare versus Nancy, the whole thing. And I love that, like, in so many places, you're like, there is no right or wrong answer, but like, here are the things to think about. Here's where we have data. Here's where you don't. And then just, like, kind of take away so much pressure and stress. I'm curious, like,

it felt like when I was reading your book. A lot of it, though, was highlighting, like, we don't know the answers to these things. Have you seen researchers, like stealing those ideas and answering those questions? No, not really. And I'll tell you why I think that is. So in many of those spaces. What you can tell from what we know is that any differences are small. So we are not going to go and find out daycare is, you know, six standard deviations worse for your kids' IQ than something else because we know enough. We have enough, even with the data that's not very good or not as complete as we'd like, we have enough to know that any effects in any direction are likely to be very small. That makes it a really hard thing to study. I think some of the reason that our data

is not very good in these spaces is that the likely effects are so little that you would need such a large study, such a well-designed study to really get anything causal. So there are a few places where, like, I think I've managed to push research a little bit. Like, one of the things I'm totally obsessed with is breast milk storage. So how long can you leave the milk out? Like, if it's out for four hours, do you have to throw it away? No. But, like, how much longer could it be out, you know, and that is something where our guidelines are incredibly conservative. It really matters for people's lives. And it's hard to study. And I think I've gotten a few different research teams, like interested in this question of just how can we measure bacterial growth

and breast milk is actually a super easy thing to do. So I'm hoping that will be my legacy. I love that. Yeah. And I definitely have thrown out milk that I felt like I fought hard to create. So I think the thing that really motivated there's the time I got a text for my friend that was like, you know, my husband left the freezer open and the breast milk defrosted. Should I leave him? And I was like, are you, and I was just like, you know what? Just close the, it's actually fine to refreeze it. Just close the freezer and don't leave him. And that made them feel much better.

And they're still married. So there you go. I'm glad you were able to save the marriage. It's an important legacy. Shifting topics a little bit. You're the CEO and founder of an incredible company that's working to make life easier for parents from pregnancy to birth and well through a child's life. I like to unpack how you brought all this data and science to the world of parenting. So we kind of talked a little bit about, you know, how you made that initial transition of, you know, I was already working in health data and then started to focus on some of the things that upset you during your first pregnancy and beyond. My journey, as I like to call it. Yeah. Okay. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, how you went from, I'm frustrated, I'm going to write a book to the creation of parent data? Yeah, so I went from, I'm frustrated, I'm going to write a book, to I wrote one book.

Then I had a second kid and wrote a second book. And at that point, I decided I wanted to be able to have a more consistent way of communicating with the people who were reading these books and, you know, new studies came out, new topics. There were things I hadn't been able to talk about in as much detail in the books. And so I started this newsletter. And this was in February of 2020, like the end of February. And like the first post is about Zika. And then the second post is like, did you hear about this coronavirus thing? It's probably not a big deal.

I'm sure we won't be speaking about it anymore. Then the newsletter sort of morphed into really something that was about COVID. And there were a lot of parents who were reading that. And I think for many parents in that moment, the newsletter sort of reached them at a time when they were like alone and wanted information. And in some weird way, I think the experience of parenting during COVID was a lot like the experience of early parenting even without COVID, which is new things were coming up all the time that you had to make decisions about and you had no idea how to make them. The newsletter at that point served really the desire for people to say like, oh my gosh, I was just thinking. about this last line and like now you're here telling me what the data says and can I have daycare, can I have grandparents, whatever it is. And over time, we've sort of moved that into a corpus of information about early parenting where I really think it's trying to achieve the same thing, which is when you're up in the middle of the night and you're afraid of things, I want parent data to be there to answer your questions, to let you go as deep as you want

into the question and then often just go back to sleep and kind of try to do that. that with long-form pieces, we try to do that. There's like an AI chat bot that'll, like, give you a quick answer so you can go back to sleep right away. So there's a bunch of things like that. But really, it's about sort of being there to answer people's questions. I feel like every parent listening to this right now is going to resonate with that, like, freak out moment in the middle of the night and just like the beauty of the quick, like you can

go back to sleep. Because if you just Google it, you're never going back to sleep. No. Because then you will find all the things it could be. Oh, yeah. It's not anything, but it could be many things. Right. It's like every cough, you're like, oh, is she dying? Do I need to go to the ER? Totally.

Every little thing. Like I said, I think, you know, the beauty of your work is that it's calming. And it feels not like just a dismissive, don't worry about it, but that the data says that so many things I think have gotten like overhyped because that works on social media and whatnot. So, yeah, I mean, social media is like the thing that it wants to get you with is either you're doing it wrong. That's very popular. or this is something to panic about. Those are the two core social media elements. So you're all over social media. How have you found kind of competing with all that hype? It's hard because the way these things are algorithmically programmed,

there's a tremendous value in things that are clicky. And I think part of what I do a lot on social media is like people send me those things. They're like, oh my God, I saw this and here. What about this thing? And I gave my kid Cheerios and turns out it has in it. No, it's fine. It's fine to give your kid Cheerios. So I sort of see that as a value of social media as being able to debunk some of that stuff. But at the same time, I mean, the algorithm would like me to, you know, say all the terrible things that are happening. I'm curious and I think our listeners would be too. If you can just walk this through, like, how do you do that?

And like, why is your approach as an economist different? You had a brilliant explanation that I enjoyed lately on should I be worried or not if my daughter drinks bath water. Right. I'm sure if you go on Reddit or whatever, you can get a million random moms weighing in on my kid did this and they were just fine. But as an economist, how do you tackle a problem like that? For me, the starting point is always a question of why. Like, why are you worried? Like, what are you worried about? So, and I really like to be very structured. So in the bath, there's like a few things. There's water. There's bath toys, which are coated in mold, there's possibly poop, and there's pee, and there's soap. And so those are sort of your core, they're your core concerns.

And then you just want to step out and be like, okay, well, what do we know? Is bath water okay? Sure, it's the same as your regular water. Check. Is soap okay? Yeah, as long as there's not a lot of it, it's okay, so sort of like work down. And then you get into more complicated questions, like how much poop is okay to eat. But it turns out, like the world contains the answer to that.

Right. You can find out. Like if you have more than a kid has more than a mouthful of poop, you call poison control, but otherwise it's fine. And it's really that kind of logical stepping through of what are the things I'm worried about? Let me think about each of them in turn and stop if there's a place where it's like, actually, that is a very big concern. But often you get to the bottom of that and you're like, oh, although this seems gross or

it seems like a thing that I'd be concerned about, actually, when I think about it in logical steps, it's fine. Now, in that case, you were focusing on the like, should I freak out if my child like accidentally ingests some bath water. Does your research help answer questions that go further? For example, like my daughter is working on, you know, the open cup because she's a year and a half. And like the bath is like a safe place to practice that because if she spills, well, we're already in water. So that's great. So it's like, is it okay to encourage it or would that be a no? Don't do that. And like how do you go about like finding that line? And I think where some of this stuff gets interesting and tricky sometimes is like the value.

you of the working on this developmental skill, which is super important to use an open cup, you know, with the sort of dangers of, it's not like the cleanest water. So I think this is an example of where we make the lives of parents really difficult. It's like it's very important for your child to use an open cup because if they don't use an open cup, they're basically going to college without every day you come an open cup. It's an opportunity for you to really mess this up. Probably their mouth will be messy. Something terrible will happen.

Don't even get me start out mouth breathing. So open cup is super important. And also like bathwater is not ideal. So somehow we've made it into a situation where like no matter what you do, you feel like it's bad. I think there it's often just dialing down the energy on both of those things. Like, yeah, it's okay if your kid had accidentally ingest bathwater. It's okay if they drink it all the time. And that's the point. A mouthful of poop is quite a lot of, you'd have to drink a lot of bathwater to get a whole mouthful of poop. If your kid is drinking bathwater, it's okay. But also, Also, if you don't focus your bath on open cup mouth development, it's also fine. It's also fine.

Parenting is hard enough. I don't know. I think we make it a little harder. We make it too hard. What are some of the most surprising things you found? Because it sounds like a lot of what you've been saying is like, this doesn't matter and this doesn't matter. But was there something that you thought would be one way and it just came out another way? It's surprising in some ways how little, like how few things.

things show up in the data as really important. And I guess what's sort of interesting as someone who does this in a research capacity and also in this kind of more public-facing capacity, if you look out in the research world, it's actually really important what happens in the first three years. So the kind of age of the parents who are speaking to me, like that's a really important developmental time for your kid. But the things that are important are quite a it more fundamental than people are understanding, like your kid having enough to eat and having a stable place to sleep and having people who love them and maybe occasionally hearing words and being read to, like, those are kind of the core things. And people get very occupied with

things that are much, much smaller and almost certainly do not matter. And so in some ways, for me, that's the most interesting tension in my whole life is like how do you get to think about policies that would help kids arrive at the age of three in a more equal way across socioeconomic groups, while at the same time speaking to it in some ways a very privileged set of parents and being like, actually, don't worry so much about whether all your toys or wouldn't. And like, you don't need a spreadsheet that rotates toys. Like, you don't need a toy rotation spreadsheet. It's not, that's, that's too much. For me, that's the most complicated attention. Do you have a sense, like, if you could wave your magic wand, what policies would really make it

different. Paid family leave and some kind of finance child care subsidies so kids would have like access to high quality child care. Those would be like my two starting ones. They've seemed pretty basic. Not out on a limb on this. Yeah. Hopefully you get support on those too. Yeah. I think unfortunately for some of them there's so much support that that's like then they try to like package paid leave with all kinds of other unpopular policies. Yeah. And then we make no progress. Yeah. Frustrating. One of the things that I think our members have asked and would be curious for you to walk them through is, is there any data that supports that having children later versus earlier in life is better or worse for you? So there was a really interesting Instagram, real, speaking of social media, the other day that was like people who have kids when they're over 40 are more likely to live to be 100. it. So that's true in the correlational sense, but it's largely reflecting the fact that there

are characteristics that make it possible to have kids after 40 that are also beneficial for longevity. So in terms of like your own health, I don't think we have any evidence that early versus later is better. In terms of kid health, we know it's easier to get pregnant when you're younger and that's well known back. But beyond that, this idea of kind of there being an optimal time to have kids, I think reflects a poor understanding of what optimal means. I mean, for some people, the best time is probably when you're 23, and for some people is probably when you're 45, and there's a pretty big range there. I don't think we see much that would suggest that there's a right time to do it from a

kid perspective. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. that's right you can check out whoop at whoop.com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days so you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free you get to try it for 30 days see whether you want to be a member and that is just at whoop.com back to the guests let's shift focus a little bit and talk about your new book yeah um it's called the

unexpected navigating pregnancy during and after complications. And it's different from your previous books because you're specifically talking to a group of people for whom pregnancy hasn't gone the easiest way. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things you learn doing that? And if any of the people listening are going through that, who would this book be for? This was really motivated by a decade of talking to people who had read expecting better and had come into a first pregnancy or a first pregnancy attempt experience with kind of a particular set of expectations and then had a loss or had a complication and wanted to know, will it happen again, what does the evidence say?

And also just wanted support. this is like the book that I would want to give them and what we do in the book and it's co-authored with Nate Fox who's a maternal fetal medicine specialist is we go through many of the most common complications and talk about you know really what is this what is the likelihood it will happen again and then a bunch of guidance about how to talk to your provider if this has happened to you so the intention is really for this book to be used by people who have experienced one of these complications and about 50% of pregnancies will be complicated by something we talk about in the book. So it's a very wide range of women. I think for me,

the core goal is to help people understand and navigate better the experiences they're having because these experiences are sad and are scary and aren't something where we really give people always the capacity to be part of their own health care. I think one thing is probably interesting about the specific decade in which, you know, you've been active in this space, has been towards a reduced stigma around some of these things. And I think, like, I've been obviously sad for it, but also impressed by my friends that, like, we're all in that chapter of life where a lot of us are having.

kids and I see that like when people miscarry or have pregnancy complications, it's like they go straight to social media and they're posting their stories and then you see in the comments like all these me-toes and all of that. So I think, you know, there wasn't probably a good sense a decade ago just how often this was happening. But I still think that people are probably going to be shocked to hear that this applies to as many as like 50%. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think miscarriage is a very clear example where I think we have gotten better at talking about it over time. There's still a lot of progress to be to be made, but certainly relative to when I was having my first kid, I think there's way more discussion of kind of when people miscarry, way more openness to sharing.

There's still in some ways a dearth of information to understand, you know, why this happened to me. What's the chance that there's something I could do about it in a future pregnancy? There are a lot of other complications, which I still think we're not quite there. not quite there on. So this book only recently came out in April. Yeah. Right. And so my guess is many of our listeners haven't had a chance to read it yet. And so is there one thing that you just want to share now, maybe something you learned in writing the book, even if it's in the book, that would be important for women for whom this book would be relevant to hear? Let me tell you a sort of very general thing we start with, which is we start by sort of suggesting some set of

core questions people want to ask and want to engage with if you're thinking about a follow up pregnancy. And one of those is, why did this happen to me? How often that question is asked, like, why did this happen to me? Like, what did I do to deserve this? What is, in what way is this my fault or a punishment? Like, somehow, like, why in an existential way? And we've sort of tried to help people reframe into why did this happen to me in a productive way. is there something some way to understand was I at higher risk? Is there something I could do to my risk? Is there a way to think about that question, which is in your head all the time, in a way that would help you move forward better rather than just think about it as like, should I blame myself? And what did I do? Has any of your research touched on, you know, for people who are pre this chapter of life? You know, let's say they're hoping to have a child in the next two to six years or something like that.

Are there things they can be doing that would either just set them up for an easier pregnancy or reduce the risk of some of these adverse events? So I think the core thing that people could do, and just to be clear, there's a lot of adverse things in pregnancy that one cannot prepare for. And most of the things are larger of the things that we talk about are things which are not really preventable or to the extent they're preventable, there's nothing really you could in advance. And there's two things that always recommend to people. One is to understand your hormones and menstrual cycle and like how that works. The number of people who arrive at

the desire to get pregnant without an understanding of like, you know, there's only about five days in a given month where sex can result in pregnancy. Many people find that surprising. I found that surprising. And so I think the more people can sort of understand just like how the whole system is working, the better you will be set up to make it work in the way that produces pregnancy. And then there's like some general stuff, which is, you know, for almost every complication and everything we look at being physically active is helpful at reducing risk. It's probably the most consistent risk reducer is like some kind of physical exercise. Seems like a general advice. Yeah. I mean, This is just, like, general doctor advice, although I tend to focus on the exercise piece rather than, like, the diet piece.

Sure. But I think the hormone piece is a really good point because whoop tracks menstrual cycles. And before we released the feature years ago, like for the very first version of it, we did a focus group with our members to understand what language we should use. So, like, your menstrual cycle is two phases, molecular and the lidial phase. We were like, I don't think people know what that is. Like, should we call it like first phase, second phase? We were trying to figure out what the right language to use was. And it was, I forget exactly, because this is years ago, but it was like teens, 16% whatever,

who like knew what that was. And we filtered the populations, all people who were menstruating. So this is like something that's happening in your body every day, right? And like, nobody knew this language. And that really informed on how we ended up building and introducing the feature. But the regularity of your menstrual cycle is a huge predictor of how hard or easy it's going to be for you to conceive and can also be an indicator that something that's going to get in your way is present. And so, um, and something that your doctors won't like proactively look into until you've been

failing to conceive for a full year, which if you're in that process can be really stressful and devastating. So it's worth paying attention to if that's normal and bringing it up with your doctor long before your quote unquote like really care about it because you're trying to get pregnant. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you're, you're living inside this body. a very important part of, like, how you feel every day and, like, how you look at all those other stuff is, like, determined by these hormones and determined by this cycle. And we really should be helping people understand that, like, way before their, you know, early 30s.

Yeah. And I think, like, I don't know, the more work through whoop that I do in that space, the more I realize, like, how much we do a disservice. I feel like the only education you get about it is, like, in fifth grade, you sort of or get told what a tampon is and like it's useful it does come off it's important uh good to know but that kind of stops there and then it's like you know don't worry about the rest of it until you're sexually active or whatever right and then we have the thing where you take the baby home but like somehow there's like so much between use a tampon and then there's a baby like that yeah

and then i think so many of us too like you know they give out birth control like it's candy which just makes the whole thing kind of go away and it's easy to like lose sight that there's this a really important vital sign in your menstrual cycle and how important that could be. And then, of course, we at Woop are always telling people more exercise. Right. So couldn't agree with that more. Was there anything maybe not quite as important as those two, but maybe surprising that in order to increase your likelihood of a successful outcome, however you choose to define that?

People got to understand the role of age a bit better. Like when we talk about age and fertility, we tend to think about it as kind of there's this cliff at 35. And that's not really true, but it is true that as you get older, your fertility declines. And so just sort of helping people think about like some of these tradeoffs, particularly in a world where like people are thinking about breathing their eggs. How should you think about, you know, there's a lot of this landscape that has changed quite rapidly. We basically would like people to understand your fertility is highest when you're 17-ish. And then it's just a slow roll down more or less until menopause. And after about 45, it's pretty hard to get pregnant.

Naturally, it's not impossible. It's pretty hard. But, you know, there's a, there's a long time in there when it's moving. I think one of the things that makes doing good research here difficult is that there's a lot of intersectionality in these outcomes that research does a poor job at teasing apart. If you have children later, like there can be risks of certain outcomes, but you also likely have the resources to give them other advantages. And so how do you think about those pieces in your work? It's incredibly hard. I mean, this is like the core problem with such a huge share of research that has some outcome

for kids or parents on like the left-hand side of your analysis and some other outcome on the right hand side is that there are so many differences across families that determine the choices that they make about family formation, about how to form a family, about how many kids to have, about when to have them, all these kind of things. So much goes into that. And then if you're going to try to like isolate one element and say, oh, this element causes some difference in outcomes, I mean, it's what I argue in some of my like methodological research. Like, that's impossible. It's the same point I'd make about a lot of our understanding about like what food is healthy for you. Like, really, really, really hard to isolate some particular food and be

like, this is a super food, as opposed to just being like weirdos to do everything else, also eat this food. You know, that's like, I think that's a, that's a very core problem with nutrition research. It's also a very core problem with, like, parent behavior research. Parent data, I've noticed from your podcast, is spinning out a related product around menopause. Do you want to talk about that? Sure. I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah. So, So this is a newsletter that is written by an endocrinologist. His name is Dr. Gillian Goddard. And we started this in large part because I wanted to read it.

And I run the company, so I got to decide. So we found Jillian. And I think there are so many people in this space. And this newsletter is called Hot Flash. But the space is really like the post-reproductive years. So sort of thinking about like you're done. having kids and things don't just stop occurring. You know, there's a long period before perimenopause often. Then there's perimenopause. And there's menopause. We're really talking about

for most people, you know, something like, you know, 15 or 20 years of your life in which changes your hormones are affecting how you feel, in which there are things you might do to change how you, how you feel. And in which, again, almost going back, it's like being an adolescent again, you know, like all of a sudden your boobs hurt. And you're like, why is that? You know, and you say, well, actually, there's a difference in your progesterone. There's more of it now. And so I think there's so much you to understand. And that's really what Gillian is trying to do in Hot Flash is kind of help people think about navigating that portion of their life. So I will tell you from my own research, I was very frustrated at how little scientific academic community has done around pregnancy and then

was shocked at like how it's so much worse with menopause. Totally. And women just get told things like, well, you're getting old now. Like you know, go h in the corner. So I think a piece of that, because it's so poorly understood, people will attribute like any symptoms to this. And sometimes like that's not a symptom of this. You know, so people write to me and be like, I'm having, you know, ringing in my ears and a lot of toe pain. And I was told that's probably very menopause. It's like, well, actually, really no reason to think either of those things. And So if you're having ringing in your ears, you should have that looked at like by a doctor who specializes in that.

That's not just hormones. But since we don't really understand enough about it, anything that just sounds like the lady in her 40s complaining about problems, they're like, you know, you're drying out. So that's what we've got. Yeah. For all the women drying out, we're listening. As we are. What's been some of the more shocking things that you've learned?

One of the things I've really come to understand is estrogen. is like just very important hormone and many of the answers to like, why are you experiencing this differently than you before have to do with just a decline in estrogen? So a lot of the common symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, even some that you wouldn't necessarily attribute like more PMS symptoms have to do with like changes in how much estrogen are happening. So that was like one piece. And the other really big problem in this whole space is how we've understood hormone replacement therapy. So there was a single study that sort of made everyone give up on hormone replacement therapy and decided just gives everybody cancer immediately.

But as it turns out, that's probably a way over interpretation of that existing study. A lot of people who would not be at a particularly increased risk from having hormone replacement therapy, and it really helps a lot of people feel better. So I think it's an example of a place where we really need to course correct and without information with just the kind of misinterpreted that's come out of the world, there's sort of no, there's no way to course correct. So I think Gillian spends a lot of time writing about it. It's like the two things she writes about the most are hormone replacement therapy and GLP wants. You talked about how like basically all clinical guidelines, some of which we now know aren't great around hormone replacement therapy, we're

about this one flawed study. And I think like that's happening a lot because there's so little that people just grasp onto whatever you have. What do you wish academics in this kind of under-explored area were doing differently? And, you know, if you could waive your policy wand, how would you change the design of those studies? It's hard. And I think part of the issue is that you want a randomized trial because, you know, that's how we get good causal evidence. So you really do want some kind of randomized trial. And there's almost certainly a lot of heterogeneity across people.

So you're sort of simultaneously looking for something where it's randomized, but it's big enough that we can pick up differences across people because in so many of these spaces, the experience you're going to have, the symptoms you're going to experience, even the impacts of something are going to vary across people. And we're often not having as much data as we want about people and large enough studies to distinguish or even a sense that that's an important thing to try to understand. I think that's kind of one piece. The other piece I would say is we're almost never caring about people's experience. Like so little of this is collecting data you could describe as, like, well-being. One of the reasons people like hormone replacement therapy is because it often makes them like sex better, for example, an activity which people enjoy. But no one's like, hey, a great reason to do this is because of sex. They're just like, well, no, I would actually still like to enjoy that.

So I just think we don't spend enough time on like the lived experience of people. It's a great call out. So if you're a researcher and listening to it. Yeah. Ask people how happy. Like quality of life. Yeah. Ask some details of questions about their sex life. That's my message.

Emily, we have some questions from our members that we'd love to quickly run through with you. The first is what is the biggest myth when it comes to parenting? That there's a single right way to do it. Okay. So that's a very interesting choice. answer because the next question is true or false there's a right way to parent there is not a right way to marry there are some mistakes you can make but most things are fine what would be like the top three avoid other than like failing to feed your child or something yeah don't leave them

unsupervised near a pool um that's one of my big ones you know make them understand that the street is dangerous and give them allergens early that's an important one and I I think an interesting one that's full of myth and where recommendations have shifted a lot. So do you want to just explain that? So when my, this is like a great personal anecdote because when my daughter was born, who was now 13, they told us, like, don't introduce peanut butter until she's a year because peanuts are a common allergens. You want to wait until they're a year or two to give them peanuts.

And then between the time that she was born and the time my son was born, there was this large trial that came out that basically showed that that advice was like not just unproductive, but literally the opposite, because in fact, introducing peanuts and other allergens more or less as early as you're giving them any non-breast milk or formula, so like four to six months, that that prevents allergy. And so right out to my son, they were like, oh, give them peanuts, like read them in peanut butter at birth. And that was like a super interesting way to sort of see research evolve. But it also really confused a lot of people, I think, has resulted in that not being adopted the way that it should be because people are like, well, you just

told me not to give them. Like, now you're telling me to give them, like, what, who are you? Just a bunch of people make stuff up, which is another example of why we need to explain to people. Like, yes, we changed our mind because of this, you know, new study. That was an interesting one where probably the one where I most felt the mommy wars, because with the new recommendation to have allergens earlier, there was also sort of this related recommendation to just start solids earlier. So the recommendation went from six months to four months. Your kid's going to give. Yeah, like you're ruining their virgin microbiomes or whatever. Oh, the microbiome. Yes. Everything's about the microbiome. So we started solids. We did baby weaning around

four and a half months. And I had friends who had babies like within a few days of mine who like waited longer and it was just one of those like, oh, you're doing that and you're not doing that? Should I not be doing that? And like it's very, it feels really consequential. Like I'm setting up your whole lifetime relationship. with food right now. Right. I think one of the most interesting things about speaking to an audience primarily of people with younger kids from the perspective of having an older kid is like, I promise when your kid is 13, you will not remember. Even then, you will not remember or notice the difference in when you introduce the salads. But do introduce allergens by six months. And you can do that even if you're not. There are ways to do that even if you're not

giving your kid a lot of solid food. And it's more important if you think your kid will be prone to allergies, like if you have allergies in the family, then you want to kind of push that earlier. Right, because you can just like dip a pacifier in a tiny bit of butter. Yeah, there's also powders you can put in formula or a breast milk. Okay. So I think, you know, not being negligent around a pool or around streets, probably most people knew that, but peanuts is an interesting one in allergens in general. And I think particularly because the recommendation has changed in the last decade,

It's one of those places where I think a lot of us get a lot of advice, whether solicited or not, from our mothers and mother-in-laws. And so where they might be, you know, well-intentioned sharing outdated advice. And so worth sharing that. So you heard that from Emily. One of our listeners asked how you would describe your parenting style. I think you should have my children on to describe. You know, I think it's, I ain't. I aim for authoritative because that's what one's supposed to do. I don't know. I try it. Like,

I really like my kids. And now they're big and I like to hang out with them. Like, we're quite strict, but sort of in a schedule. Like, our family's very scheduled. Organized. I would describe my parenting as organized. And is that a reflection of sort of you and what felt right? Or a reflection of you did some research and that's what you think is about the attitude. Like our, I think there's kind of a, we did a lot of research about sleep. I'm very, very obsessed with sleep, particularly as I have older kids, where you can start slipping out of the sleep. And so I'm like very rigid about sleep time. And that generates a kind of rigidity that's difficult to avoid in the rest of your life. But a lot of this is just that my husband and I are both people

who like to really, really know what is happening. Well, we at Woop believe that sleep is great. have made it our company mission to help people sleep more. So I resonate with that. People do not sleep enough. No. And I think we're doing a very scary social experiment because teenagers, especially young teenagers, are getting something like two hours less sleep per night than they did 30 years ago. It's a very. I think we're going to learn the hard way how bad that is.

Yes. Woop could have told you that. Now, Emily's telling you that. Sleep is important. And I think it's especially important with growing kids. And I think they have some of the most scary pressures, especially as they have smartphones in bed with them. Yeah, I think the two really big problems for, like, older kids in sleep are smartphones and extracurriculars. It's basically like if your kid gets home from, if your 12-year-old is getting home at 9.30 from gymnastics and then they have homework.

And they're not going to, they can't get enough sleep. that's it. The opportunity to get enough sleep has ended. And that's, it's worth thinking about that when you sign up for gymnastics, I think. As a former gymnast, I feel tardy. Sorry. No, it's okay. Like, it's such an interesting example, though, because it's also such an incredible sport for so many other reasons. And there's extracurriculars in general are so enriching. And I think, like, I know I keep coming back to this idea, but it's like the tradeoffs are spicy. And they're, they've gotten much harder because I think it used to be, you know, maybe, I don't know if you were serious about gymnastics, but I think it used to be easier to balance

extracurricular for a much longer period of a kid's life to balance extracurriculars with other kinds of sleep and family time and whatever. And I think as there's gotten to be more pre-professionalization and more like kind of of these pressures that happen on kids, it's gotten much harder to like do things in a way that where the extracurricular would benefit the kind of socio-emotional development but isn't like your kids getting into college because they do. this activity. And I think that's, that's made it really hard. Yeah. I think it's just like the pressures around college, like you're saying, kids are doing things at way more elite levels in high school

than they used to and just spending so much more time. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I think in a lot of ways, your research would say that like there isn't necessarily a right or wrong and you need to find the balance that works for you in some of those tradeoffs between things like a little bit more sleep versus the upside of participating in some of these enriching programs. Yeah, I think that's right, although I think parents, in many cases, are kind of probably not thinking about extracurricular benefits in quite the right way. Like, we do have some evidence on the benefits of extracurriculars, but they're mostly about developing a sense of belonging and of kids feeling, you know, like they have a

peer group that's outside of the peer group in school. And so there's a lot of reasons to like extracurriculars, but this idea of kind of of extracurriculars as like development of my kid because otherwise they won't be a successful adult. I think that that doesn't, probably didn't show up as much in the data. The reality is like your kid's probably not going to go to the Olympics. I'm just saying. Statistically, that's very true. Statistically, it's very unlikely your child is going to go to the Olympics. Even if you yourself went to the Olympics, the chance is higher, but it's still small. Our next list of their question is what is harder, pregnancy or the first year of life?

The first year of life, no question. Yeah, I agree with that. Pregnancy is like what you think is hard until you realize what the first year of life. Totally. Next question, what is one piece of advice you can give expecting parents? Schedule a meeting with your partner for two weeks after your due date. So you can talk about how things are going. I love that so much.

And I would say make that a recurring meeting. It should be a recurring meeting. I think people don't do this. And then they get upset and things are not, of course, things aren't going that well. Like you've never, it's the most important thing you've ever done and you've never done it before. You wouldn't embark on something at work and be like, we've never tried this before. Let's just never speak about how it's going and just keep going and whatever. And so I just, yeah, meeting, recurring meetings. I love that you chose that answer because I think that there's so much focus on, like, like, what's happening in your body and is your baby the size of a grapefruit yet or, you know, all this stuff? And what I felt like was zero focus on your identity is changing and it's never going back. You know, your family is going, especially that first child when you've no idea what's about to hit you, right? Like your whole dynamic changes. And I think maybe even more so if one parent's breastfeeding because there's this huge thing that the other person like can't do. and so there's so much so much new all at once and yeah your whole relationship is redefined

and so I think there's an important and beautiful message and don't forget the real marriage as you know your family goes from being with you know synonymous with your marriage because it's just the two of you to like now there's two things to take care of a family and marriage marriage is important too okay so Emily you are a runner as am I what's harder? Running a marathon or a day of solo parenting. So a day of solo parenting my 9 and 13 year old is definitely easier than running a marathon, but I would probably take the marathon over when they were like four and one. Also, after you're done with a marathon, people are like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you ran that far. Like that's so amazing.

And after you're done solo parenting, your kids, people are like, why is the house so dirty? That's so true. Like you finish the marathon. Everybody brings you like snacks and put your feet up. If there was one health metric, pregnant people should keep an eye on with their bodies. What is it? Hmm. Probably resting heart rate. Like both your resting heart rate and your HRB will change some during pregnancy. I'm not sure either of them is super diagnostic of a problem.

Certainly blood pressure, but that's not something you could measure on your own. So those are two I would like generally keep an eye on. Yeah. We have a feature that obviously we track for everybody every day, their resting heart rate and their HRV. But when you're pregnant, we'll plot it against the typical trends because we've seen that people's resting heart rates go up as much as like 15 b. At the end, and it was creating a lot of anxiety because, I mean, that could be 20% increase. And people are like, whoa, what's going on here? We're like, don't worry.

It's normal. So I think worth paying attention to, but also worth being aware that it should look like it's getting worse because you're working so hard. I mean, what's so interesting is that, like, the only reason we really know this, like, as precisely as we do is because of your data. Yeah. Like, basically, that's where I, like, I've written about this and the place I pulled the data was you guys. Oh, thank you. Thanks. I appreciate that.

Okay. We've got two more listener questions. The next was, does data ever make your anxiety worse as a parent? Not for me, but I think for some people, you can get, like, overly obsessed with collecting data, particularly when people are, when your baby is little. I find that like there's two kinds of parents. There's the kind for whom like the spreadsheet with the poop and the PE counts is helpful and the kind where that's not helpful.

And it's probably important to figure out like are you the kind of parent who needs to know all the data points or not? Yeah. This was a funny one for me because, you know, my husband's a physicist, math major. Works in health tech. You know, I'm a data scientist by training. And I think like everyone expected us. to have like the smart everything, like, you know, the, you know, smart socks that measure every

heartbeat and the whatever. And everyone was like, Tiff, you put a whoop on your baby and we're like, we're not tracking anything. I'm not doing any of that. For like three days, my husband had the, like, you know, track the P app. And then we were like missing them because, you know, he would sleep through, you know, a nighttime feeding and change. And like, I wasn't, you know, the app was on his phone. I wasn't doing it. And so then it wasn't in complete. which of course makes it junk and then we just killed the whole project but um i was just like this isn't useful and uh because i read crib sheet and expecting better so i knew it didn't matter i think you know some people find it very helpful and i really like turned a lot of that data

science brain off and just was focused on you know learning her cues and reading them and that was more comforting and worked for me yeah last question was how do you personally deal with information overload? Poorly, probably. I mean, I have basically one emotional coping mechanism I use for all things, which is just going running. And so I guess that would be the answer. You know, I think it's hard to kind of organize the amount of information that is often coming in from your job, from your family, from your Instagram feed, since you got to turn off. I'm going to ask a new last question. Okay. For all the people who were really excited about hearing what you had to say, where should they go to learn more? You can go to parent data.org and you can see all the stuff

that we've written and or that mostly I've written. And you can ask the Dewey AI chatbot your questions. And I think we have a lot of really good content that will serve a lot of parents, whether your question is like what's the right kind of sleep training or you know can i swim in an icy river while i'm pregnant what's the answer to that one yes it's fine that's exciting um and if people want to find you on social where are you i'm on instagram at prof emily astor thank you so so much for joining us today this was such a treat i loved it this was uh such a treat both personally and professionally and i'm sure our members are going to be really excited to hear everything you have to say well i'm delighted to have been here.

Big thank you to the Emily's for coming on the Whoop podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of the Whoop podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. If you're a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. If you think about joining Whoop, check out Whoop.com. Sign up for a 30-day free trial membership. Take the first step to unlocking a better and healthier you.

New members can use the code will W I'll get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. And that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.