Freakonomics Radio
The Data-Driven Guide to Sane Parenting
Humans have been having kids forever, so why are modern parents so bewildered? Economist Emily Oster marshals the evidence on the most contentious topics — like breastfeeding, sleep training, and what to avoid eating when pregnant — and tells her fellow parents to calm the heck down.
If you’ve ever had a child, or ever been a child, you know there’s a lot of parenting advice out there. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone who could cut through the dogma and the old wives’ tales and use data to help parents make decisions?
Emily Oster is a professor of economics and public affairs at Brown University. For much of her career, Oster has utilized big datasets to answer questions about people’s health behaviors. So, when Oster was pregnant with her first child — she’s married to fellow Brown economist Jesse Shapiro — she went looking for data to help her make good decisions.
What Oster found surprised her: outdated, arbitrary guidelines, often based on faulty or incomplete data and poor research design. Also: doctors who weren’t very comfortable “explaining nuance to their patients,”…
