Poseidon is the god of the sea, Dionysus of wine and merrymaking, and Emily Oster? She’s the god of parenting.
An economics professor at Brown University, Oster has built a massive and loyal audience by providing overwhelmed parents with the information and data they need to make solid and sound parenting decisions in a very confusing world. Her first book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, sold over a million copies and was translated into 19 languages, unseating the classic What to Expect When You’re Expecting as a fixture on many pregnant mothers’ bedtime tables.
In this new series with The Free Press, Oster tackles the deep, difficult, existential, and often controversial questions facing parents today: Are we too soft on kids these days? How do I raise an independent child in an era of overprotection and helicopter parenting? Why are so many teen girls unhappy and anxious, and how can we make them happy again? Why are boys being left behind? Are kids overdiagnosed? What to do about the phones!? Is marriage important for raising kids? Should you even have kids at all?
These questions are more urgent than ever. That’s because, by many measures, kids are worse off today than 30 years ago. They are more anxious than ever. They’re more depressed. They have more diagnoses than ever before. They’re more medicated. More kids are being raised without two parents in the home today. Kids’ reading and math scores haven’t recovered since their decline during the Covid pandemic. Childhood obesity has risen to 19.7 percent. Kids spend on average 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment each day, and the average teen spends around 9 hours a day on their phone.
What’s going on with kids today? How worried should we be about our kids? And what should we be doing, as parents, to change course, before it’s too late? How do we raise good people—which starts with raising good, informed parents—in this strange, new world?
Over eight episodes, Oster speaks with over 50 of the world’s best parenting experts, journalists, doctors, psychologists, researchers, and more including: Dr. Becky, Jonathan Haidt, Pamela Druckerman, Richard Reeves, Hanna Rosin, Abigail Shrier, Bryan Caplan, Christine Emba, Johann Hari, Sami Timimi, Melissa Kearney, Ross Douthat, and many, many more. Oster brings her trusted voice—with its sobriety, wisdom, and humor—to the most challenging parenting questions of the day.
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For most of human history, having kids wasn’t much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a couple of options: Have children, or join a convent. But the 1960s ushered in a big change. With better options for birth control and expanded career opportunities for women, many people for the first time could choose how many children to have, and whether they should have any at all. Fast-forward to today: More people are choosing not to have ch...
Nov 13, 2024•50 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast
The share of children in America growing up in single-parent families has tripled since 1950—from 10 percent to 30 percent. Children in single-parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level and, on average, they have a higher likelihood of poor academic performance and higher dropout rates from high school. Those translate into lower earnings in adulthood. And although it is very difficult to separate correlation and causality in these data, and hard to say whether sin...
Oct 30, 2024•51 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast
In today’s world, many parents feel like we need our kids to have phones. We tell ourselves it’s for their safety—they may need it while walking to a friend’s house or when going on a school field trip. And then there’s the fact that for many parents, the idea of not giving your kid a phone—when everyone else has one—just doesn’t even seem like a possibility. By age 10, 42 percent of kids in the U.S. have a phone. By age 12, it’s 71 percent, and by age 14, it’s 91 percent. The pressure to confor...
Oct 23, 2024•52 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast
Across the board in most advanced countries, girls and women are outpacing boys and men. Nowhere is this more stark than in education. When Title IX was passed in the U.S., the share of students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program was about two-thirds men and one-third women. Just 50 years later, the numbers have reversed: Bachelor’s enrollment is now 58 percent women and 42 percent men. So, not only is the gender inequality we see in college today wider than it was 50 years ago, it’s the ot...
Oct 16, 2024•46 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast
Kids and teens today are more diagnosed than ever, across the board, whether it’s a disorder like ADHD or a mental health condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Say you’re 15 and you’re worried about that upcoming algebra test? Anxiety. You’re 12 and you weren’t invited to that birthday party? Depression. Scared to ride your bike again after that little fall last summer? PTSD. And with these diagnoses come a menu of medications that purport to fix your child. Today: What’s behind the rise...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast
In January 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics surprised doctors and parents by changing its guidelines on treating childhood obesity to include the use of popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, also known as semaglutide, for children ages 12 years or older. And parents all over the country were faced with yet another difficult decision: Should I consider a lifelong weight-loss drug for my 12-year-old? The fact that this is even on the table at all is a pretty shocking indictmen...
Oct 02, 2024•59 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast
There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they’ve changed wildly in America over the decades. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the old school, 1950s approach: spanking. Then, there are middle-ground approaches: time-outs, warning systems, consequences, and punishments. And then, there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. These are the kind of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your ...
Sep 25, 2024•49 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast
When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. Th...
Sep 18, 2024•47 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast
