Parenting Expert Emily Oster: The #1 Parenting Mistake That Causes Unnecessary Stress (Use THIS Data-Backed Framework to Debunk the Biggest Parenting Myths!)

This is a iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. On booking.com it's easy to book your holiday home. And thanks to no hidden fees, there's no more. Guys, found a villa, I'm confirming. Where were we? Added fees. We don't do sneaky added fees. So you can go from home to holiday home with no dramas. And relax. On booking.com, finding a holiday home's easy. Booking.com, booking.com. Yeah. Today's natural birth. Breast milk or formula. People will tell you breastfeeding is free. It's like, I'm sorry, does my time have no value? By bestselling author and economist Emily Oster, whose books expecting better and Cribsheet sparked a global conversation about what the data actually says. If you've ever wondered whether all this advice is helping or just making parenting more complicated, this is the conversation we've all been waiting for. Emily Oster, welcome to On Purpose. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. This is such an important subject matter that I feel deserves to have time, energy, effort put into. It's going to transform our lives, the lives of the children you love the most. And I'm so grateful that you've dedicated so much of your life to doing this work so impactfully. No, I'm so delighted to be here. I may think parenting is hard, but also incredibly fun. And I feel really lucky to get to be part of people's journey even a little bit. Absolutely. We've probably never had this much data on parenting. That's right. Has that made parenting better or are we still just overwhelmed? I think yes and no. I don't think there's a simple answer to that question. There are clearly places where we have gotten data and we can talk about specific examples where we've learned something from the data that has improved survival or the experience of parenting or something that makes everyone happier. And I think there are really good examples of that in the evidence. It is also true that living in an environment where one is constantly fed, you know, the data says, the data says, the data says, or where people are constantly looking for, you know, what is the evidence that's going to tell me that I'm doing this right? I think that's actually quite stressful and sometimes makes parenting much harder. So some of the time I wish I could sort of help people think more about, you know, here are the pieces of data that are going to kind of help you craft your approach. And here is the stuff that really doesn't matter what you do and stop trying to look for the right answer because anything is fine. Data is really useful, but it is really overwhelming. How do you approach it differently in a way that's actually helping people? Yes. I think there's really two sort of core pieces of what I'm trying to do for people. So one is trying to help them understand which of the pieces of data they're seeing are real and which are not. So there's a lot of confusion of correlation and causation, you know, people told, well, if you do this for your kid, they'll be better in this way. But if you dive into the data, you find that link is not causal. And then the second piece is trying to help people prioritize and say, you know, here are some things that are really important. And then here are some things which even if they mattered a little bit, they can't matter a lot. And so recognizing that parents have a limited capacity, that we all have a limited capacity to focus on a million different things at once. Our goal should be to figure out, you know, what really matters and then what really matters enough that it should be sort of top priority. And then we kind of do the pieces that we that we can do in the constraints that we have. What's the most shocking piece of data that you've come across looking at parenting research that really struck you? So when I was working on expecting better, I one of the things I looked at was bed rest, which, you know, is actually prescribed to a fairly large share of people for a lot of different complications. So people are just told, you know, and you can sort of see logically where that might you might feel like, well, if you're at risk of preterm birth, maybe if you lay down, like, I don't know, the baby will stay in or like there's some kind of logic that connects there. But when you actually look at the data, there's almost no condition for which bed rest is helpful and many conditions for which it's in many ways in which is actually harmful. This is something we're so obvious in the data that what we're doing is not the right thing. And it was one of the things that galvanized me to think, OK, we actually really need to show people what the evidence says so they can make better choices. Absolutely. I want to talk about today like lots of different kind of phases of the journey of parenting. And I wanted to start with getting pregnant from what I'm hearing from people who are trying to get pregnant. It's all about thinking like getting everything right, having some control. What's your take on how much we can control when you're trying to get pregnant? It's a lot more limited than people think. People getting pregnant is very stressful for many people and particularly in an environment where the environment, I think a lot of my readers come in where you've waited like a long, you're a little older, which does, you know, fertility declines with age. It doesn't drop off a cliff, but it goes down. And also people have like waited and made a lot of investments and thought, you know, OK, this is the right time in my life and like now they want to be pregnant now. It's like I waited, I decided the right month, like this is my month. And then it like doesn't happen that month and you're like, wait, but this was my month. And so I think there's a there's a kind of tension that that comes with that. And that unfortunately makes people are trying to get pregnant quite vulnerable to being told all kinds of stuff that they could do that is not based on evidence, but often costs quite a lot of money to improve their chances. For example, buy these really expensive prenatal vitamins. For me, that's like the most you know, it is important to take a prenatal vitamin. The one at CBS that costs, you know, 10 cents a pill is fine. It has the things that you need. People are buying these prenatal vitamins that cost him, you know, $150 a month and say, you know, this is don't you want to give your baby the best start with the best is like vitamins are all the same. You know, you don't need to spend to that's like just one sort of small example. And so much that marketing is preying on this feeling of like, well, I got to get this right. I got to get this right. The reality is when you think about, you know, what what matters for getting pregnant, there's a there's a few things. So one is having sex at the right time. So it's pretty clear there's only a small number of days in the cycle where you can get pregnant. And so some cycle tracking and knowing when you're ovulating is important. And then you need sperm that is working. So the other piece of this that maybe I think people are almost under investing in is we spend so much time with women thinking about all the things that that we need to do. And it is true that that is half of the equation, but you also need good sperm. And I actually think we're probably under investing in having men do some like preconception sperm testing. It's not that hard to do. Not really very hard at all. And there are a bunch of things that men can do to improve their quality of the sperm if it turns out you have a sperm issue. So people said to me like, what should I do? I would say track your cycle so you can figure out when you're ovulating, make sure you have sex at the right time and get your partner sperm tested. And then, you know, don't binge drink and quit smoking. That's kind of it. Those are the things within your control. Those are the main things within your control. And what were some of the recommendations for men who wanted to improve their sperm counter and prove their sperm quality as well? So a lot of the is that there's sort of like a category of substances. So smoking cigarettes or marijuana, heavy drinking, these are all known to affect sperm mobility. You need enough of them. They need to be good at swimming. They need to have the right shape. And smoking and drinking affect all of those parameters. The other thing is heat. So sperm don't like to be hot. Testicles don't make good sperm when they're hot. And so sometimes people keep your testicles too hot if you're doing a lot of hot tub or a lot of sauna. You're wearing like very tight underwear that can affect sperm count. So sometimes loosening up the underwear, quitting the sauna can be helpful. I like how you've already simplified it to a few things that we can control. I think that's both very helpful and often for many people very frustrating. Oh, I totally agree. Because actually, I think the way, if you want to get this done, you want to be doing something about it every day. At least for many of the people, like for myself when I was in this position, like we were trying to get pregnant. I wanted to be investing. Every day I want something to do that's going to move me forward. And the advice of sort of like, well, okay, if as long as you've done these things, you pretty much just like, it's just a dice roll. Like, you know, if you get it exactly right, maybe there's a 30% chance in a given month that you will get pregnant and get another try the next month and that's sort of all there is. I think that can feel like, well, I wanted to be like, but what can I do? And I think that is where we get into people feeling willing to do a variety of other things that feel more like investment. I'll often tell people, like you can track, you know, you want to like track your cycle, like set yourself up spreadsheet, like enter something in an app every day if that's the thing that makes you feel like you're moving forward. What are some of the mistakes people can make during pregnancy that have post-pregnancy complications? So there are certainly some behaviors during pregnancy that have, you know, potential very long-term impact. So you've been drinking heavy alcohol consumption during pregnancy, smoking cigarettes during pregnancy. Also, you know, not good. And there, of course, are some medications that are very counter-indicated during pregnancy. Those are kind of the big, like, behavioral issues that we would point to in terms of contributing to birth defects. I get an awful lot of questions from people that are very, very worried about extremely unlikely exposures or very minimal concerns. And I think the reality is there are some of these big concerns, but there isn't a bunch of other stuff that you shouldn't be doing that matters a tremendous amount. There just isn't. And there is research. We're just saying that the research doesn't show anything having that bigger. Like we have studied these things deeply enough and looked at them. Yes. And of course, we can always do more research. But I would say there's a sort of a couple of pieces how I might think about evidence in that case. So one is, you know, there are places where we've studied this and we can see, you know, there's no correlation. In some of those cases, you say, well, what if there's a very tiny effect? You know, we don't have an infinite amount of data. And I'd say, yeah, there are almost anything you could say, well, couldn't there be a very tiny effect? But those effects are going to be so tiny that we probably shouldn't care about them. They are in the rounding error of everything else that you're going to do. And so in some sense, getting back to something I said at the beginning, I think a lot of this is about thinking about prioritizing and understanding that we want to make choices about things that are important and not obsess about every tiny thing, even if, you know, maybe doing this one thing could on average cost your kid 0.0001 IQ points. Like that's not important to be worried about. So I think that's one, it's kind of one reason we don't know this. And then there are many things where mechanistically it's impossible. You know, the other day somebody asked me, you know, my lawn was treated with pesticides and then I went outside and I touched it. I washed my hands really carefully, but now I'm really worried. There is no mechanism whereby touching a lawn, even recently treated with pesticides and then washing your hands would actually impact your pregnancy. Like literally no mechanism. And so it's not an interesting thing to study, but it is impossible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's a study that hasn't been done that you would love to see happen? There are almost an infinite number of things like that. I mean, I think what would be a top three. The one I would really, really like to see is a large randomized trial about SSRIs. So, so a lot of women come into pregnancy using antidepressants. Antidepressants are really important for a lot of people's daily functioning. Our evidence on the safety of antidepressants is a little more complicated. So there are some evidence suggesting they may raise the risk of postpartum hemorrhage. So not much in the direction of affecting the baby, but some things about health. And just in general, that evidence isn't perfect. We don't have a randomized, we don't have like large randomized trials. I would like to see large randomized trials because I think many people are avoiding these medications because they are worried about the quality of the evidence, but they are avoiding them when they would be very helpful. And I suspect that those trials would give us a much better platform from which to make decisions about this thing where there is just a very clear trade off between some potential risks we don't know that much about and the very real benefits. So SSRI trials, what I like. That would be so fascinating, I feel, because with the amount of rise in people needing mental health medications, antidepressants, whatever it may be in that space, only going up and knowing how that really correlates with make for very, very insight. What does it take to get something like that done? Like, do you, is it probably already happening? That's definitely not happening. I think it's very hard to do a study like that for like a bunch of different reasons. So one is even the design, you worry a little bit about ethics. So, you know, we wouldn't, you couldn't do a study where you force some people to be antidepressant. Now, that's something you could get around. I think you could say we have a bunch of people who are on antidepressants with some of them. We're going to encourage them to go off and we're going to, we're going to not encourage them again. That's has some ethical issues, but you probably could get it. You'll probably get that through. I think the other issue is I'm not sure who's going to fund that. So if you think about like how science works, like a lot of what gets drug companies fund a lot of trials, all these drugs are on generic at this point. So we're like a large share of them. So the drug companies are not going to be interested in funding those, those trials. And it isn't clear that like the NIH is interested in funding that trial either. And so I think we're sort of up against some ethics and also some real sort of funding limitations. And it's people like to experiment on pregnant women. That's like, for good reasons, but it has some costs. Yeah, I was going to ask you what's one thing that pregnant women worry about that you'd like them to stop worrying about and start focusing on something else. One thing is people worry a tremendous amount about what they eat. I think that that's overblown actually most of the food restrictions that people are told about don't make any don't really make any sense. People worry a lot about exercise. There are a lot that people are told, you know, don't don't exercise in this way. And actually most of those again are totally overblown restrictions and people should be encouraged to kind of keep doing what they what they are already doing. And I think people should if you sort of said like, what should you replace that with? I think people could could do more to prepare their marriage and home life for the arrival of another person that requires all of your time and money. What would you recommend? How would you go about thinking about that? If you think about what happens when you have a kid to your to your marriage, you are introducing a new person, somebody who you there's a new project, there's a new group project. And you care more about this group project than you have ever cared about anything in your entire life, but you have no idea how to do it. And you're working with another person who also has no idea how to do it, but really, really cares and you might not agree. And also you're extremely tired because you haven't slept and you don't have as much money or time as you did before. It's a terrible group project environment. And so I think one of so I think during the pregnancy is a good opportunity to prepare for like, how could we make this group project as good as possible, knowing that it comes with some, you know, some some challenges. And so one thing I tell people all the time, and I think everyone should do is put meetings on your calendar for after the baby is born, that there should be like, biweekly check in meeting with your partner, where you sit down and you talk about like, what's going well, what's not going well, what could we do differently? This is sort of comes a little bit out of some of what we know about kind of marital satisfaction, which is people like a marital checkup. It's an opportunity to say, here's the things I'm doing, here's what I'm feeling resentful about, you know, an opportunity to connect in a kind of low sort of cool state rather than in a hot state. But I think early on in people's life, you need this much more. And if you don't put those meetings on the calendar before you have the baby, you will never have them because you will not. Once you once the group project starts, you're not going to schedule meetings because of all the other stuff I already said. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like really wise advice, especially when you explain it like a group project that the environment isn't really set up for. A lot of parenting is about, you know, if you're parenting with another person is about managing that that relationship. We assume that it's all going to be great because we love the other person. And I think there's a little bit of saying like you could love someone but still running a business with them is different. And this is a little bit more like running a business than I think most people think. Yeah, yeah, we almost think that love is good enough when you're having a baby because it's a byproduct of your love. But the project is still a project. The project is still there. And love is like so important. It's the most, it is such an important thing. But the project is still, you know, things still have to happen in the project. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was going to ask you what you mentioned this a bit earlier. What are the key differences between trying to get pregnant in your 20s and in your 30s and what should people be considering both ways? So, you know, our fertility is very high when we're in our late teens, which is not a convenient time for many people to have kids. And then it sort of slowly declines kind of through their slowly through their 20s, maybe getting a little faster through the 30s and sort of eventually kind of falling off towards towards menopause. So I think one thing for people to understand is just, you know, this is a real factor in infertility. So there are plenty of opportunities to extend the life of fertility IVF is very effective egg freezing can be an interesting option. But the reality is that it is hard to get pregnant when you're older than when you're younger. And that is something that I think people should know and at least understand that there is some tradeoff. There is not a possible, but it is harder. And then you have to trade that off with the fact that you may or may not be ready to have a kid when you're 20, you don't may not have the partner you want. You this may not be the right time. And so I think just being realistic about the existence of those tradeoffs is kind of all you can do in terms of making decisions is the other piece. I would often remind people is that your kid doesn't go away after like the first six months to a year. And so there is a little bit sometimes sort of pair of people be like, well, this year is a really good like this is a good year for me because like it's a down year at work. And it's like, well, after this year, like, they're still going to be still going to be around. And so I think just sort of understanding that your life is going to no matter when this happens, aspects of other parts of your life are going to change and evolve as your kid did. Older, they're going to get easier, but also in other ways harder. And this is going to be part of your life forever. And so I would almost never tell people like, like find the best year. It's like, you need the best 18 years. So I think if you have a good solid 18 years, possibly more. Yeah, I used to, I have a mentor that used to tell me when you have kids, you've got to write off. He used to say, and he's, you know, raised three kids and they're all adults now and has a great relationship with them. And he was like, Jay, just write off seven years of your life per kid. Like that was his advice. And I was like, yeah, that's interesting. I don't have kids, but that same point as in like it wasn't just a one year thing or a two year thing. But I appreciate what you're saying because I think, and this isn't just about kids, there applies to so many things, but to parenting as well. I think the question we often ask as humans is, is this the right time? And it's almost like the better question is, do we know how this is going to change our life? Right. Right. Do we know how to adapt? Do we know how to build the environment for the group project? Like, do we know what that's going to require is more of an important question than is this the right time? Because time is kind of undefined as to what it's valuable for. Yeah. And I think it's very, very hard to ask, is this the right time and be confident about that over the period that we're talking about? You know, it's just like, you just can't know. And so I think it is really much more as you say about kind of crafting, like, is this the, how can we make this setting work for this project that we are embarking on? One of my favorite things about what you do is using data to bust myths and also bust these things that we get stressed about and overwhelm us. So what we created for you was a debunking myths game for pregnancy and childhood. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read a bunch of myths, cliches, things that we've all heard, and then you can give us the data driven answer and the insight behind it. So the first one is it's okay to drink one glass of wine when you're pregnant. Yes, especially in a later trimesters. I mean, if you look at the, if you look at the data, it's very clear that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad and binge drinking is a good thing. If you look at the data, it's very clear that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad and binge drinking at any time of pregnancy is very dangerous. But if you look at the data that looks at occasional drinking during pregnancy, it just doesn't show those, it doesn't show those kind of effects. And we actually do have a lot of data on this because in many places outside the U.S., this kind of alcohol consumption is much more common. And we have reasonably good approaches to sort of figuring out causality there. And so that doesn't mean everyone should is going to choose to do this, but I think that it is something that looking at the evidence, many people are comfortable with the occasional drink. Got it. Okay. I was not expecting that. I didn't know that. Next one, pregnant women shouldn't drink coffee. That is a myth. That is a myth. So there is some discussion about links between caffeine in the first trimester and miscarriage. It turns out that those links don't show up pretty much at all until about four to six cups of coffee. So if you are consuming a sort of typical person amount of coffee a day, you know, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, that is, there's no evidence of downsides there. But even when we look at people who consume like a tremendous amount of coffee, there's like data from Sweden or people who are consuming like eight cups of coffee a day. It's probably the case that any links with pregnancy loss are just driven by nausea. So people who are really nauseous don't drink coffee and that's also correlated with lower risks of miscarriage. There's a lot of stuff going on in the data, but the bottom line is that some coffee is totally fine. Well, okay. You can't eat sushi while pregnant. Also not true. People come up with this stuff then. So sushi is, you know, you can get food more illness from sushi, uncooked fishes more dangerous than cooked fishes just like that. But that's always true. And it is not more true during pregnancies. There's something I sort of talk a lot about is thinking about, okay, you should generally think about trying to avoid the norovirus from your from your sushi. And you should be thinking about that when you're not pregnant and when you're pregnant, there's no particular risk to sushi during pregnancy. Okay. You can't get Botox while pregnant or breastfeeding. Okay, Botox. You know, this is the number one question people ask me. Really? No way. Yes. This is like the number one question, which is amazing. That's fascinating. I know. It's only started like in the last five, you know, I've been doing this. What was it before that? Something really sensitive? It was much more like coffee. No, it's always lifestyle stuff, but like Botox, like really people are really into Botox. Yeah. So you're not going to be able to find someone to get you to do your Botox when you are pregnant, although there is no evidence that it would be dangerous. It's just like no one's going to do that. During breastfeeding, it is fine. The Botox doesn't go into your milk and you can do it if you want to have your Botox. I always tell people that your face looks great. You don't need Botox. People are like, oh my God, thank you. Then they're like, oh, but what about GLP ones? That's their next question. Oh, and what's the take on that? You shouldn't be on a GLP one when you're pregnant because that's not a time for weight loss. But during breastfeeding, generally if you're sort of early on in breastfeeding and the supply is still being established, being on a GLP one can lower your breast milk supply. And so that is probably a reason to avoid it. But if you're later in breastfeeding, there's actually good evidence that they don't pass through to the milk. So if people want to go back on their GLP one, it should be fine. I think this one's a big one. Okay. We have some milk here. So we have breast milk or formula. Does it make a difference? Both are great options. There are some small short-term benefits to breastfeeding, lower risk of gastrointestinal illness, some slightly lower risk of eczema. But a lot of these long-term things people are told, like breast milk makes your kids smarter or thinner, they can fly or whatever. That stuff is all correlation, not causation. So both of these options are very good ones. Are there any negatives for formula? I mean, I guess you could sort of say, well, if breast milk lowers the risk of gastrointestinal infections, formula raises it. Depends what you're thinking about as your baseline. But I think in that sort of in that comparison, there are some of these things where breast milk shows up as positive. But I think it's just much, much, much smaller. The data shows it is much, much, much smaller than what a lot of people are told. And socioeconomic conversations interesting there as well, isn't it? Yeah. So one of the reasons why I think we are so frequently hearing, you know, breast is best, breast milk has all these positive benefits, is because the people who are breastfeeding are very differently selected than the people who are not. So breastfeeding tends to be associated with higher maternal education, higher maternal income, other resources, and those things themselves are associated with higher performance on IQ tests. And so one of the things that's really interesting in something like the breast milk IQ linkage is you can see, you know, if you just compare kids who are breastfed to kids who are not, you see big differences in IQ. If you control for you just for some differences across the moms, those effects get a little smaller. If you adjust for more differences, if you adjust for say, mom's IQ test, they get even smaller. And then if you compare siblings, so one kid's breastfed one's not, but it's the same mom, you see no effect. And that sort of tells me that these initial effects we're seeing are really about differences across who's breastfeeding and who's not as opposed to the effect of the breast milk itself. Right. And then I've spoken to moms as well who are like also formula is really expensive too. So it's like a... Both things are very, I mean both things are very expensive. People will tell you, you know, oh, well, breastfeeding is free. It's like, I'm sorry, does my time have no value? Actually, these things are both expensive. Formula costs money, breastfeeding costs time. And I think it's not obvious that one of these is cheaper. I mean, I will say like, you know, my mother, when I was writing all these books about pregnancy, I read both the set of pregnancy books that my grandmother had in like then, you know, 1940s and the ones that my mom had in like the early 1980s. And there's Dr. Spock was like the core to the early 1980s. And in his book, From the Time When I Was Born, he's got this discussion of breastfeeding. And this is a time in which people were sort of still coming back to breastfeeding after a long period of like formula is the best. And he says something that's like, you know, like breastfeeding, you might try breastfeeding. A lot of people like it. A lot of people think it's good, you know, enjoy it. And that's sort of how he puts it. Like this is something that you should, you should try because it might end up working for you. And I think like that message, I think is really good. Like you should try this and we should help people figure out how to breastfeed, which is not that easy. And we should be supportive of it because it may work for a lot of people, which is different from saying we should be telling people that if you don't do this, your kids going to suck. Which is how a lot of people are hearing that messaging. And that is not a healthy message and is not true. And it is not helpful to anything. Yeah, it's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And not taking into account what people do for work, how much time they have, how much income they have, not taking into account all of that. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons, so I had written expecting better, which is the book about pregnancy. And then I was not sure if I was going to write a second book. It's like a long time between the two books. I had to have a second kid and all kinds of other stuff. But I think the thing that ultimately pushed me over into writing crib sheet, which talks all about breastfeeding, among many other things, is the emails that I kept getting from dads. And I remember this one very vividly that was like, my wife is so, like, is killing herself over breastfeeding. And she's depressed and she is all, like, this is, she's, you know, she's, she has to do this. And I really like, I want to help her. Like, I think she would listen to you. Can you tell me how important is this really? Like, what does the data say? And I think that moment of someone being like, this is really harming my family. And I think that it would make, it would make people feel better to know what the data really says. That was kind of, I think that's just really important. Yeah. And I think we underestimate, and this applies to other areas of life as well, where stress about something you care about doesn't end up having a good impact on it. For example, staying healthy is important, but stressing about staying healthy is kind of working counter-intuitively against you as well. Yeah. And it doesn't really help. And so similarly, if we, it's a hard thing with children, I can imagine, because you care and you, it's a different level of dedication and devotion to a child than it is even to your own health. But stress is always going to be reflected poorly as well. That's more likely to have a bad impact. Yeah. And I think we also have to recognize, like, some of what we're like, like the reason we're having kids and we're doing this is like, because it's fun and because we want our family to be functioning in a nice way. And if somebody is very unhappy, if mom is very unhappy, that is negatively affecting how the family is functioning. And sometimes they'll say parents are people too, because I think we often forget that they are an important part of the family. What do you wish men knew about pregnancy that maybe they don't because they don't experience it and they don't really understand what's going on? I think it is very hard to really understand the experience of pregnancy. And these various things I tell men, you know, like, you have fun facts, like you get a pee on women pee on themselves a lot because there's a lot of pressure. There's like things like that, which I think it's good, just good to know the stuff that is, that is going on. But I think much more important is sort of understanding, like, how can I engage when the baby arrives? Like, that, you know, that's the time when we often get this sort of bifurcation of mom and dad where the woman ends up doing more of the work and sort of just learning more and then she knows more and then he doesn't know. And I think there's like a real opportunity in that moment to kind of both lean in to learning how to do everything at the same time. I would worry much more about that than about kind of understanding all of the nuances of pregnancy, which are just hard to explain. Yeah, got it. Yeah, no, I'm just asking for myself. Yeah, I mean, people would be like, oh, you know, you should understand uncomfortable. It's like, yeah, it's pretty uncomfortable. Not even that. I think it's what you're saying makes sense to me. It's almost like it's the preparation piece. I think it's you can never fully empathize with how painful it is, how difficult. Like, you never that that isn't even it. But it's, yeah, how can men better prepare? For example, I had a lot of people that I know whose partners went through like postpartum, like afterwards. And a lot of men I knew just didn't understand what was going on. And they were just like, she's gone crazy. She's just depressed all the time. Like, you know, those kind of things. And it's almost like, I think we're learning a bit more now, I hope. And conversations like this are all to help raise awareness, to have the right conversations, to prepare for the project, to set up homes in a better way, to know what may come next. And so I think there's all of that where it's like, you don't know what that person's going through. And is pregnancy brain a real thing, for example? Like, is that real? Not really. No, I think it's just you're tired. Yeah. Yeah, but I think there's something to come back to like the pre-pregnancy. Something I would say is, you know, for people who are going through like IVF, which can be very like time consuming and huge amount of work. Stress or expensive pain. I think that is a place where women will often take the vast brunt of this experience. And we're actually, there's way more that could be shared because there's a lot of logistics. There's a lot of like paying attention to when are we doing this and what and just keeping up to date. And that is a place where I think men could lean in far more. You know, you can't take the shots. You're not going to be, you know, having your eggs harvested, but fundamentally like there's a lot of logistics. One of these high end diaper versus everyday diaper, affordable diaper, does it make a difference? I wish I could tell you the answer to this. I, my kids are 10 and 14 and we use that diaper and it was fine. I will say people swear by the coterie diapers, but I haven't seen any, anything outside of the anecdote on that. So this, yeah, this was the... I mean, those worked great. Like that, you know, no complaints about the, the like, no complaints about the big brand diapers on my side. Okay. Amazing. Good to know. Talk to me about the difference between wooden toys and plastic toys. Plastic toys that make noise are super, super annoying. Your kid will love that and it will drive you out of your mind. I love it. You like it, but we had this. So to look at the data, you know, people will say, oh, your kid asked, have wooden toys. You know, it's fundamentally, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that some toys are, you know, toys can be developmentally appropriate. Right. And so some of these making sure that your kid has some things to do that are kind of matching their developmental phase is good. You know, stacking blocks are good for certain ages, sorting things are good for it looks like some stuff like that. But does it need to be made of wood or, you know, carved in some particular way? No. And kids do like the electronic stuff. Super annoying. I've definitely talked to parents who believe in like Montessori techniques or all of that, which is all about wood and all, but there's no data behind that. There's no. No, there's no data on that. I mean, I think it's fine if that's like, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Some of this stuff in parenting is a little as much about kind of shaping an experience that you feel good about as it is about, you know, optimizing your kid in some way. And I think that's so some of the people like that makes that's something you enjoy. Like, that's great. I'm going to be over here with my like pull ladybug pull toy that same song. Yeah, it's so hard because it's so hard to think about it. Like I, my mom was extremely loving but extremely disciplined. And so I had a very clear schedule after school, but a lot of love in my life. I look back on it and feel very grateful. I have a very disciplined life. I have, you know, and it's like, but who's to say that? That's was the thing that I don't have no idea. Right. It's it's so hard to point to where some of those great qualities come from and the challenges come from. And also to separate out genetics. Yes. So your mom was very disciplined. You're very disciplined. Well, is that because she gave you discipline? Is that because you were always going to be a disciplined person? You could have grown up in any environment. Like we, you know, we know genetics matters a lot. Yeah. And so does environment. Yeah. Okay. Back to the myths. Yeah. Breastfeeding will help you lose all the weight quickly. No. Sorry. It will not. There's the, I think the data shows you breastfeeding women lose an average over like the first year, like 1.5 more pounds. No, because you eat more, you breastfeed it, it's calories and then you consume more calories just like anything else. Okay. It's not a weight loss. There's no magic pill for that. There is magic pills called, it's called Osepac. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's not bad. Yeah. You can't dye your hair while pregnant. That is a myth. There was some discussion of hairdressers having some, but we turned up. There's really no data on that. Hair dyes fine. Okay. You can't sleep on your back while you're pregnant. This is also a myth. So people for a long time were told not to sleep on their back because of concerns about compressing a vein and it is true that that can happen. But it turns out, you know, if that's happening to you, like you'll be uncomfortable and you will move. And when we got better data to look at some of the things people were concerned about the risk of stillbirth, actually it turns out sleep position has nothing to do with that. So if you should sleep in, it's very hard to sleep when you're pregnant. And if you are comfortable on your back, you should try. Eventually that is likely to become uncomfortable. Got it. You can control whether or not you're going to have a boy or a girl. You cannot control this. Outside of like, if you have embryos, you can implant embryos of particular sex. But a lot of people have this idea that like male sperm swims fast and doesn't live as long. And so if you have sex close to ovul... No, just no, that doesn't work. Natural birth is better. I hate the phrase natural birth, but it is not better. There is... epidurals are very... and different kinds of pain relief are very safe and effective. And there's no better there. Taking Tylenol during pregnancy is not safe. That is a myth. Many people heard the president, NRFK, say that Tylenol causes autism. But when you look at the best data on this, we do not see that link. You can't use retinol during pregnancy. So you cannot use acutane during pregnancy. So the sort of oral form of vitamin A is linked. Acutane is one of the small number of things that are very, very clearly linked to very extreme birth defects. Like what? I think it's missing limbs, a lot of sober... So actually the restrictions on pregnancy, if you are on acutane, you have to be on multiple kinds of birth control. This is like a very... it's a category X, which means you cannot have that in pregnancy. Retinol is a form of vitamin A. And so people will sort of say, okay, was this the same here? But it turns out that the absorption through your skin is so, so, so, so, so much less than taking something in oral form. And so most people will say like out of an abundance of caution, don't take this. But there's nothing in the data that would suggest it's risky. And a lot of people use retinol throughout pregnancy, sometimes by accident. We don't see much of a negative effect. So I always tell people like, you find to quit this. But if you were taking... if you were using this early in pregnancy, you shouldn't freak out. Yeah. Going back to the Tylenol example and what you said earlier, it's so hard... Some data is so hard to trust when you said like, you were like, you know, the big drug companies, for example, are funding a lot of the research. So it's like, who would almost go against Tylenol, for example? And that may not be the best one to pick on. But I'm just looking at it from that perspective of that's one that's like, is it just because the drug companies would do the research and then who else would pay for research against that? Yeah. So I think in the case of something like... people talk a lot about these issues of sort of funding conflicts. And in the case of something like Tylenol, most of the data we have on this is not from... Tylenol is a generic drug that the company that makes Tylenol is not doing these kind of trials. These are studies done on very large data sets that are collected, you know, by the Danish government on everybody in Denmark. And they have whether they took Tylenol and then things about their kids and they follow them over time. So this is all sort of like large scale government funded data set, databases. When we look at drugs in general, yeah, a lot of the studies of drugs are run by pharmaceutical companies, but in a very heavily regulated way. Like the pharma company doesn't just get to decide like what to do, whatever. They have to do a study to get their drug approved that is itself approved by the FDA. And so I think that those kind of conflicts are more complicated than many people think. Got it. Understood. You should not do screen time before age two. Okay. Screen time is perhaps the best example of correlation is not causation in parenting. And so people, you send me these studies that say, you know, screen time before the age of one is linked with, you know, all of these terrible outcomes. You look at the study and you'll have one group of kids are watching more than four hours of screens a day before the age of one. And then another group that never watches screens before the age of one. And then they, they compare them later. The thing I always want to ask people is like, imagine those two households. Do you think there's anything else different other than the screen exposure? Like, of course, those are really different households. There's many things that are different. It turns out you can see some of those in the data, but there are just all kinds of pieces of the differences that we're not going to be able to see in the data. And it is not surprising that we would find different outcomes for those kids. But that's just a correlation is not a causal link. And so then we're left in a place with screens where people have to make a choice about how much to expose their kids to screens at different ages without very good data. So all the data we have is very crummy, but it is a set of choices you have to, you have to make. I don't think there's anything as we would see in the data would suggest, you know, your kid watching a half an hour of Ms. Rachel, you know, a few times a week would be problematic. It's very difficult to imagine how that could be bad. And actually what's interesting is the AP has recently kind of dialed back their screen time restrictions to a set of guidelines that more or less say, just kind of think about it a bit more. Like, give it some thought. And I think this is not a terrible piece of advice that you should think about where screens fit in your day. If your kids watching eight hours of screens, they're not doing other things that they should be doing. If they're watching a half an hour of screens so you can get dinner ready so you guys can all sit down together. Like, that's probably a good thing. And it's ultimately about making a plan that works for your family for when these screens will fit into your day as opposed to saying like, no screens, all screens, which isn't very helpful. Yeah. Is there any data to suggest that a mother's anxiety affects the child when pregnant? Not anything that you would think of as good. So there's a little bit of evidence that very, very, very stressful events during pregnancy. And we're talking here, not like, you know, this was a bad week at work, but like your spouse died. That can show up in some small, like long-term effects on kids. But general anxiety stress during pregnancy, not so much. Very hard to study that because of course maternal anxiety and child anxiety are linked, but probably for both genetic and other environmental reasons, having nothing to do with pregnancy. Rural Britain. 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One of the questions that we got when we announced that you'd be coming on the show and we're trying to get questions in from our audience was how do you deal with mum guilt? Because that seems to be such a widely held challenge that everyone feels guilty, anxious, stressed, that they're doing it wrong. And everything they see online makes them feel like they're doing it wrong. And even the myths we just covered would make you feel like you're doing it wrong. Yeah, so I think there's the biggest problem for a lot of people is you make a choice, you do something, and then someone is like, why would you make that choice? And then you feel like a crap. I mean, that's like a very, that happens all the time. Yeah. I think our best defense against that is to make our choices thoughtfully. Is to say, I thought about whether, you know, breastfeeding was right for me or whether sleep training was right for me or whatever is your like topic of choice, like sit down, actually make those decisions deliberately. Like these are important decisions are going to shape your life. They're going to shape even if they don't matter for your kid, they're going to shape how your, how your life is, like what your experience is like, you should make them deliberately and decide what's the right choice for you. And then recognize that that can't be the right choice for everyone else, but that you thought about this choice. I think if we kind of come into these conversations feeling like, I know that I made the right choice for me and I thought about it and this was the right choice and I can never be sure if it was ultimately the right choice, but it was the right choice ex ante. I think that's a little bit protective. I think people could spend less time online. That would probably be helpful for some of this. But, you know, I mean, it's very bomb guilt is a topic that I experience. And I think, you know, some of it is, is kind of just trying to recognize you're doing a good job some of the time. Yeah, no, thank you for saying, thank you for sharing that. And it's again, I can only reflect on it in other areas of life, but it's almost like it's the human trait of needing our choices to be validated and wanting other people to agree with our way of doing and thinking. Totally. And also how uncomfortable it is when everyone does tell you you're doing something wrong because they did it another way. So even if you're very happy with your choice, you get triggered by someone else who says, well, my kids got this IQ level at this age and whatever and all of a sudden you're triggered by it or someone actually comes to you and says, can't believe you did that. Like, you know, my kids are doing great and I never did that. And so I think there's partly us crowdsourcing and outsourcing and being overexposed to lots of other people and how they do it. Then you have some frustrating people in your life who are telling you how to do it, to be honest. And then there's just that coming back to what you kind of said, which I really appreciate, which is know why you're making the choices you make and be really clear about it in your group project again. Yeah. And have some conviction and confidence that based on your set of beliefs, background, socioeconomic status, you're making the best decisions you can. Yeah. And I think that the point of recognizing that like your best decisions may not be other people's best decisions is so crucial because I think in these moments, we are, we want our decisions to be right and we sort of want them to be so right that they're right forever and when else. And so when you make a different choice for me, it's like hard for me not to read that as like you think my choice is bad. Yeah. Or like, well, you know, I failed. As opposed to just being like, yeah, this person had a different set of constraints and, you know, they made a different choice and different set of preferences, different set of constraints. And like the both choices could be right. We could adopt that approach a bit more. Some of this discourse would be like a little less. Yeah. The way it is. What is the day to say about raising confident kids? Not too much. Really hard to look at that kind of data. You know, we have pieces of data about, you know, raising kids who are willing to take risks. So there's a lot is like a literature about like grit and sort of how to develop grit in kids. And some of this is things like, you know, growth, like the growth mindset stuff, right? Like you sort of want your kid to understand that sometimes things are hard and you have to, you know, push, like you can get better at something just because you are not good at it now. Doesn't mean you couldn't eventually be good at. And I think that's, that's kind of part of this. It's not exactly the same as confidence, but it's something that people are often trying to develop. What I will say is I think people take pieces of advice like that, which are very good and are based on data that like we shouldn't discourage kids from having a growth mindset. And they kind of get, it ends up getting distilled into advice that is ridiculous. Right. So people end up, we go from, you know, a growth mindset is good. So it's good for kids to understand that like it's the values in the effort and it's worth trying and it gets to parents as never tell your kid good job. And then it's like, well, what do you mean? Like where's the, it's like there's no evidence that telling your kid good job is, you know, is a problem. We could develop a growth mindset while occasionally saying good job, you know, so you have these conversations for a while we're having these conversations where my kids would come home, the kids are a bit older and they would come home and they'd be like, you know, this is the score I got on this test. And we were reacting being like, you know, well, how do you feel about that? And finally my daughter was like, stop saying that. Like that's super annoying. And it was like, okay, fine. You know, we're just like, it's okay to say good job. Yeah, that's so funny. That's amazing. I think this is just like, there are many things like this where it gets parents are sort of looking so hard for these like, here's, here's, here's something you can just do is like super concrete, super concrete piece of advice and we distill things that are very complicated into something very simple, which is often wrong. Well, I think it's hard because it goes back to the point I asked you earlier about when I was talking about my mom and my qualities and things like that. I was like, we, we almost are mined for some reason, likes to think that there's a point to point connection of every action, choice and decision that impacts something. So if a kid is struggling at school, we're like, oh, it's because I did this or, you know, if they struggle later in life in a relationship, it's like, oh, because me and your dad did this, right? Yeah. And make connections feel very linear, even though they feel extremely cyclical, random, disconnected and connected and complicated. Quite frankly, it's just too complicated for any of us to know why or how that ended up happening. Absolutely. And I think we have somehow this kind of idea has translated for a lot of people into feeling almost that every moment with your child is an opportunity to mess them up forever. And I think that's, you know, so there was an episode of maybe a year ago where people were very worried about hurrying. We got this idea of hurried child syndrome. You are. Yes. I missed this. You did. That's so lucky for you. So there was all of a sudden, all this stuff on social media about hurried child syndrome, which was conveyed to people as if you're hurrying your child out the door in the morning and being like, get your shoes on, we have to go. That that's going to lead them to have terrible problems with anxiety later. And again, this name, if people are like, oh my gosh, like, but then it sort of for parents, they were like, oh my God, but like, sometimes they do need them to get their shoes. We have to go to school. Like, what am I doing? You know, but every and again, had this feeling of like every moment, every morning when you get out of the house is an opportunity to screw it all up. Like you could be doing everything perfectly. And then there's that one day where you're like, get your shoes on. And that's it. Then later, when they're an unsuccessful failure adult, it's because of that time that you said the thing about the shoes, right? And that that is how it feels. Sorry, I love that. It's like, no, but I mean, I think it's sort of ridiculous when you put it like that. But I think it is how people were feeling. It's how we feel, yeah. And in the end, actually, hurried child syndrome is a totally different thing completely not at all like this, which is. What is it actually? It's an idea coined by some guys in the 1970s that if we push kids to do sort of too much like pre-professional like sports and like just sort of grow up too quickly that they miss out on some of the fun of childhood. But actually a very interesting set of issues related to some of this stuff. John Hight has talked about like interesting set of issues to discuss completely unrelated to getting your shoes on. There's no evidence that pushing your kid out the door. So I think it was just an example of something that kind of got into the into the zeitgeist. But is the stuff parents are hearing every day? And I think if we could just dial down a little bit, you'd be like, hey, there are some ways you could mess up your kid, but like they're much bigger than this than these kind of tiny daily choices that you're that you're making. Yeah, definitely. And again, it's like, I often think about growing up because that's my only experience of parenting in that sense of being parented. And it's like both my parents worked. I don't think I got a lot of time in the weekdays with my parents, although we did on the weekends. But the great parts of the parenting were not, I never felt left alone or abandoned when I was at daycare or picked up and then my mom went back out to work like that. And if I ever felt lonely, I would just go to work with her in the evenings and lie by her foot and fall asleep while she did work and then we'd come home again. And so it's like, there was not a long term, you know, and again, I'm not saying that my experience is everyone's experience. All I can say is that, yeah, it's just that isn't as causal as we believe it is. People often say, you know, they're like, the first three years is really important. And that's true. Like it's true. But when we sort of look at that, like, what does that mean in the population? Well, what it means is that it's really important for kids to have, you know, a safe place to sleep, enough to eat, you know, someone who loves them, maybe some books, like some pretty basic things, which unfortunately, at least in America, a lot of kids actually don't have that. That's something we could work on. But many of the things that at least the kinds of parents I talked to or worried about are kind of like, you're already doing like 95%. And now you're telling me like you're spending all your time obsessing about, like, you know, the 0.3% over here, like, you're good. What's your take on that coming from people's own unhealed stress, pressure, trauma, childhood, like, how much of that is coming from their own? Is there any data to suggest that we... I don't think there's a lot of data to suggest that. I actually have always read this as something completely different, which is it's coming out of the demographic shift. And when people are having kids, so we, you know, it used to be you had kids, you know, you kind of graduate from college, whatever you did. Maybe you didn't go to college and you had some kids like in your 20s, we're now in a demographic space where a lot of people have kind of thought about like, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm getting, getting to work. I'm going to get into college. I want to get into college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to get the job I want. I'm going to get them and I'm going to make partner. I'm going to graduate. Like, did-did-did-did I have like sort of been climbing a ladder of like professional, personal and professional things. And I've gotten to this point and it's like, okay, like all of these things, I put a lot of effort in and I got it. And now I'm going to have a kid and I'm going to put a lot of effort in to win. Right. Like kid, like sort of the children become the thing you're going to win next. And I think that generates an enormous amount of pressure because if you think of your child as like a thing to achieve, it's difficult because it's not like going to, not like getting into college. You know, it's not like if you work harder, like, like it goes better. It's like goes much worse. But I think that's part of it is this feeling of kind of like, this is something that I could win much more so than some of this unhealed. I mean, that's hard to know. I'm sure people do have unhealed traumas, but I would guess the demographic shifting is more. Yeah. It's the hard toggle between saying it is a group project, but it isn't because it's what you said earlier. I agree with you. There has to be a business plan almost, but then it's not a business in that it's so it's this. Yeah. It's like a limit to what you can control. You can control. There are things you can do to set up to make the experience of doing this easier, but that is different from being able to control the outcome. And I think that's sort of the core, the core distinction. Wanted to talk about one of the other big debates around sleep training. Yes. This is probably what you're doing. It's filled with because there is no parent who's not struggling with sleep in some way. Shape or form, is there an ideal way to sleep train one size fits all model? Definitely not. I think so. So first of all, there are, oh yeah, there is definitely not a good one size fits all. Sleep training is not going to be the right choice for many parents. I think the, but it is going to be a right choice for some parents. So when we talk about sleep training, one thing people worry about is, you know, is this going to cause long term terrible attachment problems for my kid? And let me back up and say, like, what do we mean by sleep training? Yes, please. Yeah, can you define sleep training? When we talk about sleep training, usually people mean some form of like encouraging independent sleep, which usually involves some crying. There's a wide range of things. So it ranges from kind of the, the sort of fervor extinction method where you kind of do a nice bedtime routine, put your kid in the, in the bed, close the door and, and, you know, decide we're not going to come back for some amount of time. And the kid will often cry for a long time. Usually it's a few nights of that and then they, they sleep. And then there's versions of this where you're sitting in the room with them where you're coming in. So there's a lot of variations, but it almost always is in the service of trying to encourage a kid to fall asleep independently and to sleep to sort of connect sleep cycles. So when we sleep, all people, including kids, we wake up every about every 90 minutes between sleep cycles. And so good quality sleep for kids and for their parents means sort of the kids need to connect the sleep cycles in some way. And so then they are sleeping through the night. When you say baby sleeping through the night, you don't mean that they're literally sleepy entire time. You mean that they are going back to sleep on their own after they, they wake up. Okay. So sleep training usually involves some kind of crying. So unless people worry that this will cause long-term attachments. We have a lot of data on this that suggests that that's not true, including some randomized data, some community-based data. There's a lot of evidence that sleep training is not damaging to children and also a fair amount of evidence that improves sleep for parents and that it sort of causes improved sleeps for kids in the sense of allowing them to connect these sleep cycles. Having said all that, I think that means for me based on the data that this should be in people's toolbox. That when you think about like what am I going to do about the fact that we need to sleep, my kid needs to sleep, sleep is really important. We have to decide this should be one of the things in the toolbox. It's not going to be the thing every parent pulls out of their toolbox. Often find in this a little bit of a hard conversation that people kind of end up in sort of doing one of two things. Like one of two things is sustainable. One is some kind of sleep training where the kids are going to sleep independently and they're going to sleep for extended periods of time and the other is co-sleeping. These can work really well for different families. The thing that actually is very hard is like I'm not sleeping in the room with my kid, but they're waking up every 90 minutes and I have to go put them back to sleep. That's really unsustainable for almost every family. They tend to find that people kind of come into one of these two options, but that really means that you want to ask yourself like, where are we trying to go? Like are we hoping to all be sleeping together in the bed, which can work for a lot of people? Or are we hoping to be sleeping independently and from there to kind of back out, how are we going to get there? Is there a right age to start sleep training if that's the choice you made? Hopefully not. So not before four or five months. And at that point you are not looking for your kid to sleep all the way through the night. So many of these sort of sleep training approaches there are kind of about learning some independent sleep, then sort of putting together a schedule where you think, okay, at some point they will need to eat in the middle of the night. And then as they get older and they need to eat less, they'll kind of connect more of those things and eventually have a longer sleep. Right. Got it. Are there any, I mean, I guess it's just painful for a parent to go to sleep thinking that their child's crying and takes a second to, you know. Yeah, I think one of the things we see in the data is that sleep training doesn't work well if you are not ready to do it. So the people who are ambivalent about this who think like, I'm not comfortable with this. I don't, this doesn't feel right to me. This isn't going to work so well because like you're not, you're not consistency is important. Yeah. And it's just like that's not going to work as well for that group. So I think a lot of it is about being sort of deciding that this is something that is safe, something that is effective, something that's going to work for a family and deliver at the other side of it, which is often, you know, just a few days kind of going to deliver a better environment for your family. Yeah. Anything else on sleep training that we've missed that we haven't talked about things that you get asked the most about it? So I think one thing that people really struggle with is actually sleep training for little kids is it can be a hard for like babies. I mean, like a hard decision, but like it's not that hard to implement. Like if you're committed to doing it's not that hard to implement because your kids in the crib and they can't move. I think it becomes really hard is when people have toddlers and their kids are coming out of the room and we sort of, there's often another period where people are spending a lot of time, a lot of complicated bedtime stuff. And that's actually a very different problem. It's not, it's more of a kind of a need for behavioral modification than it is a sort of sleep training. And so there I think the main point for many people is just you got to decide where you're trying to go and then like decide a moment they're going to consistently implement. Kids tend to respond really well to consistency. Where did the theory or belief come from that if kids are left crying that they'll end up feeling abandoned? Where did that come from? So it's based on psychology of attachment theory, a lot of which was developed out of observations of kids who had very, very problematic attachment like childhood. So one place this we saw this was in Romanian orphanages. So there was a period of time in Romania in which there were a lot of children who were unwanted and they ended up in these orphanages where they were like basically just left alone for, you know, with very, very minimal care. There was a lot of abuse. And when researchers came to like observe these kids, they found the babies really didn't cry because they sort of had learned nobody would come. And then these kids had problems for very long periods of time. The difference between a baby that is left, you know, alone for days at a time with not enough food and, you know, not and sexual and physical abuse and all that. The difference between that and kind of crying for even a pretty long period of time for a few nights in the context of an otherwise like loving and stable and happy household. Like those are really different things. And I think that that they sort of know that but there's kind of a porting of porting across this, which I just don't think is is appropriate. But that's where it comes from. Yeah, got it. I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's incredible what connections we make when they're not really that connected. I mean, I think this space is a very, the space is a tough one because it is hard to hear you kid cry and is hard to think about sleep training for a lot of people. It is also incredibly helpful for many families. And I think that's worth noting. Yeah. Are there any data-driven techniques to help babies stop crying quickly? Just consistently implement this multiple, you know, over time. I think that's that there's no like this trick. I mean, it doesn't work for every baby, but it really does work on average. Incredible everyday prices. Check the latest investment pieces. Check find it all at Bista Village. Every day shop with up to 40% off your favorite brands like Barbara and Mulberry. The thrill of discovery awaits. Bista Village. What will you find if you want to save a few quid British gas have away? You get half price lecky and it's called peak save on every Sunday. It's the smart thing to do if you're regular folk or furry and blue. 11 till 4. Let the good times begin. You could charge up the car or take the dryer for a spin. Half price electricity. What joy that brings with British gas peak save. We're taking care of things. T's and C's apply eligible tariffs and smart meter required. Virgin Media gives you show stopping TV and broadband. You get the channels you love including the TV and the TV. The channels you love including Netflix and now Sky Atlantic at no extra cost. That's epic entertainment you can't stop watching. A bit like an elephant cruising on a truck through the bright lights of Bangkok. Plus you get lightning fast broadband too. Yeah, that's entertainment the Virgin Media way. Visit virginmedia.com. New customers only. Virgin Fiber areas. Restrictions and credit checks apply. Terms apply. Wanted to revisit screen time from the point of view of like as kids are growing up and not looking at you could advise whether it's valuable to look at specific ages or not. But is there any connection now? I know earlier you said well it was really not about causality or causation. It was just the fact that it's just a different socioeconomic condition and different opportunities and different education level of parents and availability of funds and resources and time and energy and everything else. If that's all it is, is there any data to suggest it matters on any level? Yeah, I mean the answer is probably yes. This is a space that's really where data is really new. So if you wanted to ask what's the impact of being exposed to an iPad at the age of two on like high school graduation or college graduation. Like we don't know because the kids who are exposed at the age of two haven't graduated yet. So we're really in a data poor environment. When we look at younger kids a lot of the sort of questions we would ask are about displacement of other activities. So asking as kids do more and more of these is that kind of displacing things that they should be doing that has sort of active positive value like any time with their family going outside. Like what are we replacing is kind of the question I would ask as opposed to thinking about the screens per se as like good or bad. They are an activity which must be displacing something else. And so if they are displacing sleep, for example, that's really bad. We know kids don't sleep enough and they need a lot of sleep. There's been a second question as kids get older about kind of the social media, the sort of social media part of screens where again we're in a very data poor environment. But I think there's reasonable people have reasonable concerns about girls in particular and the kinds of exposures that we get. And then you're layering on top of this like a whole other AI thing which I got that's new. And so we just there's a lot of choices that parents are having to make that are hard because we have no context for them. And also our kids are much better at screens than we are. So a lot of the tools people would put, you know, people like, oh, I add this tool to my kids' iPad to do this and that's like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? You know, it's like, you know, these kids' school is putting up like these restrictions like, you know, they can't play this game. And they're like, oh, I just went to the website that's like called like my school blocked blah, blah, blah. And that's where you get the games. Yeah, totally. Totally tilting a widmill on this stuff given the demographic, given the generational shifts. Yeah, I'm at least a supporter of most of or all of Jonathan Heights considerations around that. As I don't know, older age, like, I just feel like there's no need to be on social media before a certain age. Yeah, I think that. So it's like, there's no need for schools to have phones. Like I just don't, you know, we all went to schools without phones and. Yes, I think there's a few of these things which are like these things all have like little different pieces. I think like the phones and schools like that's distracting. You don't need a distracting. There's no need for that. I think the social media stuff, I also agree, like there should be some sort of thought about age is maybe going to be different for different kids. I think there should also be a fair amount of kind of scaffolding by parents. Once your kid gets these social media tools, like, you know, it's like a car, right? You don't just hand them the keys and say enjoy, you like teach them. And I think this is kind of like a car. Like you got to be willing to take the keys away. You got to be willing to like help them learn, you know, what's the reasonable way to interact with this. I will say, I think that the relative to the kids who are now like 18, 19, the kids who are now 13, 14, at least in some cases, I think are actually much less into this. There was sort of a period of time when everyone had Instagram when they were 12. This is actually dialed down a bit, which, you know, maybe it's just reflecting my kid's school, but I don't know. Yeah, it's different between just having screen time and then being on social media and being exposed to other people's lives and messaging. And I think there are two totally different conversations. And I like the way you just said it, that if you look to getting a phone like getting a car and if we were able to start helping society think that way, then it becomes a point of, I remember wanting a car and being like excited, nervous that I had to pass a test, preparing for the test. You know, all the levels that you go through to get there, and then you have your first accident and, you know, like that scary... Get your first ticket. Yeah, you get your first ticket. It's like, you know, it's, it's, but it feels like a whole journey to get it rather than now a phone's almost like this expected piece of life that you have no idea what it's exposing you to or your kids to. And, and it's a tough conversation with parents. I love the scaffolding idea, but I do think that it's hard when it's like, oh, well, your friends parents, I gave them a phone at 12 and then, but I'm weighing two to 14 and they're like, but wait a minute, everyone at school had one at 10. And whereas if there's just rules that are not parents set. Yes, I think parents could use help on this for sure. And, you know, ultimately there's like no substitute for knowing your kid on these things and every kid is going to be different and is going to be spoke to be differentially affected by these things and you need different things, which is part of what makes parenting so difficult. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's tough, tough couple more things I wanted to talk to you about this one was about vaccines. Yes, because I know there's a lot of conversation about that. So vaccines and CDC guidelines change over time, of course. How would you consider parents think about navigating that? I think parents should vaccinate their their children on the whole. I mean, I think that, you know, the AAP has a set of guidelines for many years. The AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC had the same vaccine guidelines and they are the sort of primary childhood vaccine series are that have been enforced for decades and have been a really safe and effective and etc, etc. And over the past year with the current administration, we have dialed way back the number of vaccines the CDC has recommended. I think there's a fair amount of holdover from COVID where people were uncomfortable with some of the way that the COVID vaccine was pushed on people. And I think some of that is actually fair. Probably we do not currently need all healthy children to get a COVID booster. Europe doesn't do that. I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable position. What is not a reasonable position is people shouldn't get the measles vaccine. And so I think for parents, it's kind of thinking about, you know, what is the if you want to think about what the evidence says about these vaccines. These vaccines are really good at preventing disease and they are really safe and have been in use for for a decade. So I find the current vaccine conversation really difficult to engage with because it feels like, what are you kidding me? Like kids are going to die of the measles. Like kids are going to die of the two kids died of the measles last year. More kids are going to die of the measles this year. So in a single week in January 2026, there were more measles cases in the U.S. than all but a small handful of years over the past two decades. Because people chose not to. Yeah. So if you look at the graph, basically we had like 260 cases of measles in a week in almost all full years in the past two decades. We had like far fewer than that. So because people stopped vaccinating and then measles is super, super contagious. And so if you get a small amount of outbreaks and the outbreak grows and we had a lot of cases and I just think, you know, that means kids are going to die of measles. Who didn't need to die of measles and that just feels terrible. Yeah. Do you think kids are being over-medicated in general? I mean, I think it's a totally different question. Yeah, totally. It's interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot of probably to some extent. I think there, if we look at the data on something like ADHD and we look at, you know, what's happened to those kind of prescriptions over time, we've gone up a lot. And we do see some evidence that those are increasing, those are higher for say, kids who are younger when they are first in kindergarten. And I think that's reflecting our expectation of kids in schools, which is totally different than it once was and particularly probably poorly suited, especially for boys. And so if we sort of think like, okay, we're going to bring a bunch of kids in who kind of aren't that great at sitting still. And when they're not that great at sitting still, which totally age appropriate behavior, we're then going to give them something to make them sit still. I mean, there's a good argument that we've been overusing that approach. Yeah, no, totally too difficult. Yeah, which is a totally different conversation. Totally two different conversations. Yeah. I think it's become hard. It's almost hard for, there's some people who never question it at all. And then there are I think some people who question it because there's a lack of trust or there's, for example, like you see the other medication, you see the rise and then you go, wait a minute, there's so many updates and what's happening here. And is it really helping and where's it, you know, so I think there's a lack of trust. There's curiosity. There's, you know, there's, there's all sorts of versions of it on the spectrum of why and why we disagree or where they sit. Yeah. And I think the other, I mean, the other thing about vaccines is like, we haven't done a great job of helping parents understand, you know, like which vaccines are most important. I basically think everybody should get all of the vaccines on the schedule because they're all safe. But I, I'm curious whether we should be having more of the conversation of, okay, look, if you were only going to do, you know, there's real hesitancy for good reason to have a conversation that's like, look, if you were only going to do three, these are your three. And I see why we don't want to have that conversation because it implies that, you know, maybe there's some risk to these other things, which there are not. But it could encourage people to get some subset of the vaccines. It feels like such a complicated messaging, messaging play. You know, if we really think the most important thing is for people to get like the measles vaccine and the Tdap vaccine and the flu vaccine, like maybe we should be like pushing the rotavirus vaccine last, even though that is a very good vaccine. I don't know. This is very complicated. I wish people would just get all the vaccines. Got it. Understood. You have written Emily four books on parenting, I believe. If you had three messages for parents that you felt they really needed to hear, what would they be? One is that there are a lot of right ways to do it. I think that's probably the core message of my second book, which is, you know, here are some data on stuff, but in almost every choice you're going to make, there are a lot of different good options. And you just got to find the one that works for you. So I think that's one pretty core message. I think a second key insight in everything I write is that correlation is not causality and you should be really, really skeptical of a lot of the evidence that people tell you because a lot of it is correlation. I guess the third insight is I think people spend too little time thinking in advance about their plans and too much time in therefore in sort of reactive, reacting to things that happen. And we're very reluctant to put time in upfront because we're busy. But there are many situations in parenting in which putting some time in upfront, thinking about how you want to approach something is going to save you a lot of time and conflict later. I love that. I love all three of those. And that last one, especially, I just think we think, like I always hear the advice of you're never ready to have kids, which I agree with. Like that makes full sense. But at the same time, you're definitely not ready if you never thought about it. You could be more ready. Exactly, which applies to everything. It's just that mindset of, well, you never know what it's going to be like. And it's like, you're right. Yeah, I definitely like, as someone who doesn't have kids, I have no idea what it's going to be like to prepare. I fully hold my hands up. I lose. I get it. But I can think, I can prepare, I can try and I probably will still fail and make mistakes. And I think that's the problem. We think planning means perfection. As opposed to... As opposed to planning just means planning. And that's all it is. And it doesn't mean it's going to be perfectly executed. Absolutely. Emily, last two segments, we have a this or that. Okay. And then our final five, which we do with every guest on the show. So this or that parenting version, gentle parenting or helicopter parenting? I don't like either of these. Explain. Why? I mean, I think that gentle parenting, as a lot of people have interpreted it, is kind of permissive. Parenting is sort of like, I'm not going to put any boundaries. And I think that's really problematic. So what is good gentle parenting or what is the... I think there's a good version of kind of punishment, parenting without rules and without consequences, which is much more about just setting boundaries. It ends up looking really similar to parenting with rules and consequences. But you know, the kind of like saying what the boundary is, following through on the boundary, that's a very clear part of almost any evidence-based parenting approach. But gentle parenting, as many people seem to interpret it, I think does not work. So I think I'm going to go with helicopter parenting, which is being over-involved, which I also think can be quite problematic, but perhaps less. What is a proven approach to parenting? So I think that the best set of evidence-based approaches we have to like behavior modification are things where you have a clear set of expectations, where when there's a behavioral issue, there's a clear set of expectations, consequences, and rewards. That's often what we see supported best in the data. So something like 123Magic or one of these... What's 123Magic? So 123Magic is one of these sort of evidence-based parenting approaches, which is just a particular way to kind of scaffold. Like when somebody in your kid does something bad, you give them like three warnings and then there's a timeout, it's very effective. Right, yeah. I mean, it seems to follow the common sense of what life looks like. Life has choices and actions, they have consequences, and then they see the reward. Like that's kind of what... That's what it works as an adult. Yeah, exactly. As an adult, that is life. Yeah, got it. Natural remedies or medicated products? Generally medicated products. I think that there's a lot that we have learned over time about, say, antibiotics, which are the reason that many people are not dead. So I'm going to go with medicine, although there are certainly places where we sort of overuse antibiotics and we have a better off just like not using them because people don't have a bacterial infection, but overall, medicated products. A strict schedule or flexibility? Can both work personally? Explain, yeah. So personally, my family has a very rigid schedule. One might say too rigid, but that is... No, actually, I have much more because I mean, yes, it's a combination of me and my husband, but I think that he is even worse than I am. But that is what works for us. For us and our kids, we really... We like to know what's expected on the weekends. We know what we're going to do. There are calendar invites. If we're going on a hike, my husband puts a calendar invite with the drive time in it because he's insane. But that's for us, that's really great. I think for other people, flexibility can totally work. This is one of the core things I think you need to figure out about your family, which is what version of this is going to make us feel confident and happy. There is not a right answer, but there probably is a right answer for you. If you're a person who just wants to wake up on Sunday morning and be like, let's find out whatever, you're going to be really annoyed when your spouse is like, why didn't you put the calendar invite in for the drive time? But if you're a person who really wants to have the calendar invite, it can be frustrating to be like, well, let's just do it where the wind takes us. Well, how long will it take to get there? Exactly. So I think you just got to find what works. Absolutely. Two under two or waiting? Two under two is tough. Again, I would say for me, I wanted to wait. I like the four-year age gap worked real well for me. One kid carried their backpack while the other kid... You're carrying the other kid's hunter-gatherer birth spacing. Is that dated to that? This was the common hunter-gatherer birth spacing, I think we think, because one kid can kind of walk on their own when you're carrying the other one. My sister and I have a four and a half years. So great. But I think if you're a little older or there's sort of some other reason why you want to get them in close, that is very tiring. It is very, very tiring to have two little babies at the same time. You need good scaffolding. Got it. Plastic bottle or glass bottles? People are so worried about microplastics. This is not an important source of microplastic exposure relative to the other sources of microplastic exposure. We don't know that much about microplastics. It's like a whole other episode you could do with somebody else. I think people should avoid glass bottles because they shatter. That's it, yeah. And then glass will be everywhere. And hurt the kid. And hurt the kid or you. Yeah. Yeah. Timeouts or time-ins? I don't even know what a time-in is. I'm a fan of time-outs. I think time-outs work well. I think that they can be really... How does a good time-out work? The good time-out works when your kid knows that the time-out is the punishment. They know that we're going to have a set of, like, you know, they know there are risks for the time-out and they have an opportunity to fix their behavior. This is why something like a counting approach or warning approach is good, that you follow through on the time-out when you say that you're going to, when the time-out is appropriately timed for the age of the kid, shorter if they're younger, longer if they're older. And then when after the time-out, you don't discuss it anymore. It's not like there's no shaming. There's no...it's just like you're in a time-out, you're calm. You put them in the time-out. They have a chance to cool down. You have a chance to cool down. Nobody is yelling. I think they can work extremely well. Yeah. I was going to ask you, are there any more strategies like that in parenting, that are growing older, where, that are you found extremely useful? You have a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old. Yes. When the kids were little, we found time-outs very, that to be a very helpful approach. I think in general, we found consistency is very good. I will say now a lot of my considerations are how can I get my children to continue to speak with me? And I have found that my very best approach with older kids is to be available. And so I spend a lot of time after dinner when they're in their rooms doing homework or whatever, sitting in the den of our house, which is near their rooms, just sitting, working on my computer, whatever. And then if they happen to want to come out and talk, I immediately close the computer and can talk to them. And that just being there when your kids are ready to talk to you, I think is a strategy that works pretty well. The only other strategy, really, like deep, the seeded strategy that we have is don't lie. Try not to lie to my kids. That's why they knew about Santa Claus before everyone else. There was like one time my son was like, was like, mom, is the tooth fairy real? And I was like, do you want to know? He was pretty old. He was like, I was like, do you want to know the truth? He's like, yeah, I was like, no, it's not. He was like, I didn't think so because other fairies aren't real. I was like, yep, you got it. That's so funny. So now when he loses the tooth, he's just like, can you put money in my allowance? Absolutely. That's so funny. That's so funny. So even the fun white lies. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think the Santa thing comes up all the time. People are like, should I lie? Should I? I was like, I don't know. I think my husband is Jewish and he was just like, I'm going to tell our kids Santa's real. It's not for me. Yeah, got it. Emily, this has been so useful. Thank you for busting all the myths. Thank you for providing all the data and being so open and honest about so much that we're still figuring it out and we're still researching it. We're still researching and still trying to find good data to back. So we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five. These questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum. And so Emily, this is your final five. The first question is, what is the best parenting advice you ever heard or received? Try not to think about it. Question number two, what is the worst parenting advice you've ever heard or received? Don't put Mittens on your child because she'll never learn to use her hands. That's brilliant. It was my mom's. My mom was so great, but that was bad advice. That's hilarious. That's so funny. Did you ever follow that? No, it's ridiculous. I didn't look it up. I went so far as to research it. That's good. That's what it's like to have a baby. Question number three, something you used to believe was true about parenting, but now you disagree with. That if you do the same thing for two kids, you get the same outcome. No. Fascinating, yeah. You have to adapt. You have to. It's so easy to think you did a great job on the first one and then they're just different kids and you need different things. Question number four, is there a list of three qualities you try and instill in your kids? Three things you think are universally important. In my own kids, yes. I think respect for others, following through on your commitments and you try and pursue excellence and the things you choose to do. How do you do that as a girl? What's your approach to that? Some of it is that we say that some of these are our core values. So following through on our commitments is something we will tell the kids is a core value. Some of it is how you, is what you try to, the things that I try to do in my own life and model. I think it's sort of modeling and then some explicit. This is how we operate. So I express and then be the example. You've got to explain it, make sure they get it, but then they've got to see it through you. Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? I'm going to go with comprehensive fertility education for people at multiple times of their lives. Ideally through the education system or? It's a lot. Sure, I'm going to be able to implement it in whatever way I want. But yeah, I think through, we spend a lot of time telling people how not to have kids when they're younger. And then we never tell people how to have kids when they're older. And I think there's a piece of that that's about parenting, but there's another piece which is just like, I think that people don't understand their own bodies very well. And I would like them to understand them better. I love that answer. I can agree with you more. Do you think that's even realistic? It feels like it needs to be realistic to get to. It feels ridiculous that we haven't got it. It feels ridiculous. You're saying that, I'm like, yeah, this is the thing that every human, not every human, but humanity is going to need to do for a long, long time. And the fact that you literally walk home out of a hospital with a baby. And they're just like, nothing. Yeah, and you have to self-educate and read a book. It's ridiculous. And listen to podcasts. I'm like, it's insane. Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is we used to live in a society. We used to live in larger groups where you didn't have to know this. You're like, everyone was having babies all the time. And also the older people were doing this. And I think as we have moved away from religious communities, as we have moved away from our families, it does feel a little bit more like there's missing both some of the, I mean, there's just like basic fertility stuff, but then also just sort of like shared, there is a need for somehow the parenting advice is filling this gap. But I'm not sure we're filling in quite the way we need to. Yeah. No, I love that. I think that would be so powerful. And I also think that even though we did get away with it in the past because of bigger communities and bigger groups of people, I don't think that was really solving the problem either. It was just covering up. Just a different way to cover it up. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Emily, it's been such a joy talking to you today. Thank you so much. Where would you like our audience to find you? Of course, they can follow you across social media. We've mentioned your books. We'll put the links in the comments. And you can find me at parentdata.org, which is where I have links to all of these things. And then many, many resources to help you make it easier. Amazing parentdata.org. Thank you, Emily. Such a pleasure. And look forward to doing this again. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. A therapist once said to me that if your parents didn't know how to hold you, you develop the mind you hold yourself with. It's a fate of pain and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.