Data-driven parenting (that might even make your life easier!) with Prof. Emily Oster.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode ninety seven. We're excited to be interviewing Emily Oster today. She is a professor at Brown, an economist, and the author of the new book Cribsheet, which is a data driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool. So lots of great things we're going to be talking about with her later in this episode. The reason we reached out to Emily is because a lot of people mentioned on my blog that she would make a great guest, and then Sarah'll so recently heard her on Freakonomics, right, that's yeah, it aired just recently. The episode aired in early May if you want to go back and look back, because it's a fantastic episode if you enjoy hearing her on this podcast, and specifically she delved into some topics that I felt were right up our Best of Both Worlds Ali and thought she'd make a fantastic guest for us. So we were thrilled when you know, she was able to make room in her guest speaking calendar right after Freakonomics to hang out with us Freakonomics and Best of Both Worlds, which you listened to both of those, Sarah, what well else are you listening to today? Yeah? I was. I was wondering if you had any new podcasts you liked. I you know, I haven't had that many new ones. I actually there's a finance one that I've been enjoying called how to Money. Although it's very male perspective, I'll have to look to see if they're any you know more more, although they have a very nice family perspective. They both have large families and they feel like spending out on the families is worth it. So I really like that. Maybe they just need to have their partners speak. I am actually a guest on this show with How To Money at some point. I'm not sure if it will have aired by the time this is I didn't not air yet because it heard it between when we're recording this and the But yeah, no, they're Matt and Joel are very fun and yeah, they're both big expanding families, so it was good good to talk with them from that perspective as well. Well. I'm also super excited to say that Note to Self is returning. Manush has had another podcast in the meantime, but I am just in love with Note to selfs topics and I'm excited that that's coming back. And I still listen to a lot of a lot of different things. I do like in the if you're looking for something sort of similar to our kind of content, maybe less work related. I still like the mom our a lot. Yeah, what about you? I listened to Happier. I listen to what should I read next? That's That's been great. I still love that one as well. You know, I'm not in the car all that much in terms of longer chunks of time, and so I find that there's less space for listening to a lot of podcasts. But you know, I certainly like those and I've enjoyed listening to ones like how to Money, you know, trying trying that out before I was a guest on that. I definitely, I mean I listened to everything that I'm on a guest that I'm a guest on, like before I'm on the show. So I feel like there's a wide variety of podcasts that I've tried out here and there. There's also another I've been listening to, not Safe for Work or no, maybe it's called Safe for Work. Yeah, Safe for Work, Safe for Work. It's a good it's like a career podcast. It's like it's similar to us without the family side. Got so those of you who enjoy us might want to check that out as well. That's cool. Yeah, and uh, we we continue to record this. We've been batching a lot to get us ahead of the summer because it's going to be a lot of back and forth of both of us being off at different points in the summer. So yeah, that's uh some of these the timing maybe a little bit odd, but hopefully our listeners will forgive us. As we're talking about August and it's like June, so we thought ahead about that. So pretty much we try not to do that. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, here is Emily. I'm so excited to speak with her. So, Sarah and I are thrilled to welcome Emily Ostar to the podcast today. As we said, she's the author of the new book The Crib Sheet, which is a data driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool. So, Emily, could you introduce yourself to our listeners. Yes, Hi, I'm Emily. I am a professor of economics at Brown University in my day job, and I am the author of this book, Cribsheet, which is about using data to parent. And I also have an earlier book called Expecting Better, which is about using data to be a better pregnant person. And I'm really excited to be here with you guys. Yeah, and you have two children who have been the subject of much of this research as well. Right, yes, sorry, I should have mentioned the most important thing. I have a four year old son and an eight year old daughter at home. Excellent. Well, one of the things that intrigued us and intrigues me in general, is that economists are kind of special. They have a different way of thinking about the world. I know, I enjoy listening to Freakonomics is one example of a podcast that explores that kind of thinking. Can you tell our listeners like, what does it mean to be an economists? How do you see things a little bit differently? Yeah, So I think there's many kinds of economists, and we run the range from what I think a lot of people would think about, which are like people who study the Federal Reserve and think about interest rates and think about stocks, which not really the kind of economics I do. But I think that there's a large pool of economists now who are kind of really into analyzing data and trying to get cause or relationships out of data, in many cases around issues that are maybe less traditionally associated with economics, like parenting, but more like health or behavior, behavior, behavior, and so you know, for me, I think of economics as kind of being partly about about data and evidence and trying to get causality out of out of data, and partly about decision making and thinking about how people should make decisions and what is the right way to make choices. And so I think that that for me, those two things kind of come together and you can apply them to in a lot of different areas, some of which are more traditional than others for economists. Yeah, and so your book takes this approach of looking at data and looking at how people should make decisions and turns it on this topic of you know, first pregnancy for the first book, and now parenting, especially during the early years. And you know, one of the reasons we're very excited to have you on. It's one of my personal biggest pet peeves that suddenly somebody will get very authoritative and say, well, all the research says kids turn out best if you do X. Now what maybe you could explain to people what are the inherent problems of a statement like that. So there is almost nothing about which all the research says the same thing. And I think this is one of the things that frustrates me also so much, is that this sort of phrase US studies show like studies show, studies show everything. Okay, there's always the studies show everything, And the challenge is to say, you know, what is it? What are all the studies show all the studies show When you look at them all together and you try to understand which are the best studies and which are the are the least good studies, and you know which ones should we should we rely on. And I think in some sense, saying all the research shows just betrays like a lack of understanding in some ways of how this works. Because even for something where it's very clear that it's it's sort of the data is in one way or the other, you will still often find a study that shows the opposite, because you know, studies are not perfect, and sometimes there are some good studies and less good studies, and some studies are wrong. And so I think we need to take a more holistic view, but it is very hard to do that in the face of so many pieces of information that come at you. Yeah. Well, also the question of how kids turn out. I mean this is also a problem because any study needs a measurable endpoint, and I'm just not sure how turning out translates into a measurable endpoint. Yeah, no, it's it's right. And I think even you know, even in the book, there's this sort of there's all the limitations I talk about, and then there's the on top of that, the limitation that like, in our best case scenario, the outcomes we're looking at are like test scores, right, or you know, behavior, like some measure of behavior, right, And those are the things we can measure. But of course, as a parent, like, yeah, maybe those are things that you care about, but they're certainly not the limit of the things you care about. You know, I want my kids to be like happy and nice and and there's no nice, like forget about like a nice. They will measure nice. Nobody's like, hey, is your kid like kind to other children? That's not the thing. You know, there's externalizing behavior, there's like pieces of that, but there isn't there. We're sort of missing some of these more holistic things because they're hard to measure. And I think that you know, that's an inherent limitation, but it does mean that that these these conversations end up sounding sort of like, oh, my goal is to like optimize my kid on IQ and behavior outcomes, And I don't think there's anybody's actual goal. And the funny thing, like you talk about, everything tends to have two sides. So even if you did manage to use data to create the smartest kid, that could backfire anyway, because you may have sacrificed something else equally valuable, like being nice or creative or not having a psychiatric disease or right or whatever. It is just like, for example, all bad things you know, yes, yes, exactly. So you know you're building your career as an economist, and then you know, you and your husband start a family, and you know, you decide to take this approach to pregnancy and childcare. What were some of your biggest surprises as you looked into this. Was there anything that you were surprised to find or like, WHOA, I didn't think that would be there in the data, So I think there was more of that in the case of pregnancy. And so when I sort of think about the two books, you know, there's a lot of things in the in the first book about pregnancy that are kind of like, you know, people tell you you can't have any sushi, but actually like it's fine to have sushi. And so there were sort of many many more things like that or like the one there that I was super surprised by that remain very surprised by is about bed rest. So a lot of people are told to go on bed rest, and it turns out like there is like almost there's basically nothing for which bed rest is a good idea, and there are a lot of reasons it's not a good idea. And yet it is still prescribed all the time. So there were there were many things like that in pregnancy, I think in the parenting stuff, you know, there's there's a few things that kind of I think people find somewhat surprising, but a lot of I guess a lot of what's surprising about this about the book is that there are many good choices, and so we are sort of coming in always with like the idea that like there's there's like a right choice, like there's like a right way to sleep with your kind of a right way to feed them, and and you know, in most of these or many of the decisions there, there isn't really a right way. And so that means that there isn't a fact that is surprising. There is an approach that is surprising. But I will I will highlight one thing that I think that we that I didn't didn't realize until I did the book, which is about the way that you introduce food. So there when you I don't know if you guys have you muys have little kids or big kids. And I'm actually a pediatric ercnologist, so I am like gonna listen with ears open. But actually, so when I was thinking about feeding our dog, like introducing solid food. You got this like very specific list of like first you give them ry cereal and then you know, every three days you give them a new vegetable, and first it's vegetables and then it's fruit, and like there's there's a more of like very very very specific instructions. And I was like, Okay, there must be a reason that it is exactly like this, Like there must be a reason that you have to start with this and then you have to do this, and then you have to do this, because why would it be so specific if there wasn't a reason. And then the answer was like this is a fine way. There's really wrong with this way I'm doing. It's like perfectly fine, but there isn't anything wrong with like giving them oatmeal first, or you know, like giving them some fruit before that. I mean, there's like it was sort of like there's a logic, but there didn't. It didn't feel like there was a deep underlying evidence base for like why you had to start and do it exactly this this way. And I was surprised. I think that's so funny. And my gut feeling is that people made a list because it was like an easier answer, Like parents wanted a prescription and they're let someone wrote it down and they're like, oh, that looks good, and then that's the new handout and you can sound all good saying it. And it wasn't hurting anyone. It isn't like unlike something's like bed rest. This isn't like a problem, Like this is totally fine way to do it. It's just it's like if you didn't want to, you know, I remember my son didn't like rice cereal. He just like hated it. And he was and my husband's like, why, like but what, we're family, why does he like this? And it was like and then he was like, maybe he'll like, you know, like kanji, and then he did. And then it was like, I guess we're gonna give him. This's this kid. Number two, Yeah, number two. But also the risk that people are like, oh I did something terribly wrong. If they introduced yellow vegetables before red vegetables or whatever the order was right, because yeah, I remember it's very yellow and then the orange is you know, it turns out it doesn't matter. It's okay. All the vegetables are going yeah. Well, and the funny chicks out. You know, people make life altering decisions based on things. I mean probably you know, what order you feed your kid is not terribly life altering, but things like parental employment are a lot more life altering. And you know, you looked into the data on this, you know, and how how people wind up being very judgmental in both directions without particularly great evidence. So what did you find in terms of the data on parental implement And I'm not saying here whether mom stays home or not, because I love the way you put it, What is the optimal configuration of adult work hours for your house? Yes, yes, it's very catchy. Yeah you won't see that in the headline anytime, but I'm not going to tell you don't think so it's too many words. So you know, first of all, I think this is this is a place where it's very it's this is a place where the data is somewhat limited, or you know, the approaches are somewhat limited because this choice is really wrapped up in other things about the family, and so it's just it's a hard question to answer. So the best we can do is we can say, Okay, what is the data to say of the data that we have. What does it say? And so these studies compare the kids of moms who stay home to the kids of moms who who work, and or parents where both parents work versus one parent staying home. It's usually the mom, although not not always of course. And you know, what they show is that the outcomes are very similar. That there isn't any particular reason to think that. And again here we're in outcomes like IQ or behavior, things you can measure in test scores and in schools, and the kids look look the same. There. You know, maybe is a little bit of a hint that kids where one parent works part time and one parent works full time maybe do a little bit better. But it seems like that is probably because that's like a very unusual family configuration, which only happens in particular you're kind of heavily selected, uh selected families. So I think that that what this means, and you know what I'm what I took from this is that the choice of you know, how to organize your adult work hours should be mostly about what is going to work for the family overall. And I think we have this sense that we like start this conversation with what is the best for the baby, Like, let me do the thing that's the best for the kid, the best for the kid. And they said, well, there's just like there's no best for the kid. They're like this, anything is fine. And so you need to figure out what's best for your for your family, and one part of that is budgeting. But one part of that is what you want to do. So when I talk about this, I say, you should think each person the family should think about what do you want to do? Do you want to work? Do not? Do not want to work? And as I've talked about this book with women, there are a number of women who have told me it never even occurred to me to ask that question. Like when I was making a decision about whether to work after I had a kid, it never occurred to me to think about whether I wanted to. But why is parental preference view it as not relevant variable in so much of this? I mean, I think it it's because this has gotten wrapped up in this general you know, modern approach to parenting. Their culture. Yeah, I trying to like optimize, try our kids enjoy our lives. That's not what we're here for right now, right, I mean here for a podcast that serves to hopefully go against that. And I love that you're actually bringing numbers into that. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, And I personally enjoyed that you looked at the marginal value of each extra hour with your kids versus the marginal utility of like the sixth hour with your kids is probably lower than the no. But I mean, I think there is this this resistance in their culture to to saying that, as particularly as a mom, but as a parent in general. Like people don't somehow saying like, yeah, I have a job because I like to have my job. I like it. I like to go to work. It's fun, I enjoy it. It It gives me fulfillment that is different from the fulfillment I get from my kids. And I don't like my kids. I like my kids, they're great, they're the best. But I also like my job. And I think we are we have become kind of resistant to saying that, and we're kind of resistant to saying in the other direction too. I think people who stay at home there's also a resistance to saying, you know, I'm staying at home because I like that that's the thing that I enjoy doing, right, now because there's so much resistance to saying that, it ends up being much more fraud than it would be in much more conflict driven than if everyone could just be like, Yeah, I'm doing the thing that I want that works for me. So of course maybe it isn't the thing that works for you because we're not the same person, and that's fine. We could still be friends and not in the two tribes people, yeah, or the tribes split their the tribe tribes. So if you you know, obviously if both parents are employed outside the home, then childcare comes into this. There's probably going to need to be some sort of paid childcare. And you looked at this too, so you know both the question of like nanny and daycare and what makes good care for that? Is there any negative outcomes for having done this? Are there positive outcomes for you know, putting your child in daycare? So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, So I think again, like I'll say, this is a hard thing to study because the kinds of choices that people make about childcare are wrapped up in other things that they that they do. But to the extent we have data, you know, I think what it suggests is that there are maybe you know, daycare very early on maybe has some small impacts on behavior, and daycare later on has some those are small negative impacts, and daycare later on has some small positive impacts on test scores. But all of these effects are small. When you say early on, like in the first two it's sort of in the first like eighteen months versus like eighteen months to four and a half, okay, so so sort of like yeah, the first year, year and a half versus the like slightly later period, but all of those effects are really little. So like relative to other kinds of variation across kids, they're they're just not that important in terms of size, and they're totally swamped by home environment. So things like you know, how what is happening in your house is way, way, way, way more important than the differences in childcare that you are having. And so in some sense, you know that's again like boy, it's really important to be a good parent. So maybe that's more stressful, but there is a sort of less stressful aspect of it that says that you're making these choices is not this is not the choice that is going to make your kid smart. Or not smart or badly behaved or better behaved than So a lot of it should be about again sort of what is going to work for your for your family. And then I took a little bit about, you know, particularly in the case of daycare, like how do you choose a good like a good daycare? Like what is what does it mean for a daycare to be to be good? Because we do know that daycare quality or nanny quality as measured and these studies, is associated with better outcomes. And I try to be clear that quality is not like organic snacks. And I think that's sometimes it's easy to slip into the idea that like I should go to the daycare with the fanciest stuff and the like. That's probably correlated. But then ultimately, really what matters is like an engaged caregiver who's paying attention to their kids and not you know, whether the I don't know whether there's like a particular kind of blocks or something like that. Yeah, any kind of blocks or any kind of blocks are fine, Yeah, exactly. And so you mentioned these tiny effects, and that's looking at daycare versus home with parent. What about home with nanny? No, So that's looking at daycare versus home. So these these studies are are kind of limited, but that that statement is looking at daycare versus home with caregiver, not the mom. Oh, so that's daycare. So I try to sort of pull out this study that's looks at like so that could be a family member. So it's like a little tricky, so it's not nanny's, but it could be a grandparent. But I think it's it's distinctly not stay at home parent. Got it interesting? Well, Sarah is particularly interested in your research on screen time. This This is something she brings up a lot here. And you know your husband is also an economist, and I know one of the studies you looked at in your book is one that he did. Correct. Yes, it is a study. It is a study a television exposure and kids, and so in that study, you know, I think that the challenge in looking at things about screen time. We can talk about how I think the data in general is very poor, but you know, the challenge in looking even at something like TV exposure and kids outcomes is that the kinds of kids who watch more TV are from families that are different from the kinds of kids who watch less TV. And so it's hard to know if it's the TV. So Jesse's paper so if you want to study this and get some causal impact, you need to actually find some sort of random or plausibly random variation and the amount of TV the kids watch. So what Jesse does is they look at he and his co author look at when TV was introduced in the nineteen fifties, and some places got TV earlier than others. So there were some kids who were exposed to TV for more of their like young childhood, and some kids who are exposed for less. And when they compare those those groups, it doesn't look like the TV is having negative impacts. Now, I think that's like a very compelling argument. Their paper is very compelling on the topic of TV in the nineteen fifties, which is maybe some has some relevance. Actually people watch more TV than you might expect given that there were like three channels, but it is it is probably not the answer to like can my kids play iPad apps? Which I think we don't have an answer too. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's I mean even in the short time. So yeah, you asked of Lauren, I had kids, We've got kids, ranging from how many kids we have between us seven, ranging between eighteen months and twelve and even in the time since my oldest who's now seven, was a baby, and now I feel like the quote unquote rules have changed, and then kind of knowing that there's not a lot of substance behind those rules in the first place, Like again, being a pediatrician, sometimes I turn to AAP, but you know, you have to also look at what's behind that, right, because that's still just somebody's opinion summing up the quote unquote data. Yea, and that's being looked at properly is sometimes in question, Yeah, And I think in this case it's not. It goes beyond like maybe their understanding of the data isn't isn't that good, but just that there isn't a lot of data. So if you want to know, like what's the impact of these kind of frequent screen phones, iPads whatever on like high school graduation, well, there's like no way we could ever know that because the kids who are graduating from high school now are are We're not exposed to screens as little kids, and so we're sort of relying on an expert opinion about these topics, which has some value, and I think that is it sort of has to be the case that having your kid watch nine hours TV a day is bad because there wouldn't be any other time to do stuff. And you know, similarly, having your three year old stay up late at night playing Xbox games instead of sleeping, we can that's also not good. On the other hand, I think the guidelines make it seem like if you have your kid, your two year old watch a half an hour of Kayu while you take a shower and make dinner, that that's like, oh so terrible, And it seems much less likely that the data supports that conclusion. Yeah. I actually the moment that I finally was like I'm no longer listening to this was when Well suggested that parents need to watch along with theirs. I'm not watching is one time you get a break, like I'm not gonna sit there and watch Bears Seem Bears or Kayu or whatever like that is no. No, I will say. My husband is actually this is like his dream because there are so many My kids are now old enough that they both like to watch like animated shows like made for you know, seven year olds. But that's like that's his thing. So they've been watching like Shira. There's like a Shia reboot on Netflix, and so he just like sits like for TV time, Like I'm like, I'm gonna go upstairs the hand glass of wine. I'm gonna make dinner, like it's gonna be read. But you like, he's like, he's like, this is so creticve to like stay with the kids on the couch and watch her. So it's great, but it's not because he if you told them to it, because he loves Shira. And then they ran out of Shara and the kids started watching a show called p J Mask. Oh my kids love that. Yeah, and Jesse was like, no, I'm not going to work. What was the station? Check out power? Rightow? I bet they'd like it's like the Netron. We're onto Vultron. Also, yeah, I know. So what happens when you have two parents who are economists? I think I was. I laughed so hard when I saw that you too communicate via task management software of the asana whatever it is. So, how did we actually tell us how it came to be and also actually give our listeners a flavor of those exact logistics because people always tell us they want those details right. So so a sauna is a task management tool that I use at work. Also I think it's sort of commonly used it at work. And the idea is that, you know, if there's a task so like buy new summer clothes for the children, one way you could approach that is, you know, you could just say, like send an email like, hey, you have to buy new summer clothes. Somebody has to buy new summer clothes for the kids. And in a task like that, it might be okay to send an email, but you know what if there's a lot of discussion like well, which you know, what do they need and like did you talk to them about it? And did you do the review of the existing clothes and do we have any leftover clothes or in Penelope they still fit thin. You know, like there's some topics and it fills up your inbox and you also then maybe you can't find it. What if the person starts a new thread with like links to the things that they bought, that's not very helpful. Then you're like trying to get your emails altogether. This is the reason people use task management products at work, and so we we use them at our house. So we have so we like log onto a Sana and you open a task it says like review, you know, review summer clothing, and then people can comment like I looked it through the clothes and she only has two pairs of shorts and you know, I'm going to order these shorts and I'm ordering these things. And then the other person say, well, what about like what about the shorts that I left in the closet from last year? And you know, you can like you've thread and then when you're done, you can click complete and then you feel like you've gotten something done. I think I'd really like the complete button. That's a complete comment. But I mean, I think this is this is like part of the general thing where I think that we don't always take the lessons from our work into our house, even though sometimes we even though there is like an element of management in parenting that is not dissimilar from the element of management that you have at work. And you guys are actual colleagues though, right, I mean you're yeah, we are actual colleagues in the same department. Well, many questions about that. I mean, one sort of we do have definitely academic listeners and the question of going on the job market to gather what that was like, because I'm sure that the search was with then you know, very sort of different than if it's you know, one party doing that. But also then what that leads to in terms of how you guys split things in terms of parenting. I mean, given that you have again the exact same job, that probably changes the discussion versus in many couples. Yeah, so I think, you know, in the job market case, I think we're sort of lucky to be in a field where it is not there are a lot of jobs, so I think if you you know, and is not uncommon for universities or departments to be hiring more than one person in the same hiring cycle. And so we did go on the job market together twice, once for junior jobs and once for senior jobs. And you know it like getting a job is stressful, getting two jobs is more stressful. And I think there are a lot of particularly in the senior job search, there were some you know, trade offs between what was best for each person, but I think in the end they worked out it worked at good and we're lucky to be in the same place and in a place that we really that we really like. It's been super supportive. I think splitting stuff in your house is is tricky. I do more more parenting than my husband does, and I think that is mostly taste. Actually, so I think that that is mostly that I like it, not that I like it more that it's not the way I would put it, but that I have a higher taste for time with the kids, like more hours of the day. And then you know, so, but I think that we we try to split things, like you know, who's responsible if somebody is if the childcare is sick. We try to we try to balance that a little bit. And you know, the other thing that happens is that like sometimes one person is really is more busy than the other. So the last several weeks, as I have been promoting this book, I have been super busy and I have been away a lot, and he has been doing a lot of additional additional parenting. And he learned to make the lunches, which is not been that successful, but everyone has been eating, so it's good. I want to ask for details, but I'm going to restrain exactly what I want to It's not that complicated to make the lunches. But my kids I have my kids are unfortunately very very specific about what they want. And so the first time I would just tell you, like the first time I did it, he spent forty five minutes in the morning making the lunches. Okay, I just it's not like a displayed Vento box. Okay, it's a small amount of like frozen vegetables and a bagel. And and my daughter came home and she was like, Mom, he put way too much jam. Didn't you tell him not to put a lot of jam on the bil? I was like, yeah, I actually did. I put in the notes don't put a lot of jam on the bagel. And then she's like, you have to look at this. You have to look at this. And she like takes out her thing and she's like wiped off the jam with her with her napkin. And then she's like saved the nag. But she can tell me it was like too much jam, too much jam, you know, too much jam. He didn't read the notes. He did read? Was that an enough? No? No, just that I just that was just and and I had written I emailed him that clearly in the task management software. Yeah it needed to be No, he needed to be able to provide feedback. It's totally right, exactly well and just to I mean, one of the things that I loved it the last chapter you talk about some of the best parenting advice you ever got, which was from your pediatrician when you guys were in Chicago. Maybe you could tell listeners that story. You were you were very worked up about, you know, a trip to France you were taking with with your daughter. Yeah, so we uh so we were we were going to France and my daughter was almost two and we had come. We used to come to our pediatrician visits with these like long lists of questions that we would have. I don't think with my second kid, I never have any questions. Can be all these questions, And in this one it was like, Okay, we're going to France and this place that we're going and has a lot of bees, and I'm she's never been sung, and I'm afraid that she's gonna get stung and if she gets stung, we're kind of far. It's really isolated, and like what are we going to do? And like what you know, like should I take an EpiPen? Should we test her in advance? I had this whole like series of different plans that we like, different levels of planning that we could engage in to deal with this major problem. And I sort of finished my like hyped up story and doctor Lee is like a very calm person. She just looks at me and she sort of nods her head and she's like, yeah, I would just try not to think about that, And it was like it was it's sort of that moment where you realize, like I am being insane, like this is you know, and she's edited in like a super nice way. She doesn't like, get out of my office. You're weird, though, But I think it did highlight and I think about that all the time in these points of parenting where you're just you get really worked off about some little tiny thing and it's not important and there's there's nothing you can do about it, Like you can't you can't control that. There are so many things in your parenting that you wish you could control, but you can't, and you have to just let it go a little bit. And I think that that's I try to think about just you know, okay, just try not to think about that, and it's probably going to be fine. And if there's something bad happens, we'll you know, we'll work on it when it happens. That's great advice. Well, I think this brings us to our Love of the Week segment where we talk about something that's really working out well for us this week or that we're enjoying. So Sarah and I can go first to Emily so to give you time to think about it. So, Sarah, what do you have for us this week? Mind sort of a strategy which is that if you have an item that you need you can, and it's not a terribly expensive item, but you need it in different places, should just buy multiple of that item. Because I bought my headphones the ones i'm wearing now. They're like fifteen bucks, and I would always scramble for them when we had to record our podcast, and I was like, why don't I just buy one and keep it with my microphone? So yes, I'm in love with the convenient headphones. Mine is a statistical one, which was I was reminded of with reading Emily's book when you talk about so you know, we always get wrapped up in these studies where like you know, it doubles your risk of whatever to do this and you're looking at it, it's often extremely small numbers, like it goes from you know, point oh one in one thousand to point oh two in one thousand. So yes, it did double, but you know we're still talking relatively small. Absolutely, So there was this fascinating number I saw in terms of health economics, the number needed to treat I love that, yeah, because how many people would have to do this intervention in order to prevent one adverse event? And so you looked at it in terms of, like, you know, how many families would have to co sleep for there to be one additional adverse event. It was something like ten thousand. I mean it's not a small number, and you know, same as like various drug interventions, like you know, okay, fifty thousand people have to take this drug over and over again and we will prevent one incidence of this. And it's just a totally different statistic and makes it so much less likely that you will go with whatever that is versus saying, oh, it doubles your risk. So I enjoy looking at it from that side as well. So I will tell you the sort of fun thing that is happening, a fun, nice thing that made me happy, which is that my daughter has been asking for a dog, which I don't want right now because there's a lot of other things, and she asks for it every day and I find it, you know, annoying, and so I've told her to ask my husband, and so she started asking him r every day, and then yesterday he told the kids that instead we could get venus fly traps, and they were incredibly excited. And it's like taken on, I would say, it's it's about as exciting as a dog would be. And they're making plans for their venus fly traps, and a venus fly traps just a plant. It's just a plant, and so you know, it's gonna we're just gonna have it. And it's not a dog, and I'm not gonna have to do anything to it. And I'm just really pleased that my kids are still young enough that they can be dissuaded from their desire for a dog by a plant. That's awesome. And yes, that to me, I would definitely go for the venus fly trap over the dog. We've had one before. They actually they keep, you know, they catch. That's good and that's a good thing to help. Yeah, amazing, Well, Emily, thanks so much for coming on the program. We were so glad you could make the time to do this. Yeah, thank you guys so much for there and so for our listeners again. Her book is Cribsheet, a data driven guide to better more relaxed parenting from Birth to Preschool, So please check that out well. Today's question comes from somebody who says she worked as a research scientist for a decade and then moved into the tech field for data analytics about two years ago, and she's asking about the transition between academia and industry and how this has played out in how she uses her time. She says, in academia, years are spent gathering information, then a few months summarizing culminating in a paper or grant. As I switched into working at tech companies, most of the deliverables are based on a four to six week work cycle, and she's found that she over researches and over prepares, so once, for instance, she put together a technical report, then spent days making an hour long presentation to present to the team, only to find out I'd only have the floor for the first fifteen minutes of a meeting. Nobody speaks for an hour straight. Ever, I was used to filling an hour usually by preparing for one hundred and twenty five percent of that seminar then cutting down to size. She says, aside from asking questions about the size of deliberals, which she figured out on her own, as would be a good thing to ask, how do I avoid exhaustively exploring many branches, even if I can sometimes make an exciting paradigm changing finding. She mentioned that something I had written in the past. She mentioned that as you progressed as a writer, you learn to scale your research and work to the size of the article. So if somebody assigns me a four thousand word article, I do a different amount of research than if they assign me an eight hundred word article, and that you sort of learn how much fits this space. She says, well, what helped you learn that skill? So time, trial and error. I don't know that there's any better answer to that. Time estimation is hard and general. I mean, this is not just a challenge for people who switch careers, though it's definitely a challenge for people who switch careers. But there are people who drive to work every single day, and in their mind it takes thirty minutes, and it doesn't it takes forty five, because in their mind it's like, well, once it took thirty, Like I guess when you drove to work at five am or something, But every other time you're driving at eight when there's more people on the road, and it actually takes forty five minutes, and you'd be amazed how many people haven't quite figured this out. So, I mean, one of the reasons I do tell people to track time is that it gives you a better sense of how long things actually take. Like it's very difficult to look at a spreadsheet where every day it takes you forty five minutes, see it's to work, and continue to tell yourself that it takes thirty. I mean, you could try, but it's a lot more challenging to have that cognitive dissonance there. So first, just you know, paying attention to all these things that you'll learn, like how much time do things take? Like how much time does it take me to do a fifteen minute presentation versus an hour presentation? How much time does it take me to get you know, the amount of research that would fit in this amount of space. But there's also just a difference between being well prepared and over prepared. And well prepared is great, like everybody loves people who are well prepared. But since she's a scientist, I think it might help to think in terms of probability. So well prepared is probably thinking about in the ten to ninetieth percentile of what might come up, right, So think about you know, you know, maybe probably the guy will ask me this. He probably won't, but there's a reasonable likelihood he will ask me this. Let me come up with that. But then you don't need to go out to the point one percent probability of like, you know, well, what if we, you know, launch a mission to Mars, like how will our thing look? Then you know, that's that's just not something you really need to concern yourself with. So it's just part of part of the learning curve. And then recognizing that you don't have to do everything. Think about you know, ten to ninety percent. What do you think, Sarah? Yeah, you know, I know this person who wrote in kind of attributed to a job change, and you gave her that grace. But I have a feeling just from the way she writes this, then it may be just her nature to do a little more than she needs to be doing, and we actually this is giving around in time a bit. But we did have a recent guest talk about how you know, over conscientiousness can be a problem with women and as opposed to men, Like there are actually studies that show that, like, particularly in school, like, there's a tendency towards putting a lot more in for incremental gains. You have more girls trying to get like the ninety nine percent, where as a boy might get a ninety five. I'd be like, great, onto the next thing. So I guess I would caution this person to try to challenge herself if she really tends to fit in that overdoing it place, which again I don't know for sure, but I sort of get that sense. Even in the way she writes this email, like there are so many specifics in it, it was like like like I probably would have not spend as much time writing the email as she did. Then figure out how good the job needs to be, and maybe go a little beyond that if that feels helps her feel like she meets her standard. But try to make sure that she's not going far far beyond that, because that could be crippling and that could be inefficient and nobody really gains anything. So I guess I think as women and as people in general, if that's your tendency, you probably need to be aware of it. Yeah, you might look at what your colleagues are doing too to pay attention to that, and you can decide to be a little better than that in terms of preparation, but not you know, in an entirely different realm, because then it's just you know, wasting your time. And you know, when you spend too much time on one thing, there won't be time available to do something else because again, there are only twenty four hours in a day. So when you've massively over prepared for the hour long presentation that's only fifteen minutes anyway, well, that means you weren't doing something else. No, maybe it was sleeping, maybe it was hanging out with your family and relaxing, but it's also probably something work related you weren't getting to as well. So you kind of got to keep your eyes on the big prize and recognize that everything has a limit. In general, as we say, done is better than perfect, because there is no perfect without being done, and better is the enemy of good. Better, Yes, exactly all right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Emily Auster about data driven approaches to raising children. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.