Decision-Making in Family Life with Professor Emily Oster

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a 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 two hundred and eight. Sarah will be interviewing Emily Auster, who has been on our program in the past, but is back because she has a brand new book out called The Family Firm, which is all about how we can make smart decisions, mindful decisions about how we raise our children, particularly through the elementary school years. It's a great book. Sarah and I both enjoyed it, and so I know she's going to have a lot of great things to say. I also know that a lot of our listeners have become more involved in Emily's universe over the past year and a half as she has been writing a lot about the COVID research out there and how it relates to children and schools and things like that. So you guys talk about that in the interview as well, Sarah, Right, we do, And to be I'm thinking about the interview and as we did it, the cases had been really low, and honestly they've gone up a bit since we recorded. So you know, as we kind of talked about, making decisions has to do with putting in all the inputs about risk and what you're willing to live with, and some of those equations may be a little bit different than what we were talking about at that time. So I hope I neither of us came off as in minimizing anything. Obviously, the pandemic is still kind of happening to some extent, though it is different now. And anyway, I just wanted to add that in there, that things were a bit different when we recorded. That's yeah. One of the things that you know Emily talks about in her book that we also want to open up this episode with a discussion of is screen time. So this is something that Sarah has been thinking about a lot, You've been blogging about. You guys have a new screen time policy in your household, at least for now, I do. At least all things are by definition fluid. And I think I even told the kids for the month or something like that, like I don't even want to attempt to say this is our new life. But we were struggling with a lot of I think what took me over the edge was one child was on there I've had for quite some time and looked up and then when I told them to get off of it, like things were thrown at me, and I was just like, okay, something is like not agreeing with this kid, Like I don't need things thrown at me. Obviously, Laura is not a fan of like the narrative of like this one thing happened and we changed everything, But we didn't change everything. We just decided we needed a little bit of a break. And I don't think that screen time affects all of my children equally, but at least one of them see to really struggle with life for quite some time afterwards, and we were also a little bit worried about the health implications of them sitting around honestly for sometimes many hours on weekends and in order to try to encourage a little bit more physical activity with that time. We're just taking a break, so I don't even know what my rules are. We told them no iPads for the month. Honestly, I'm sure we will bring them back in some form. We're only allowing them to basically watch one show on weeknights after they have already read and helped cleaned up, and the weekends were going to limit their screen time to two hours. I'm sure we'll go. Oh and I said they could use iPads if Josh was on call, because I felt like that was I mean, I'm going to have to deal with the aftermath. But at the same time, like when you're so parenting, you need your break. Yeah, so I don't know. Again, work in progress. We've had a decent week. There wasn't that much fighting over there, so that's good. We'll see how things go. Yeah, yeah, we've you know, I've flirted with the idea of screen time limits in the past, but I mean what I've read, I haven't found any particular evidence that there's a particular quantity of time, or that universally it's terrible for kids or anything like that. I'm sure there's particular kids that have bad reactions to it. And if that is the case, and any of our listeners know that about your children, then obviously you do whatever you have to do. I think in our case, especially as the kids are older, it's just how people communicate, Like this is how they talk with their friends, it's how they do their homework. I have a couple of kids who are into actually programming, like learning how to program their own video games. They've been building their own video games. Like I think that would be really ridiculous of me to be like, you can't do that, because I only want you to be on screens for an hour a day, Like I mean, that's no different than them woodworking or something as a hobby. And some of the stuff they're watching is pretty good too, Like Alex has been really into all these science videos that he's coming up and telling me like, wow, you know, the top of the pool feels like the atmosphere of Venus while the bottom feels like the atmosphere of Neptune or something like that. And so, you know, I don't begrudge him finding that out, that there are different temperatures in the solar system. So my current thought about it is that the question is whether it crowds out other things, like you are saying, like if they're sitting on their butts all day and not doing anything physical, or they're refusing to help out with chores or anything like that, that's a problem. They're partly just so busy right now that there's just not enough time to spend ten hours a day on the screens. Everyone is in various camps, people have activities like we've got karate, we've got tennis, so we've got swim lessons, we've got rock climbing, everything else. Like, there's just not enough time to have too much screens, so I'm trying not to. You know, we do family activities on the weekends. They fit in around that, and that's okay. I'm also trying to make other things more attractive. So we have a general policy that if you want a book, you can get it, and that means that that's always a really cool attractive thing, Like you can always get a book you want, so that hopefully sometimes at least that's more attractive. And I take the phones away at night before they go to bed so that there's screen free never in the bedroom while they're supposed to be sleeping. And relaxing and all that, and all of that sounds completely reasonable to me. I also thought it was funny people are like, well, my thirteen year old, I'm like, but I don't have a thirteen year old. Oh I'm sure I will. Things will be very, very different, and who knows, they'll all be on watches or like something else in four years. I don't know our hologrant Well, okay, maybe hologrant, but like you know, I have a three year old, a seven year old, and a nine year old right now, so that's kind of what's working. And I mean to be again like I don't want to throw any one kid under the bus, but like, if the behaviors were different with certain kids, then I might feel differently. But that's just where we have to be at this moment. I don't I don't feel like sanctimonious about it. I just feel like this is what fits right now. I want to be a hologram. I'll be the hologram that follows my kids around. What would your mother say? I feel like holograms. I feel like we have that technology maybe, but I don't know if it's going to hit the mainstream right it be our helmets where they're having dates. We have that, we have that, That's what I'm saying, like to be having play dates with their helmets on, so they think they're in the same place but they're not and whatever. Yeah, something a lot of virtual play dates, like during COVID for instance, you know, playing video games and friends. It was actually a really cool way to stay in touch with people when we couldn't play in person. So yeah, upside to some screen time there. No, it's true, the collaborative roeblocks and Minecraft like it was a lot. It was a lot of good stuff. All right. Well, let's hear what Emily Oster has to say. All right. I am here with Professor Emily Oser. She is one of the few people who has ever been a repeat guest on Best of Both Worlds. We're so excited to have her. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Astor. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University, and I'm an author, and I'm super excited to be back here and talk to you. Yay. I think we had you a couple of years ago after you had published Expecting Better and maybe Cribsheets had come out and we talked about some of your evidence data driven guide to those parts of parenting. But you've made quite the name for yourself, I think over the past year during the COVID pandemic, and we're going to talk about some of that, And you have a new book out which I truly enjoyed that we're going to talk about. I think in the second half of today's episode. I can't wait. Yay, Okay, So let's start with dive into the whole COVID experience. I'm not just going to say how was it for you, because that's a little basic, but tell me a little bit about how your work ended up pivoting a little bit around COVID. So I had sort of coming into COVID, like in January of twenty twenty. I had started this newsletter, of course, not intending for it to be about COVID, which we didn't know about at that but just intending for it to be a place to kind of connect with people who were reading my books and talking about data and parenting, and as with everything else, it sort of pivoted into being really about COVID, partly because just all the questions I was getting were questions about COVID and what to do and how to think about COVID and how to think about the data. And one of the things I started doing a lot of was writing about decision making and sort of decision making under uncertainty in this space, which was a relates to a lot of the questions that I talk about in the books, but obviously is different in the world of COVID. And I think probably the kind of pivotal pandemic moment in some ways for me was this time in May of twenty twenty when I wrote a post about like grandparents and daycare and how to think about sort of sending your kid to daycare and how to think about seeing grandparents and that kind of framework for thinking that through. And I think that resonated with a lot of people. It's actually kind of related to some of the stuff family Firm, but I think that idea of sort of you're in control of making these decisions and here's a way to do it. I think that was helpful, I hope for many people. And then it sort of led into doing much more of this stuff over the last year. So I've just been doing COVID decision making and stuff about COVID basically the whole time. I know it was helpful for me. I definitely there was this hard period of time when everything was very very black and white, and it felt like even discussing thinking about risks and actually calculating and thinking about why we're making different decisions was almost like frowned upon. So I felt like your newsletter was one of the first places where I was like, actually, let's do some math and think about how are our decisions in this context, which is wildly different, but how do they compare too decisions we've made at other times. Could you talk even a little bit more about that visiting grandparents post and kind of the thought process that went through gauging risk and how you explained risk to people, maybe a little bit about the response. Yeah. Sure. So at that time, I think this was kind of we were coming out of these first sort of stage of like everybody is locked down, everyone's in their house, and starting to ask these questions about Okay, my kid's daycare is reopening, or you know, now it's can I see I haven't seen my parents in two months, three months? Like can I see them? Are their safe ways to do that? I think you're exactly right. That people had initially was sort of like, well, there's totally black and white, like don't do anything, don't leave your don't leave your house. But there became a point where at least some people started thinking about not doing that, and I think a lot of people felt very trapped in the question. I just don't know how to think about this in the new world, and so kind of what I tried to do was both give people a little data and give them a framework to think about that, which started with the idea of just being very explicit about what the question was that they were asking. And in a sense, although that is really obvious, I think that it was the piece that people It was a piece that was missing for a lot of people. So telling you, well, look what you want to do is ask, you know, should I see my parents or not? But should I see my parents now or in two weeks or now, or in six months or now or not until the vaccine? And I think that kind of idea that you really need to think about what the alternatives are, the concrete alternatives are, I think was already somewhat helpful because sometimes people would say, well, you know what, like I'm actually it's not like I'm not willing to wait until there's a vaccine, Like I cannot imagine doing that, And so then it totally changes how I'm going to think about this choice when I know, no matter when I see them, there's going to be some risk, and so the question is, then how do we kind of mitigate the risk? How do we evaluate the size of the risks? And then I spend a lot of time talking to people about, Okay, what exactly can you do to make these risks smaller, what's the value of testing, what's the value of quarantine, how do we think about those risks? And then how big are they relative to some other risks that you undertake every day? And so I would say like a huge portion of my brain space both then and then for the rest of the pandemic is just thinking about different ways to help people think about the size of risks, and different ways to kind of frame particularly small risks so people can understand are they small, how small are they, how do they compare to other to other risks? And so that's that's a huge amount of what I've been talking about over the last year. I mean, truthfully, every time you leave the house there's risk, but also saying in the househouse risks too. I'm a pediatric endocrinologist and we're working on some research on the enormous rise and type two diabetes diagnosis we've seen over the last year. So it's funny nobody would have even thought about that risk before. But life has risks every second. So I think your work really did bring that to my brain into the forefront of actually we can quantify it like a lot of what you did was multiply, multiply divide like multiple math. It was just math. No, And I think, I mean, I think one thing that has emerged really strongly over the pandemic that I think is we're still grappling with is there actually have been a lot of and even if you totally limit to medical issues, that kind of intense focus on COVID avoidance has not been without its own medical costs, be it lack of cancer diagnoses or mental health issues or obesity or other things like that. I do think that there were trade offs there that we maybe didn't recognize as much at the time. Yes, no, absolutely, I know there was a little bit of backlash and that must have been very not fun at a time when we were all stressed out, and I know I could tell from your writing that all you were trying to do was help people and do scientific work. Part of me felt like some of that was from the idea that any risk at all related to our children is unacceptable, and I was wondering if you could, I don't know, elaborate on that a little bit. Yeah, I think there were sort of two pieces. There have been sort of two pieces of backlash. One is kind of when we are talking about a contagious disease, when you make choices about doing things that has consequences for people outside of the immediate group that you're in. You know, I try to talk about that, but I think inherently when you are talking about personal decisions, there is a kind of like overarching you know, well, you need to think about how this is going to matter for other people. I think, particularly in this sort of early period, that was something where people just found it hard to think about. And it's a little different than a personal choice. But the thing that has continued to be a big piece of the discussion, particularly around kids, even post vaccines, are these questions of well, how do I think about risks to my kids? And I think that what has happened is that this has become for people a salient risk that has taken on a totally different character than every other risk. And so you know, when you sometimes when I talk to people, I will kind of realize that when they think about the idea of their kid yetting COVID, they sort of are processing that as like that is far, far, far worse then getting RSV or the flu or any like. That's just that's like a uniquely bad thing to happen, not because they'll spread it to other people or something else which is literally uniquely bad for them. And I don't think that's really supported by the data from what we know about the sort of risk of serious illness in kids. And yet somehow it's sort of got it's gotten coded that way, and I think that's something that people push back a lot to what I say, you know, well, you're understating the risk of COVID. It's like, no, I don't think that. I don't see it that way, because I think that our data is suggesting that COVID is not high risk rhigh risk for kids. But that's been a hard thing to communicate and for people to understand. I think, well, I think the problem there is like it's this new thing and it's not zero risk. I mean, we've had admissions for MISC at our hospital. But at the same time, like we sent our kids to daycare and went outside before when RSV and flu were around, and now we have this disease that I mean, listeners to this podcast know my three kids had COVID and they were truly asymptomatic. So now I'm just like sort of Okay, now they have antibodies and they're too young for the vaccine, but I'm sort of happy they have a little protection. So I don't know, now I'm going to get planned for that. No, but I think, I mean, but it is you know, I have taught it, like, you know, one of my kids in my son's class at some point had COVID not during school, and you know, I remember talking to his mom about it and she was like, yeah, you know, we were so terrified about this, and it's not that I would have wanted it, but kind of the realization of it was very different than I expected. I sort of thought this would be a totally different kind of illness than anything we'd experienced, but in fact, they just had a cold, and I don't want to minimize because we don't want I mean, somebody in my family could have ended up with long COVID. We could have spread it to someone who's immune is suppressed. Like, I'm very grateful it worked out. So just to circle back on that, we didn't take it lightly at the time. But I see what you're saying in terms of all diseases can have bad outcomes, and we just shouldn't be applying one special type of thinking to COVID. We should be rational about applying the same tool set that we would apply to flu in RSV and all kinds of other bad things. Yeah, And I think that's become sort of increasingly true over the past say six months, right, So I think there was really, like, earlier on in the pandemic, before the vaccines, I think there was a strong argument for saying, look, you know, we need to like, keeping kids from getting COVID is protecting people who, if they get COVID, will die, because absolutely, particularly for older adults, the mortality risks from COVID are totally different from the flu. It's way more serious. You know, that's sort of obviously true. We have now arrived at a point where, you know, with widespread vaccinations in the US, higher risk people who would like to be protected are able to be protected. And now we're sort of much more in a space where the question is, you know, how are we thinking about kids in particular? And I think that's changed the calculus a little bit. No, that totally makes sense. Awesome. Well, I am not going to be labor COVID too much because I want to talk about all of the well not all, but many of the kind of decision points in the Family Firm, which is the book that is going to be released, is it in August? August? Yeah? I truly enjoyed reading this book, and there is a little bit of discussion of COVID, I think at the end of at the end correctly, yes, the epilogue, but most of it is on just different topics that come up often as your kids exit that baby stage. Why don't you just talk a little bit about the impetus that you felt for creating this volume, which I think is a little bit different than your first couple in the first place. Yeah, it is. So, you know, the first two books are really kind of very focused around the data and the idea that Okay, like you're going to face these decisions and pregnancy and kind of early parenting, and they're going to questions are going to come up, like circumcision or swaddling, and you know, the data has kind of a good answer for you, or at least tells you a lot of what you need to know to make these decisions. As my kids got older, I realized that data was not as helpful in those ways as it had been when they were younger. In particular, as our kids get older, they get more different. Like so sometimes I explain this people like there's just more heterogeneity, like what's good for one kid is not good for another kid. The circumstances the family find themselves are different across families. What people want to prioritize is in some ways more different. And so there are many fewer things where you would say, Okay, well I'm just going to like let me just show you the data on swaddling, like does it work, what are the impacts? Is it bad? You know, does it hurt their hips? Okay, there's things like what school should my kid go to? Are not like should I swaddle them? They're just not like that, And so when I sat down to think about, you know, is there something that I have to say about this period of life, I realized that there was still a lot of interesting data. And in some ways, I think the data pieces were really fun for me here because there's like some super interesting stuff to learn. I mean, I like totally nerded out about this stuff on sleep and food and reading and all this kind of stuff. It was like really interesting. But those data pieces rarely kind of fully answered the questions with older kids. And so the first part of the book is really a decision making book. It's really about kind of how to parent deliberately and the idea of using tools from business decision making to kind of shape your family life in a way that then you can draw in these pieces of data to make the decisions, and that you can have a framework to use them to make the decisions that like work for your family. So in a sense, it's it's sort of two books. It's like a book that's all about these data pieces that's I think interesting and people will will enjoy, but also it's a book about decision making. It's like a it's a business book where the business is parenting. It's about your process it's about you walk me through like in the Emily Oster Household. I guess you know you can. You can disguise some stuff like how you might approach that decision around. I can use an example from your book, like I want to play travel soccer. Mom. Yeah, so I think in our house, to be fair, travel soccer would not come up because my family doesn't the two ball sports. But you know, I think that's it's a reasonable there are related questions we'd have. So I mean, I think the first thing that we would ask there is is this even a question we want to engage with because is it something that would fit in our family lifestyle? So I sort of talk about this kind of four step decision process about sort of framing the question. So the first question there would be, you know, is it should we do? It's really sort of should we do travel soccer or not? But also trying to encourage people to say, you know, should we do travel soccer or is there something else? You know, is it travel soccer or regular soccer? Is it travel soccer or track? Is it travel soccer or no exercise at all? What is really the question? And then there's a portion of the decision making which is really about data and what I call fact finding, where one of the piece of that is to try to think about what are like, are there risks to travel soccer or are their benefits to travel soccer? Are there reasons I would like my kids to do this sport or not do this sport? Am I worried about concussions like a real data piece, But actually the biggest piece, and this is kind of in our household, which be really the biggest thing, is to think about how is this going to fit in with all the other stuff that I'm doing. So, like to give you a concrete example, my family's dinner every night at six That's like it's just like our thing. It's really important to my husband and I. It's like one of our sort of top family priorities is having dinner together. It's not everybody's top family priority. It's a big thing for us. If travel soccer interfered with family dinner, we would not do it. I think we wouldn't really engage anything else because if we found like basically travel soccer means like you're gonna miss dinner three nights a week, we would not even discuss doing it because we have sort of x Andy decided that, like this dinner thing is like a big family priority for us. And I think that idea is really key to a lot of the stuff that I'm suggesting in the book. Is the idea that if you at the beginning of whatever, like family planning, family stuff you do, if at the beginning you sit down and you say, here are the things that are really important. Here are the things I really care about that I really really want to be priorities for our family, that's going to dictate a lot of what you do. But it's also going to make some of that later decision making easier, and you will not wake up and find that you committed to travel soccer when in fact you're very sad about it because it got in the way of this other thing that really you did care about before, but you hadn't actually said that you cared about it. I know there's a chapter about family dinner in your book which set me off a little bit on a tailspin of my own because it's not feasible for our family. I wish it was. My husband's a surgeon. The chances of him getting home for dinner are basically like two percent every night, So like if we were going to plan on it, it would just be a nightly disappointment exercise. I guess I could have family dinner without him, but that's I mean, I've tried. It's not as the same. So I guess because people who just listen to your example are probably now like, oh, God, what am I doing wrong if I don't have family dinner? Talk about that in your book and actually felt better because I felt like the evidence that you laid out suggested that, well, I don't know, do you want to go Yeah, no, no, it's right. So I think people, you know, I sort of talk about family dinner because it takes on this like this sort of like mythical like if people have the family meal, and you know, I've definitely had people tell me like, oh, if you don't have a family meal, like your kids will be a serial killer. It's like, that's not you know. So I kind of go through the data on this, and I think part of this is a place where it's very very difficult to figure out are there actually impacts of sitting down for family meal, Because on the one hand, there's a pretty high correlation between that and some other kind of outcomes that you value for your kids. On the other hand, the differences across families in who has this and why are really big and really really difficult to control for. And you know, the other the other thing that I kind of really kind of highlight in that chapter is that, you know, we talk about this like the only time you could have sort of like focus time with your family would be at dinner, but that isn't actually true. And my sense is that a lot of the benefits that you would get from this are benefits that you could get from other kinds of sort of concentrated family time. That it's not the act necessarily of sitting down and eating the dinner that is like the magic. Not that it is the magic, but that's not so much that as opposed to like there are it is good to have some focused time with your kids and sort of to prioritize that time in some ways, but doesn't have to be it at dinner. And I think it for a lot of families, it's just like that's just not feasible. This is not feasible. And I felt like whether things were feasible was another interesting theme of your book. And I know that they are probably going to be people that read it and bring up privilege because a lot of the decision points. I mean, let me put it this way. I read your book and I was like kind of struck with thoughts like, Wow, we have two really well learning jobs in our household, and I still don't feel like I can really have everything I want. And I'm not blaming your book. I think your book just set me on in my own personal journey like thinking about a lot of those things. And I actually wrote a blog post about it. I I got like eighty comments, so clearly it struck a nerve with others as well. So how does that come up in making choices or acknowledging that in most families, some of these decisions aren't even going to be like a lot of people aren't going to be able to choose private school or not, or work or not or all kinds of things. I spend a lot of time in different parts in the book talking about you know, for some of these choices, you're going to come to them and say like, this isn't like I can't make this choice. Like, so I talk about the idea of sort of should you like choosing private school for one of your kids, and acknowledging that, like you know, that isn't going to be sometimes that's just not a choice because of financial feasibility. And I think that for there is a real sense in which income bused choices, and that is the reality of some of this. I do think that the idea of making deliberate choices about how your life looks is not actually specific to income. I mean, there are constraints that you are going to face that are going to differ across different families for some reasons because of income, and for some other reasons because of other kinds of constraints, like you know, your husband is a surgeon who works a lot and is not home at particular times of the day. And the fact that constraints exist does not get in the way of good decision making. And in fact, I think that it is a mistake to avoid kind of structured decision making, to say, well, I can't be serious about decision making because not all of the choices in the world are available to me. No, that's actually the place where this kind of sort of thinking deliberately about stuff is the most valuable, I think, is when you face some constraints. So I mean, I see what you're saying, and I think it is. I think it is a valid criticism. We're concerned, but I also think that there's value to this decision making, even if you can't have everything that you want. Totally agree. And it wasn't even meant as criticism. It was more like it was more like, Wow, this made me think a lot about how I would love to like idealize every APPA, but then the reality is like nobody can idealize every aspect, and maybe that is why it is so important to think about what you're willing to trade off and what you're not, and that does take a lot of work. Do you and your family have any kind of like regular rich because I'm much I don't think I meant you mentioned any like are there quarterly meetings? Like how do you kind of regularly check in and make sure you're continuing because things do change, they do change. Yeah, So I mean I think we the sort of most regular kind of check ins we have are with our like with our kids. So like when you know, at the beginning of the school year, like we kind of sit down together and then with the kids and sort of talk about like the structure of the like what are the extracurriculars we're doing, how are we going to organize that? And then we actually have we have like a regular babysitter, and we have like a monthly check in with the babysitter, which actually serves, at least on a schedule basis to be like a good time for the three of us to sort of talk about, Okay, like what is the next kind of month to six weeks look like in terms of our schedule, and like what we're trying to juggle. And then I think increasingly my husband and I try to when there are sort of things that come up with the kids, we were dealing with them like more in the moment, partly because they're not coming up as often because the kids are bigger, less complicated, less complicated. That's a controversial Yeah, no, no, they like some of the logistics are more dialed in. Maybe that's that's a way to put it. You've gotten into good groove. We got into it greats sense. And you did mention something about like not having bandwidth to do a lot of this thing when your kids are under five, and I kind of laughed because like, I see that, I fully see that, and yet I have like two bigger kids, so I like need to be have that bandwidth, but I also still have like a three and a half year old running around like knocking everything over. So I just thought that was funny because I get that, and I'm very much looking forward to when everybody's over five, right, so I can really imagine ten. Is that six and ten's like, is like pretty good? That's how old yours are right now? Six and six. Oh, that's amazing. Well, I just really tell everybody how they can subscribe to your newsletter and when can get The Family Firm. I think this book is just going to be a valuable read to many of the audience of this podcast, and I highly recommend you guys checking this out. That's awesome, Thank you so much. So my newsletter is called parent Data. It's on substack and so you can find me on subsack. And the book is called The Family Firm. It's out August third. You can get it at bookstores and on the internet, and I hope that you guys like it. You can listen to it and we have it on audible and I even read it myself, so that was exciting. Oh, I could see that being really good read. With your own voice. Now. I don't know if you remember from the last time you were on this podcast, but we always end with the love of the week, So I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay, you mine, and it can be anything. It could be like a recent walk you took that was great, or a book you read, or like anything, a concept whatever. So mine, inspired by your book and by your work. My love of the week is math because math is underrated. Laura Vanderkam and I are both people who did not pursue math fields, but I think both were very good at math. We appreciate math, and your work makes me appreciate that even more. My love of the week is the Ryan's Amusements Arcade in Newport. I took my son for like a short mom and son trip and we got to go to the arcade and fight over who is better at ice zombies, and it was a reminder of how much I like a little bit of one on one time with the kids. And I want to Tiger in the Claw machine because I'm really great at LA machines. I am bad at Klaw machine. I'm so good. It's like one of my few secret talents. Klaw Machine. If my kids heard this, they'd be so jealous. They always want to do it and they never get anything. So all right, maybe you'll have your next book. We'll have to use strategy Claw Machine Strategy an entire volume of Clom machineics. Oh my gosh, Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was fantastic. I hope we can have you a third time after your next Yeah, well that would be great when it exists. Thank you so much for having me. All Right, well we were back. That was a great interview with Emily auser about the family Firm and COVID and all those other topics. So we have a question from a mother of a toddler. Do you want me to read this one? Sarah, Sure, go for it. I'll paraphrase here. So this woman writes that she has a fourteen month old daughter who loves her mommy time in the mornings. The problem is that she needs to be at work no later than seven due to her contracted hours, and because work responsibilities are gearing up, it's really important for her to get in on time. However, getting to work on time has been a struggle because prior to her daughter, she would get up early and write, do spiritual reading, and cook a nice breakfast before getting dressed for work. Now her mornings are spent peeling her crying toddler off her legs while she tries to apply eyeliner. She says her husband tries to distract her daughter with toys and coco melon and all that good stuff, but she keeps running back. It's taking her like an hour to get out the door. She's tried waking up before she does. But they live in a one bedroom apartment in the city, so the crib is like two feet from her sleeping face, and this is absolutely impossible. They plan to move to a bigger space within six months, just just hoping that helps. But in the meantime, is there anything that can be done? Or is this just what toddler life is like? Just what toddler life is like? I actually to answer that that was the quickest Q and A of best both world history. I get it. Here's the good news. I'm gonna give her some hope. Like this is your phase right now? It sounds like it's very different from your pre kid life. I can't imagine how early you'd have to get up if you have to be there by seven and you're doing all this stuff like I'm very impressed and I'm a morning person, so that is saying something, But it doesn't sound like that's gonna happen right now, at least not in your current living situation, and so you're gonna have to figure out how to get those things in your life, whether it's you and your husband. Maybe maybe if you knew that on Tuesdays and Thursdays you were fully off of mourning duty, maybe that would kind of help you from a mental standpoint, knowing that you had some time that was just yours. I also think it might be time to think about what could go and what needs to stay in that routine. You mentioned your hair and your breakfast and stuff like could the breakfast be eaten at work? Could you get Japanese straightening so you don't have to do your hair? I mean, I'm kind of joking, but I mean, honestly, one of the reasons I get this labor intensive, expensive process for my hair is because it looks reasonably good while doing zero to it, so I lose no minutes in the morning. And you might want to think about whether a new hairstyle would help you get to do more of what you love to do. But also this phase will change, your child will sleep better. It sounds like you're going to move to a different living place, depending on if you don't have another baby right away, you might have some time and the baby is sleeping better and you can do some of these things. And I can tell you now that you know, even just a couple of years out from that, I have to drag my kids out of bed for camp after seven in the morning every day, and I do get to do what I want to do in the morning. I can even run when it's light out in the summer. It's amazing. So you will get there. That is very true. I would say that, Yeah, transitioning to parenthood is rough. Reading this letter just reminded me of that so much, because this person is only a year or so removed from having total control over her time and now she does not, and especially if she has been consuming productivity literature about lengthy morning routines and such and viewing this is what productive people do and not realizing that this is what people without toddlers do. But anyway, yes, moving to a bigger place will help. That's one reason we left our one bedroom apartment when Jasper was about fourteen months old. Is because every single morning my husband would walk past his crib on the way out the door and wake him up, and then I had to deal with it. I was just going crazy. So a second bedroom will be wonderful because then you know you can get up and even if you can hear your daughter, she's like not on you, right, Like if she could be in her crib, you could just be applying your eyeline or in your bathroom. She's safe in her crib. She can't get out. You can do your stuff and walk out the door, right, And it sounds like your husband is already up. I mean, if he's trying to distract her with cocoa melon, then he's up and doing stuff. So maybe you guys have already decided that because you have to work so early, he is the morning parent and you are the evening parent. And that's great, Like that's a wonderful split. If that is the case, maybe until you get to this bigger apartment, he could start taking her out on stroller walks in the morning, Like if you all get up at six, he just puts on pants, puts her in the stroller, walks out the door, you get ready, go to the subway, and then he comes back five minutes after you leave, and you know you've made a quick exit, so you don't have to deal with that. And I understand that, Yes, obviously your daughter wants to see you in the morning, but if she can't see you because she's out the stroller, then there won't be as much of an issue. And presumably you are the one spending time with her later. If this is the arrangement you and your husband have worked out in terms of how you split it, so you're probably getting your time with her. It's just not going to be in the morning because of how early you have to be at work. So hopefully that'll work. Just go do the stroller walks in the morning. Maybe they can start go look at feeding the birds in the park or something for thirty minutes every morning, and then by the time it's cold because you're writing to this, in the summer, you guys will be in the bigger apartment. It won't matter anymore. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah has been interviewing Emily Oster about how we make decisions with parenting our children in the elementary years. We will be back next week with more on making work and 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.