Dr. Emily Oster wants to let parents focus on the good stuff

Few people have shaped my everyday decision-making like Dr. Emily Oster. She is a friend, a colleague, a fellow parent, an economist and a bestselling author whose work occupies the narrow borderland between wonky analysis and practical parenting advice.

Gestating, birthing, and raising human beings is no small feat. Everyone seems to have a take on how to do it best. But where most of us (myself included) are overwhelmed, Emily has a way of sifting through the panoply of opinion–from doctors, from the media, from society-at-large–and somehow assembling a well-considered point of view.

We first met a decade ago on the heels of her debut book Expecting Better, a bold, intelligent and at times iconoclastic take on pregnancy. I’ve been hooked and had the pleasure of following her career ever since, which is at once an authentic manifestation of her own curiosity and the ultimate side hustle to her day job as a professor, teaching economics and conducting research at Brown University.

Today Emily’s expansive platform spans four books, plus an online community (ParentData), a podcast (Raising Parents) and even a chatbot (Petey). We recently caught up about all this, and more.

You're a prominent economist. You're also married to a prominent economist, and you're the child of two prominent economists. That's a lot of economics going around. Can you explain that? Did you always know this is what you wanted to do?

Learning things other people don't know yet is my most core love. But I thought I would do medical research, or be a doctor, and then during my first summer of college, I encountered the concept of the lab. One summer I had two jobs: I worked in a fruit fly lab, and I worked for an economist as a research assistant. By the end of the summer, it was crystal clear to me that the fruit fly lab was not for me, and that economics was.

You first came on my radar, like most people, because of some of your early work that was featured in the sequel to Freakonomics. You have always had such an interesting way of asking new and unusual questions to understand old problems. Can you talk me through that?

Freakonomics features my paper about the status of women and exposure to television. Basically we looked at a bunch of places in India that got access to cable TV at different times, and afterwards you can see pretty sharp changes in response to questions like, is it acceptable to beat your wife? And then even among some other more objective measures of education for girls, all of that is improved by access to cable television. Normally when you tell people you’re an economist, they're thinking you study the markets and macroeconomy—not television and gender interaction in India.

What's always been very powerful about economics is the ability to ask questions that think about how people make trade offs, how they make choices in their lives, and then the very sharp focus on data to establish causality. My core area is always: what can we learn from data?

Did you always know you wanted kids? Did that knowledge or lack of knowledge shape your career at all?

I did always know I wanted kids. I met my husband in college, and so we got married almost 20 years ago now, and had a long time with just us. Being an academic, childbearing is a little complicated, because you sort of have to wait until you have tenure, but actually then you're too old.

And so we ended up just deciding it was the right time for us. He had tenure, I did not, and we were very lucky that it wasn't actually hard for us to have a kid. We always knew we wanted a second kid, and as soon as we had the second, I was like, okay, we're done. People ask me, how should I decide if I want a third? I don't know. When we had one, I was sure we were not done, and as soon as we had two, I was sure we were done.

I admire the way you tackle these areas of conventional wisdom in parenting that a lot of people take for granted. Many of your greatest hits are areas of controversy too: alcohol during pregnancy, eating raw fish, co sleeping. Can you talk me through the process of breaking up some of these big questions into something you can answer with data?

Causality is always top of mind for when I go into data about something like coffee or alcohol or sushi. This is where I have a very specific and somewhat different perspective than maybe a public health researcher, because I am generally very deeply skeptical of most observational data. Those kinds of analyses are almost never useful. There is so much opportunity for bias there. A lot of what I'm doing is saying, okay, maybe there are a few papers out of hundreds of papers on this topic that do a better job at getting a causality. And I want to focus on those, as opposed to saying I'm going to take all 500 papers and average them.

In the case of alcohol and pregnancy, the selection tends to go in the direction of overstating harms. So if you dial into large scale studies from Europe, where there is less of a stigma, where it's more likely that the choices are just a little bit random, you see nothing. You see no relationship at low levels of drinking. I think that is reassuring. I am not saying you should drink, and I think that's a canonical aspect of everything I'm doing—I'm not trying to tell people what to do. I'm trying to help them understand what the data says and what is the range of your reasonable choices.

There's this population of people I’ve found myself becoming particularly passionate about: people stuck in the grey space between getting pregnant easily, and committing themselves to IVF. Right now, there’s not much for them in terms of help. That’s why I’m so thrilled that ParentData recently announced a new “trying to conceive” section.

What motivated paying attention there for you, and what are some most surprising things that you've started to uncover as an economist thinking about fertility decision making?

Even though I tend to serve people who are pregnant or have kids, there is a fair amount of people who are trying to conceive, and a pretty large number of people who have a kid but are trying to conceive another one. There is also a large set of people where it's like, oh, I'm already 35, I don't want to just see what happens. I want to get on this, this is the time. And then I think there's really a need for people to understand, if you wanted to try, what would you do, what doesn't work, what does work, and what's even an ovulation window? Just basic stuff. Until I tried to get pregnant, no one had really fully explained the menstrual cycle to me.

The thing I wish people would avoid is, like, I'm 35, I stopped using birth control, I didn't really think about it, and now eight months later, I haven't gotten pregnant and I'm looking for help. There's a lot that we can do to help people get this first piece right. And then we also have a bunch of content on infertility treatments, which people still don't totally have a great primer on. A lot of content is also about non-traditional family building, building your family if you're an LGBTQ couple, or if you're going to be using donor eggs or sperm. I think there's a need for understanding there, but it's a hard space because the experiences are so widely different, and what someone needs who's been struggling with infertility for four years and is through five rounds of IVF is very different from someone who's just started this journey.

A key aspect of your work is also correcting misinformation, which I feel like is the definition of both a moving target and a slippery slope. Can you talk a little about that? How do you think about the line between affirming an individual's lived experience in the absence of data, and knocking down misinformation?

I think it is just about being honest about the fact that things will happen even if there is no causality. That's what the control group is for. There are so many things in this space like that—take bed rest. A lot of people will go well, I went on bed rest and I didn't have a preterm birth. It's like, that's why we need control trials. Because actually, that isn't what helped. But of course, most people with threatened preterm labor don't have a preterm birth whether they're on bed rest or not.

I think one thing is always just helping people understand, what do we mean when we say “the evidence shows”? I think it's really important to distinguish between things that people do that are not damaging, and maybe would even be psychologically helpful, and then things that are actually dangerous.

So, not in the fertility context, but there's this trend going around that if you feed your baby butter, it will sleep through the night. There are all these people like, here's me, feeding my eight month old two big spoonfuls of butter. And, that definitely doesn't work. But if your kid is nine months old and they eat two tablespoons of butter before bed, that's probably fine. However, definitely don't give your three month old two tablespoons of butter. I understand we'd all do everything for a night of sleep, but I think that’s different.

As you've grown your own family and your brand simultaneously, are there parenting tips that you've actually changed your mind about?

I think early on, I did exactly the same thing as everyone who follows me and reads my books has done: we had a spreadsheet where we were tracking diapers and breastfeeding and when our kids slept. The idea that you have control is so hard to give up. And of course, you do have a little bit of control, but much of the time with your kids is an exercise in recognizing, like, I'm only shaping around the edges. Fundamentally, this is kind of outside of my control. And that was a hard thing to adapt to. I think it's a hard thing for a lot of parents to adapt to.

Now, you've got four books, you’ve got podcasts, you’ve got the whole ParentData platform, you've created this huge base of knowledge. Where are the gaps still, from your perspective, and if you had infinite capacity, what would you want to know more about?

There is another piece of the writing which is a weekly newsletter that goes to everybody that is about what is on people's minds. It’s not very hard to figure out what to cover, because there are panic headlines everywhere, and there's always another black plastic utensil style article to be written. For me, that's the funnest part. The best day is when people are panicking about something, and I can really be deep in Appendix, Table E4 and say, you shouldn’t worry about that.

I think that what we are positioned to do is help people in those moments be like, This is what's going on. This is what you need to know. There's a new study. It says, blah, blah, blah. Here's what all the literature before this has said. Not every new study is totally reinventing the wheel. Mostly, they're not. And I think that kind of context is a thing I wish people would have more of. There's so much sort of back and forth when new pieces of information come out, it makes it very hard for people to figure out what's true.

There’s a lot of bleakness about parenting right now. The Surgeon General wrote about the stresses on parents as a report. Empirically, it is less affordable to be a parent than it was a generation ago. Maybe it's even more risky when we look at mortality rates. Amid all of that challenge, this is my final and hardest question for you, Emily: what actually gives you hope for the future of parenting?

It is a fundamental thing about being a parent, which is that you can't believe how much you like your kids. There is so much joy in watching them, and in moments of parenting. I do think people experience this as very hard. I mean, I often experience it as very hard. But I think we can make it a little easier, and we can take some of the pressure off of people.

And if we can do that, there's more moments to just recognize, oh my god, I can't believe that I have this feeling about a person. For me, that's so magical, that as an experience you get to love something that much.

What my team is reading, considering, and building against:

• New work from my friend and colleague Dr. Rebecca A. Gourevitch finds that people of color pay the most out-of-pocket to have a baby, even when they are commercially insured. This was a large study that included 76,826 people in Massachusetts–a state that prides itself on equitable policies. When I texted Rebecca about the study she reminded me that employers are no more immune to racial segregation than any other shared service. What this means is that people of color in Massachusetts are less likely to work for employers with generous coverage.

• Leave it to the New Yorker to pen the ultimate opus on the history of menopause marketing. My favorite insight here is that no matter how many times humans go through something, every generation will feel like they are the first. Yet as author Rebecca Mead points out, in the case of menopause it is because every generation has been subjected to the prevailing medical opinions of the time. This go-round may be different. For the first-time, celebrities have mainstreamed the menopausal experience and brought it into the public discussion, allowing us to imagine a new standard for the care and support that women in midlife deserve.

• A new investigative piece from ProPublica describes stringent limitations imposed on military healthcare coverage of abortion services. In April of 2023, Coast Guard Commander Elizabeth Nakagawa faced a life-threatening emergency during her miscarriage but a medically essential D+C procedure to evacuate her uterus was denied, resulting in severe complications. Her ordeal reveals how the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has created a chilling effect on abortion care irrespective of the circumstances.

• In a new op-ed about birthrates (that tricky, tenuous subject) my friend from college and NYT columnist Jessica Grose presents a wonderfully reasonable thesis: if we stopped pitting child-free people against those with children, could we actually promote a more pro-child country?