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- [00:01]
Emily Oster
One of the things that seems to be true of modern parenting is people view every moment of your parenting as an opportunity to ruin your child forever. Like if you rush them out the door in the morning, that could be it. That could be the decision that ruins them for their whole lives. Which of course is not true. But it like imbues every interaction with this kind of like intense sense that it's the be all and end all
- [00:23]
Yasha Monk
and now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:32]
Podcast Narrator
One of the things that I've been trying to think through for the last years is how to reconcile my faith in evidence based research and the importance of facts in my mistrust in some of the kinds of advice and things you read on social media with the fact that public health authorities often get things wrong, that they often give advice that claims to be evidence based but turns out not necessarily to be that. And some of those questions are particularly important when it comes to questions around parenting. When it comes to questions like whether or not you can indulge in that glass of wine in the seventh month of pregnancy, how bad it is to give an iPad to a two year old so that you can wash up dishes, how much of a difference it makes whether your child goes to a perfectly decent school in your neighborhood or better, perhaps private, more expensive school somewhere else. Well, the person who has written most incisively about all of those questions, often pushing against the conventional wisdom, is Emily Boster. Emily is the J.J.E. goldman University professor of Economics at Brown University and the author of a number of great books including Expecting Cripsheet and the Family Firm. In this conversation she gave us some specific advice about how you should think about questions like whether breast is always
- [02:03]
Yasha Monk
best, whether parents should try really hard
- [02:06]
Podcast Narrator
to breastfeed or not. We also talked more broadly about norms around parenting, about whether parents should always put the interests of the child first, or whether they should also care about their own well being, prioritize that somehow about how big a difference parents really make to the well being of their child. What are the kinds of decisions that middle and upper middle class parents in particular always feel like they're facing, do or don't determine how a child will do in its life overall. And finally, in the pieces that are reserved for those of you who are generously supporting this podcast, we also talk about the pandemic, about how a supposedly data driven approach often got very important things wrong in the pandemic, leading to policies like very prolonged school closures, which have turned out to have a really bad impact on the well being of the very children that they supposedly were meaning to serve. If you want to support the podcast and have access to that really interesting part of the conversation, please go to jasamung.substack.com and become a paying subscriber.
- [03:31]
Yasha Monk
Emily Oster, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:34]
Emily Oster
Thank you so much for having me.
- [03:36]
Yasha Monk
So you've carved out a very interesting niche for yourself in public discourse by doing something very simple, which is to ask about important emotional decisions. A lot of them to do with parenting, some of them to do with topics like Covid and school closures. From an empirically informed perspective, looking at which parts of a conventional wisdom is actually backed up by pesky things like studies. How did you fall into that role? What motivated you to ask a set of questions?
- [04:03]
Emily Oster
So I am trained as an economist. I am actually a professor of economics at Brown. And my training as an economist, the things that I do there are really about data and decision making. And so I approach the world with that angle, sort of thinking about how, how can data help us make decisions either about policy, which is more like my sort of work life, economist life, but also then how can it help us make decisions about the other parts of our life, about our parenting, about our pregnancy and pregnancies, about things like Covid, whatever it is. And so when I was working as an economist, I was working as a professor, and then I got pregnant and I kind of found myself wanting to use all of the tools that I had from my job and in the service of my pregnancy and then later in service of my parenting. And it kind of snowballed from there. But it sort of starts from this core belief, core professional belief that data can help us make decisions, which is kind of what I think most economists believe.
- [05:06]
Yasha Monk
So really just in the proud tradition of practicing the dismal science of using quantive data to get people to be pissed off about you, and they often get pissed off about you. One example of this when it comes to pregnancy is that the standard medical advice is for people not to drink at all, for expecting mothers not to drink at all. You doubted that in your book on pregnancy. What's the basis for why we should mistrust that conventional wisdom? And again, just tell us a little bit before we get into some of those other questions about your process. You know, how do you go about determining for yourself and then sharing with your readers how much you yourself might choose to drink during pregnancy, how much you're gonna encourage other people to drink during what time period?
- [05:43]
Emily Oster
So I wanna sort of step back and say this question was motivated in the way that many of the questions I had about pregnancy were motivated, which was the. Trying to understand the answer to why are you recommending this? So when you get pregnant, they give you a long list of things not to do. Don't drink, don't smoke, don't have deli meats, don't have hot dogs, you know, and. And I wanted to understand why are you saying these things? Are some of them more important than others? What is the evidence behind them? And that's partly because I'm just a person who wants to understand why I'm making choices that I'm making. But it's partly because, actually, on many of these, including recommendations about alcohol, you get quite varied recommendations depending on who you're talking to. So something like 40% of doctors in the US will tell their patients, you know, an occasional drink is fine. That, of course, is very different than the official guidelines. And that leaves people with the question, well, like, what do you mean it's fine? Like, how? Why do you think that? Why is it different from what someone else thinks? So when I approach a question like that, when I approached it in them and expecting better, I went and looked at the evidence. When you look at the evidence on pregnancy, sort of one thing that's crystal clear is, is that heavy drinking during pregnancy, even a couple of times, you know, binge drinking is dangerous, can lead to negative outcomes for kids on a bunch of different dimensions. But when you then sort of look at the evidence on occasional drinking, on moderate drinking, you know, not more than one at a time, you don't see those kind of effects show up. And we have a lot of data on that because that alcohol consumption at those levels is much more common outside the US Actually common in parts of the US Too, but certainly in Europe, this kind of occasional drinking in the later trimesters is just something that more people do. And so you have better evidence that makes it clear that we don't see these kind of negative effects or anything that seems like it's approaching them. So when I. So that's the sort of process I went through. I read, you know, hundreds of papers I wrote in a way to try to help people understand, you know, why one might come to those conclusions. But as with all of the stuff that I do, and I think this is really core to what I'm trying to build at Parent Data and what I try to do in my books, I am not interested in telling people to drink or not drink. Like, that is not the goal. I'M not interested in telling you to breastfeed or not breastfeed, or to circumcise or not. Like, I'm not interested in telling you what to do. I'm interested in helping you make decisions that work for you. So I this sort of phrase, like, would you encourage people to drink? No, definitely not. I don't. No. I would encourage people to read the evidence and think about their preferences and make decisions for themselves. And that's really, I think, the core idea behind how we can be confident in our own choices.
- [08:26]
Yasha Monk
One thing that I think a lot of your findings have in common is when there's a kind of conventional wisdom which says, this is bad, that is bad, don't do this, don't do that. And then when you look at it, it turns out that we're at a level of abstraction that actually seems to mislead about the underlying data, right? So let's say on breastfeeding, I believe there's a kind study which says, you know, certain kinds of, not all that significant health outcomes may be causally related to not breastfeeding. So perhaps you're a little bit more likely to have colic or a little bit more likely to have a cold at the age of two in a baby that is not breastfed versus in a baby that is breastfed. But of course, the way in which most people then consume that information, whether in the form of doctor's recommendations or in the popular press, is it has really bad health outcomes when you don't breastfeed your baby. And what they take away from that is, oh, my God, you know, my baby at 16 or 18 is gonna have some really seriously adverse health outcome. They're not gonna be able to lead a fulfilled life. But that is just not what the underlying data shows. And of course, there's a second question about where are we actually dealing with causation and where are we dealing with correlation? Is it that not breastfeeding really has that bad impact on the child, or is it that situations in which the mother might already be having health challenges or perhaps she's from a lower socioeconomic status, or other kinds of things that might lead to worse health outcomes for the baby also cause them to be less likely to breastfeed, disentangle sort of those two things from us. You know, when we get this recommendation, alcohol is bad, you must breastfeed, et cetera. What kind of loss of resolution is involved in terms of what the actual studies say? And how do we think through this question of correlation and causation? Especially for listeners who may not be social scientists.
- [10:09]
Emily Oster
Yes, it's a big question. So let me actually start with the first piece. So I think this is. You exactly have captured what is really difficult about a lot of public health messaging, which is that in the service of trying to be simple, we have lost all nuance. And so if you sort of think about some of the goal of public health messaging, it seems to be, you know, let's look out at the world and decide, you know, which of these behaviors is better. And by better we mean, you know, has any positive impact. So breastfeeding is a good example. If you look at sort of the data there that some of the really good data, I think we could reliably say that there's some small impacts on gastrointestinal illness in the first, you know, six months of life. So in that sense, you know, breast is, breast is best. I guess there are these positive impacts that gets taken by the public health establishment and we say, okay, well let's now make the simplest, say the simplest thing here, which is just breastfeeding is better. And let's then try to sort of push that message in a way that convinces people to do it, because we've looked at this data and we've decided it's better. And what people hear is breast is best, breast is best. Don't you want to give your kid the best start? And the messaging is so is so simplistic that we don't add by, by the way, what we mean by a best start is a moderately reduced risk of gastrointestinal illness in the first six months, which is really different than what many people are hearing. And so I think that's one piece where I do feel like there's a lot of potential for our public health messaging to just better help people understand how much best. Even if we want to keep it simple, to at least give people a sense of, well, how large is this impact and is it possible it's outweigh by some other factor that might be important to you? There's a second piece which also comes up in the breastfeeding case, which is that a tremendous amount of our evidence is driven by correlation, not causation in breastfeeding. If you look at the characteristics of people who breastfeed versus not the strongest, probably the most significant issue in that data is just that on average, people with more resources, with more education, with more income, more likely to be married, all of those things correlate with breastfeeding and many of the long term outcomes that we look at studies that say kids who are breastfed perform better on their A levels, or kids who are breastfed have better IQ scores. All of that kind of data is just really driven by correlation. It's driven by differences across these groups. It is not causal.
- [12:49]
Yasha Monk
This makes it a little bit clearer, perhaps, to listeners who are not social scientists. Part of this is that precisely because the advice, for example, is to breastfeed. And the kinds of people who are particularly likely to be tuned into public health advice to be aware of it, to really feel pressure on themselves to live up to that, on average, might be people with a higher educational status, with higher socioeconomic status. And those things are so powerfully related to those other kinds of outcomes. You might get this confounding variable, right? You might get this appearance of a causal effect when it doesn't exist.
- [13:21]
Emily Oster
Absolutely. So really, what you're saying is that the people who are breastfed are different from the people who are not, but not really because of the breastfeeding or probably not because of the breastfeeding, but because of other characteristics. And we sort of know that to be true, because when we look at evidence, when we look at data where the researchers are able to do a better job adjusting for differences across families, you see the effects of breastfeeding get much smaller or are even zero. So that kind of tells us that a lot of what we're seeing in some of this correlational data is really not about the breast milk. It's really about mom's education or mom's resources in some other way, or dad's presence or whatever it is.
- [14:02]
Yasha Monk
And of course, part of it is that the gold standard in medical research is randomly controlled trials. But we can't tell mothers to randomly breastfeed or not. That would be unethical.
- [14:10]
Emily Oster
We have a little bit of randomized trial data on breastfeeding, and it basically doesn't show what these correlational studies show. You're right. You absolutely cannot force people to make feeding choices, but you can encourage them to make different. You can encourage more people to breastfeed. And so we have a little bit of that data. It's not especially large. It's like one large trial, but we have a little bit of that. But it gets overwhelmed in the discourse by this, like, sort of these flawed studies. And the flawed studies, I think, reinforce what many medical practitioners already think. This is a more complicated thing, but I think there's a sense of, like, you know, well, if we all think breastfeeding is great, and we've all told everybody's breastfeeding is great, then when we see a study that says breastfeeding is great, we're like, yeah, that study must be right because it reinforces what I already thought.
- [14:57]
Yasha Monk
And some of the other studies that have a smaller effect also are sibling studies. Right. We have siblings from the same family that end up being breastfed, not breastfed.
- [15:04]
Emily Oster
Yeah. So I think those are, I think outside of randomized trials, the sibling studies are probably the best we have because it really holds constant, you know, it holds constant who the mother is typically at least and sort of says one sibling's breastfed, one sibling's not. And so you can sort of look at them and at least know that the family circumstances are the same. And those studies show very little effect on any of these long term outcomes.
- [15:25]
Yasha Monk
There's an interesting dynamic here where I was joking earlier about the reputation of economists as practicing the dismal science. They have a reputation of really just looking at quantitative data in this kind of cold hearted way. And I think that is sometimes what critics of your writing might say, you know, but hang on a second, you know, shouldn't we just prioritize doing the best for our kid under any circumstances? How can you look at this with this kind of number driven focus? But in a weird way, I think that the insights you're sharing with us also liberate people to take other kinds of things under consideration. Where, you know, when you start with a public health advice that is driven by numbers in a way that I think is often quite flawed, but it seeming, look, there's this study, it shows that gastrointestinal illness is stronger at six months. So therefore breast is best, you must not do that. And people feel that all the other considerations in their life. Well, does my work schedule actually allow me to breastfeed all of the time? Do my parenting norms actually allow me to breastfeed all of the time and become overwhelmed by that kind of data. I'm really struck by an observation that a friend of mine made who did want to breastfeed her first child. And for whatever reason the child wasn't taken to the breast and she realized that she ended up having much more co equal parenting relationship with her husband. Because of course when the mother is the only source of nourishment, that makes it harder for the father to play an equal role in the household. And because they were bottle feeding, which is not what they had planned to do, but what ended up happening, she felt it made it much easier for her husband to be the one who gets up at 3am to go feed the breasts, feed the baby. So in a weird way, in this case, the dismal science is actually allowing people to make decisions in a way that reflects those not easily quantifiable other kinds of considerations as well.
- [17:06]
Emily Oster
Absolutely. I think that there's a sort of ignoring of individual preferences that comes when we're giving this blanket advice that says, you know, well, this is breast is best for everyone, for every single family, in every circumstance. The best thing is for kids to be breastfeeding. How could that be true? Like, think about the variation across human experience and the variation across how much people care about things and the circumstances they're in. How could it be that this recommendation is correct for everyone? And the answer is it's not. Because what we need to do is think about how does the data combine with the constraints and preferences that you face? And I think in some ways that's such a clinical way to say it, and that's how economists would say it. We're going to take the evidence and combine it with preferences and constraints. But really what we mean is the things that you care about, the values that you hold, should be an important part of your decision making. The data should also matter. I mean, it's worth looking at. And there are places where the data is more clear about some behavior, where I think it should matter more. But in many of the things in parenting, the evidence just doesn't say one thing is so enormously better, that it shouldn't be outweighed by, or it shouldn't be incorporated with other things about preferences. And when we give public health advice, that's like everyone should do X, you know, because otherwise you're a loser. Like, that's actually not respectful of people's, of the other features of people.
- [18:32]
Yasha Monk
The other thing that's interesting here to me, where an analytical look may result in another way of thinking about things, is how do you trade off between the interests of different people who constitute a family? And it seems to me that one of the things that drives a lot of the conventional wisdom, whether that is from public health authorities or whether that is from parents, is a kind of under no circumstances do any harm to the child in every circumstance, prioritize the interest of a child over any other kind of interest. And so could there be a potential small adverse health outcome from drinking a glass of wine in the seventh month of pregnancy or from not breastfeeding? Well, that has to take absolute priority over everything else. And of course, the same is true later in childhood. Right? I mean, Is there a potential benefit from driving my child to this extra enrichment class in ballet or violin or whatever it may be? Well, what a monster would I be if I don't give him that opportunity? But of course, life is full of trade offs and the family has trade offs between the interests of children and parents. So how should parents think about that? I'm sure that a lot of the listeners to my podcast are the kind of people who want to be very rational and who listen to this and say, oh, perhaps I should allow myself a glass of wine. But then they might feel guilt or might feel, but what if somehow having this glass of wine does harm my kid? I mean, shouldn't I 100% put my kid above my own interest? How should people think through that trade off interest?
- [19:57]
Emily Oster
No, I think it is. You exactly hit on, I think the messaging parents get, which is, it's almost, it's like, if anyone, if there's any suggestion that this behavior would be harmful to my baby, I shouldn't do it, even if it were infinitely valuable to me. And similarly, if there's any suggestion, you know, like, what if I don't take them to violin and there's like a quarter of a percent chance that they could have played one time at Carnegie hall, like, that's like, that's it, I've ruined everything. And basically the constraints of the parents or the preferences or what the rest of the family wants is just not relevant. I think that that is not very healthy way to operate. But I think it really puts a kind of pressure on families and to not think big, not think big picture about the kind of. The fact that the truth is, even if you only care about the outcomes for your kids, having parents who are happy with the choices that they have made and who enjoy their lives actually does matter. So this comes up sometimes in this conversation about, in these conversations about breastfeeding where people will say, and even doctors will tell me, look, I would much rather have a mom who is not depressed, who is using formula than a mom who is depressed because they are killing themselves to try to breastfeed and isn't working and they're doing everything and they're like not enjoying their time with their kid. Like, that's, that's not a good trait. Even if you thought there was some small gastrointestinal benefit, that's just not a good trait. And I think that we, this current generation of parenting kind of goes way, way into like, you know, parents like kid first, kid first, kid first. And your kids, they do come First, I mean, all of our kids, like, I love my kids, they do come first in a lot of ways. But there's a little bit of put your own oxygen mask on first, which I think we, we miss, which is, you know, if you aren't breathing, if you aren't protecting your marriage, if you aren't, you know, doing things that fill your bucket some of the time, you are not going to be a happy person. And that's gonna make you a worse parent, even if that were the only thing you care about. And it's also just not gonna make you a happy person. And we only live one life. And so I think there's a, it's kind of, it's hard. It's a very hard thing to say because immediately people go to, well, it's very selfish. Like, why, you know, why do you want to be so selfish and just care about yourself? You only have your kids for 18 years and you know, don't you want to do everything for them in that time? But I'm not even always sure that's so good. I'm not sure the evidence would suggest that's always so good for our kids. I think sometimes they need to understand that they are not that like there are other people who matter.
- [22:46]
Yasha Monk
So let's distinguish between two strains of this conversation, right? Like, one is the way to push against a mistaken cultural norm where the children always have to come first in every kind of thing on the basis of actually that's not good for the kids. If you're really struggling to breastfeed and it means you have to get up in the middle of the night every time and that leads you to be depressed, that is going to have a much worse impact on the child than the difference between breastfeeding or not. That seems very plausible to me. You know, I have seen, and I'd love for you to hear whether that is founded empirically or not. But I have this kind of in my mind studies where if you ask children at most ages, you know, what is the thing you most wish in terms of the parenting of your children, of your parents, that would change. They don't say, I want to go to an extra sports club or I want to do whatever they say. I wish my parents were less stressed. And so actually whatever you can do to have them be less stressed feels like a really important thing for the well being of those children, especially if we believe what they're actually telling us. So I agree with you that there's going to be many contexts where there isn't in fact, a trade off where what seems like a trade off because there's a kind of constraint. Trade off on the whole means that both the parents and the children would be better off if the parents make sure that they're happy and healthy individuals, their relationship is strong together, that perhaps there's some relaxed family time every now and again, rather than just rushing from one class to another. I would love to hear more of you on that, but agree with all of that.
- [24:10]
Emily Oster
I think we agree on that. Yeah.
- [24:12]
Yasha Monk
But it felt to me, and I didn't expect that you're flinching a little bit away from the hardest questions. I'm gonna push you on it, which is. All right. There's gonna be some areas where there is a trade off. Right. I mean, your child really wants to go to some class and you're just exhausted and they've already gone to three different classes and, you know, you just don't know that you have it in you. Right? Or let's say with a glass of wine. It's unlikely that somehow having that glass of wine is going to be the difference between you being depressed or not depressed, or it's somehow going to have a sort of huge benefit to the child. So even if the risk is quite low, as you're saying, there is a kind of trade off involved, there is some kind of small risk for your child. On one side, there's your enjoyment. On the other, your ability to just enjoy something that you do and have a moment of sociability with friends and indulge in that glass of wine, that feels more like a sort of genuine trade off. How should parents think about that and what is the case? That they should sometimes just also put their own interests first.
- [25:08]
Emily Oster
It's so interesting that you mention the flinching, because I think I do. I mean, I think we all sort of flinched about that because it's very hard to say, like, I'm going to choose this because I like it even though it's not as good for you. And so I think we are looking always as parents for sort of like, well, maybe it is good for, you know, maybe it is good for you. Maybe there are some benefits. And I do think there's more cases for like, just if it is something that makes you happy and then you are happier, that actually, like, that is good for your. For your kids. But I also think we kind of have to make it okay for parents because it is to say, like, my kid occasionally will. Will suffer. Will suffer in some small way for my. To trade off against something I like. So, like, in my household, my. I really like to go running. I brought a lot, and my kids don't like that.
- [26:00]
Yasha Monk
I.
- [26:00]
Emily Oster
That my kids don't like this. And it definitely, like, it makes me a worse parent some of the time. So when I, like, run for a really long time in the morning and then I'm supposed to parent for the day, I am not my best parent, for sure. Like, I am crankier, I'm tired, I'm under. Like, I'm just cranky and I am shorter with them than I should be. And it is for me, that is a trade off that I make because I really like to run and it's like, important to me and it's like a thing that I. That I care about just for, like, just for me. But it is a genuine trade off. And I think that it is a genuine thing in which, like, it's worse for my kids and it's something that I'm doing because I like it. And I could say it's good for them to see me like something which I think is. Is broadly true. But I. I also think, you know, it's okay to say there are four people in this house or six people, or two or three people, however many people, and all of their preferences matter some. Even if some people's preferences matter more and that it isn't the case that our kids art preferences matter more than anything else. That, you know, I think that's just not. That's just not true. But it is really hard. Even now I find myself being like, okay, but actually, like, it's. It's like, well, let me explain why it's good for my kids that I run 22 miles and then I'm an asshole to them. Even though it's not good for them, it's not good for anyone.
- [27:27]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, it's interesting. And perhaps, you know, I'm not yet a parent and so perhaps I sort of feel it's easier for me to say that because I don't sort of picture my children and think, you know, no, you're not.
- [27:36]
Emily Oster
My son's like, I can't believe you're. So you're not gonna. You're gonna do this? You're abandoning us. You can't. How can you? You're not walking us to school. I love when you walk us to school. You care more about your running than you do about me. That's what he told me once. And I was like, that's not true. In the aggregate.
- [27:53]
Yasha Monk
I want to jump in. And again, Rationalize this as saying, well, it's really important for children to learn that they're not always the center of attention. And that does seem to me true in general. Right. I mean, I think one of the differences in cultural norms about parenting in the US and in Europe, for example, particularly in southern Europe, is that in the US there's this expectation that when you're spending time with your kids, they need to be at the center of attention. And I think that actually leads to all kinds of bad behavioral traits versus in places where, you know, it's not the old fashioned thing of, you know, be at the dinner table but don't be here, don't be hurt, or don't be, you know, be seen, but don't be heard. I don't mean that kind of thing. Right. But like, hey, we're adults, we're having a fun time together at this family dinner. We want to have a real conversation. Of course the kids are going to be part of a conversation. Of course the someone's going to interrupt to make a request or ask a question. They also need to understand that there's other people with their own interests and they want to have a serious conversation about other stuff and it's not all about them. And I actually think that that is a really helpful be part of an upbringing. But of course that again goes back to a kind of rationalization of like, in fact it is good for them. And certainly as somebody who doesn't have a parent, I also want to say the second thing, which is, you know, certainly if you have a broadly utilitarian outlook on the world, which I don't in every respect, but I do think it's a good sort of first cut at a lot of moral questions. It's just not right that we should make give some tiny marginal improvement in the happiness of a child at the great cost of the happiness of the parents. You know, it's okay to have the child be a little bit less happy to make sure that the parents are also leading happy, satisfied lives.
- [29:20]
Emily Oster
Yeah, I think we're sort of like some of the parenting approaches sort of suggest that that trade off ratio should basically be infinite. And I think that's hard to defend. Like that ratio should not be infinite. It shouldn't be one. It shouldn't be like one unit of my happiness for one unit of yours, I think, but I think it should not be that it should.
- [29:42]
Yasha Monk
And perhaps that's a choice that to some extent, in a theoretical manner and every day, in some practical manner, parents have to make all of the time. Right. Do they feel like the ratio should be closer to 1.1 or 5 to 1?
- [29:52]
Emily Oster
Exactly. Sometimes it's 5.
- [29:54]
Yasha Monk
One very big question that people ask about is screen time. There is a real sense that there is a mental health epidemic among a lot of teenage girls. In particular, my frequent podcast guest Jonathan Haidt has a powerful book arguing that even beyond that there's this sense that, you know, a little bit of screen time early in childhood when we're not yet talking about social media and Instagram and so on, which is, I think the things that John is particularly worried about, you know, attention span and brain development and so on, are going to be impacted. If you give an iPad to a two or three year old child, what do you think the evidence suggests about screen time and then more broadly about social media?
- [30:32]
Emily Oster
So I think those things are pretty different. And so let's start with the screen time question. You know, the, the data that people bring to bear on questions like, you know, what's the impact of screen time for 2 year olds on development is really bad. It is far worse in terms of the correlation versus causation problem even than the breastfeeding evidence because, and I think in some ways it should be very easy for people to understand this. So an example of studies like this, you know, there's one set of kids who have screens have, you know, kids under one who watch screens for more than four hours a day are compared to kids under one who watch no TV a day. And then you look at the sort of test scores or some developmental measures, say when those kids are five or six, if you explain to tell somebody, like imagine the household where there's a one year old watching four hours of television, four to six hours of television a day, and another household where the one year old watches no television. Do you think those households are otherwise similar? I think it's crazy to imagine those households are otherwise similar. And in fact in the data they're not. But they're not just going to be dissimilar in ways you can see, they're going to be dissimilar in all kinds of ways. And maybe those kids are different. Like it's very, very hard to have data like that and say, you know, that's the screens as opposed to some other feature. And so when, you know, when I talk to parents about this, I think the right way to think about it is that screens are not like inherently bad or inherently good. They are a thing that means you're not doing something else. And so rather Than thinking about screens as this kind of like sort of boogeyman experience to think about them in terms of the opportunity cost. It would be better for your kid to be, you know, it's better for your kid to be reading a book or hanging out with your family or, you know, sleeping. There's other activities that are probably, we know, deliver positive benefits. This is like neutral. This is like a neutral thing. And so you want to think about what is it substituting away for from. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do any of it. You know, if an hour of screen time while you're cooking dinner so you can then be ready to have that nice family dinner with your kid and have. And be like in a good. In a good place, if that's what you need, that's fine. And there isn't anything in the data that would say that it's. So I think this is just a place where people need to really. It's good to sort of structure the choice and think about the boundaries and not have screens be everywhere all the time, but also not think like any amount of screens is terrible, which is just not supported in the data.
- [33:00]
Yasha Monk
That's a really helpful framing, actually, which slightly changes my instincts about this. Right. The obvious part of this is you have to wash up or clean up or do some kind of errand. And how do you make sure that you can do that while your child is happy and entertained rather than being in the way and making you cranky and so on? Right. Let them watch something on the iPad or play something. Perhaps it's educational content, perhaps not. They're not gonna have a very meaningful experience during that hour in any case. And that's okay. Are you thinking about, I'm too lazy to read the kid a story at bedtime, and I'll just give it an iPad to play on at that time. That feels really bad because this is an important family ritual, and this is a moment where they're actually gonna be learning a lot of. So at that point, you shouldn't do that. How would you think about an in between case? Like you're taking the kids to a restaurant for dinner. That feels to me like both one of the cases where the iPad is the most useful because perhaps they're about to have a meltdown. They're gonna get bored, they're gonna get annoyed. And so giving them the iPad is a great way to be able to have a restaurant experience for the parents. And that's important for their happiness. Perhaps to have a friend visiting who they really want to connect with. Right. On the other hand, perhaps that precisely is the kind of experience where it's important for children to understand this is a social experience. You're not at the center of attention, but this is part of what it is to grow up and to be a member of a family unit. And perhaps a little bit of boredom, a little bit of frustration is, in fact, a helpful educational experience. How would you puzzle through that case?
- [34:24]
Emily Oster
I think that what I would say is that I just tell parents, you gotta make that decision deliberately based on what you're trying to accomplish. So what is the purpose of going out to dinner? Is the purpose of going out to dinner that you would like to have a date with your spouse and you can't get a babysitter? And, you know, there's no, like, other. There's no childcare option, but you just really want to spend some quality time with your spouse? I think in that case, like, it may well be the case that the right solution is your kid's on an iPad, and you're having. And you're having a date. And, you know, that's. That's accomplishing the. The goal. Another thing you could say is, I would like to go out to dinner because I want our family to be a family who can go out to dinner and, you know, sit together and talk and order from a menu. And. And that's like a. That's like an experience I want my kids to be able to have when they grow up. And in that case, adults don't sit at dinner. Actually, they do, but they shouldn't. Adults don't generally sit at dinner watching videos on their. On their phone. And that isn't the goal of dinner. And in that case, I would say, you know, it is. It. They should. You should not have iPads at dinner because it is not accomplishing your goal, Even though your kid might be kind of whiny and having trouble sitting down. But, like, that's. That's the goal is to sort of move forward and have. And have that. So it really is not. Again, it's not like it's definitely terrible to have iPads at dinner, or it's definitely fine to have iPads at dinner. The question is, what are you trying to accomplish? And if we ask that question around our use of screens, I think we'll be in a much better position to just, like, like, scaffold the boundaries in a way that we can then tell our kid, here's the boundary, here's the expectation, which can make it Much easier to hold the boundary if you've told the kid in advance what it is.
- [36:04]
Yasha Monk
What about social media? So when we're not talking now about 2 or 3 year olds at the restaurant and we're trying to distract them for half an hour, we're talking about how bad an impact are things like Instagram and TikTok having on self image on the mental health of teenage girls, for example.
- [36:20]
Emily Oster
So I wish we had better data here. I think the data we have is not perfect, but we do have some data. The best of it I think is from the introduction of Facebook, which definitely suggests some negative impacts on mental health. It's clear there's a fair amount of variation. Some kids do seem to benefit from the connections they can make in social media. Seems like on net they don't benefit and that, you know, the kind of experience, particularly for teen girls around things like Instagram and TikTok is not very good. And you know, there's many reasons you can sort of see why that would be. This is not showing, this is not showing real life. But when you are a teenage girl, maybe you think it is. So you're on there and you're seeing people and you know their skin looks great and you're like, my skin doesn't look. Even though I bought all the products that this person said, I buy all the same stuff. It's like, why doesn't my skin look like that? That's because it's a filter. But it's like you're sort of not. Kids in this age range do not have the kind of frontal lobe structure that adults do. And I think it makes it very hard to process, kind of to process things in a positive way. And so yes, just the data does not suggest very good things about teenagers and their exposure to social media. And I'd separate that, by the way, from phones, which I think there's other reasons we should hold boundaries on phones. But I think phones and social media are two pretty distinct things.
- [38:00]
Yasha Monk
So I take that as a empirically cautious vote that Hyde may be onto something, but we need more data to confirm that.
- [38:09]
Emily Oster
Yeah, I would love to have more data to confirm that, but I would say I'm I empirically cautious vote in favor of at least being more careful. I mean, there are parts of John Haidt's work that I agree with even more strongly. Like I don't think we should have phones in schools. That's actually pretty separate from this. It's just like you don't need a video game that's pinging you every 20 seconds, you know, while you're trying to learn math.
- [38:35]
Yasha Monk
Your writing has informed a lot of my thinking on these specific questions, what we've touched on. I'm trying to think of how it adds up to an overall attitude to questions like parenting. And I think a lot of what drives that anxiety. But I can't have that glass of wine, but I need to shepherd my kids to that extra ballet class, is a sense that the fate of these children is in our hands and that what we do at every moment is going to really add up to determining the future. Right? That it is in my hands whether going to be a happy, healthy adult who gets accepted to Brown University or, you know, a drug addicted, depressed dropout who, you know, lives in my basement for the rest of time. So I would love to hear your take on the overall data about how much does parenting actually matter? Is it just a matter of obviously avoiding being physically abusive with children, avoiding traumatizing risk, keeping them alive, which is no easy task when they're small toddlers and so on, and then the rest takes care of itself, or depends on broader, you know, questions of socioeconomic status and genetic inherit opportunities in your society, or do you think that those kind of smaller range decisions actually add up to making a real impact on the trajectory of children on average?
- [39:51]
Emily Oster
So I think one of the things that seems to be true of modern parenting is people view every moment of your parenting as an opportunity to ruin your child forever. Like, if you rush them out the door in the morning, that could be it. That could be the decision that ruins them for their whole lives. Which of course is not true, but it imbues every interaction with this kind of like, intense sense that it's the be all and it's the be all and end all. When you look at the data on kind of what matters, I think there's a little bit of a sort of twofold thing here. So one is that there's actually a lot of evidence that the first three years matter a lot. So when we. So when kids sort of show up in kindergarten and you ask like, you know, what, what do we see in kindergarten? There's huge differences across socioeconomic status even before they've been in any formal schooling, whatever. Like, we just see like, you know, kids who have grown up with more resources are just doing way better in K5 than they were before.
- [40:51]
Yasha Monk
And just quick question about this. How do we know that that is rooted in parenting practices of the parents in those first five or three years rather than genetic inheritance or other kinds of things that may not be down to their parenting choices.
- [41:07]
Emily Oster
It's a great question. I think some of it we know from, you know, what kinds of impacts you can have with. With sort of parents, like, simple parenting interventions, which can improve some of those outcomes. And some of it is by looking at how much we can catch up with things like Head Start. So we sort of know if you try to equalize things in those early years, you get more equal outcomes early on.
- [41:29]
Yasha Monk
What are the most powerful of those interventions?
- [41:31]
Emily Oster
It's like, here are the things that seem to be really important. Kids having enough to eat, kids having a stable place to sleep, kids having someone in their life who is a consistent and positive force, not being abused and yelled at, and maybe a little bit of evidence that having access to some books and some reading can improve, you know, school readiness. And outside of this kind of very. It's not that I say these things are basic and they are basic, but they're also, like, very hard. And many, you know, many kids do not. Do not have access to this. So it isn't like saying, you know, where, like, these things are so easy. Anybody could achieve them. There are many kids in America and elsewhere that don't have access to this, but they are pretty fundamental. Stable housing, stable food, somebody to love you, somebody who is a positive, stable force in your life. If we give our kids those things, that's 95% of the way to what we are trying to accomplish. And then you can ask questions like, okay, somebody once asked me, how can I train my kid to win the Math Olympiad? Which is like, basically say, it's like, well, you probably can't. Like, if your goal. If your entire goal is to train your kid to math wearing the Math Olympia, like, you probably can make a little bit of progress by, you know, doing more math. But at the end of the day, like, that's probably not really your goal most of the time. And if you ask, you know, my goal is to raise like a happy, healthy adult. You may not achieve that, but the things that you can do to influence that are pretty. Are sort of pretty basic and not like you need to rotate your Montessori toys or whatever.
- [43:16]
Yasha Monk
Let me put what you just said in a slightly more polemical way and see whether you agree with me. Right. I mean, let's distinguish between public policy in a deeply unequal society like the United States, where there's a lot of poverty, despite how rich it is overall, and the kind of questions that to stereotype a little bit the Average listener to this podcast is going to be asking themselves. And that's why I think it's so important to specify those particular interventions. Right. Because when you say the first five years of life is really important, what a lot of my listeners might hear and what I perhaps at first heard was like, oh, my God. So it is really important that I make sure that story time at bedtime is an hour rather than half an hour, but I don't give them that iPad, et cetera. Right. It sounds like, for the most part, the people who are listening to this podcast, you know, they're going to be able to give their kids enough to eat. Right. Hopefully they're going to have a stable, loving relationship with their child. Right. Hopefully they're not physically abusing their child. Right. That is not the questions they ask themselves. So it seems to me like the message to them is don't worry. Right. Then there's another question of if you care about children in the United States or around the world, make sure that perhaps we have child benefit pay payments, make sure that poor parents are actually able to have housing stability, make sure that they have enough food. At a societal level, that is by no means an easy task to accomplish, and that can make a huge difference. But perhaps our energies, if we care about children in general, would be better devoted to that than to the marginal extra step in our own parenting activities.
- [44:46]
Emily Oster
Could not have said it better. Yeah. I think that these conversations about, like, how do I be the optimal parent? Are happening in spaces where you're already doing everything that actually could matter, and then we're not having the conversation about how do we think about the right policies to support parents more broadly and families more broadly where kids do not have access to these pretty fundamental needs.
- [45:12]
Yasha Monk
What about beyond the age of five or six? I mean, one thing that I'm sure a lot of listeners to this, this podcast really worry about is school choice. For example, how much do those kinds of things matter for outcomes?
- [45:25]
Emily Oster
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there are. Parents ask a lot about school quality. I think the, you know, the reality is that much of the variation in school quality, which in the US we typically just measure by test scores, a huge share of that variation is just driven by differences in the kids who show up at the school. So not so much the, like, you know, schools that are, that are in rich areas do better. And that's not really because of what the school is doing. That seems to be mostly because of, you know, the kids that they get as, as inputs and what the parents are doing. You know, we have a little bit of evidence around, you know, how can we improve school quality? How can we provide better school quality to kids who would not have access to high quality public schools or who are, you know, charter schools tend to have better outcomes than. Than the district public schools, at least in urban areas. We know in general, smaller class sizes are better than larger. Certainly if you look at private schools, the outcomes there are, on average, better. But again, that's probably a lot about who the kids are, who is coming into the school, and not what the school is doing. So the landscape of school choice is pretty tricky, and it's not usually very obvious, but especially in the US like, so much of the variation is just about family, family variation, and not about anything, really, that we're doing within the school or nothing systematic within the schools.
- [46:55]
Yasha Monk
One of the things that strikes me as odd about this whole conversation is that it's a strange mix between altruism and egotism, which is to say that on the one side, there's this expectation that you completely prioritize your children over everything else, that you put them above everything, that you don't have that glass of wine, that you do ferret them to that extra ballet class, but you spend a lot of financial resources on making sure that they go to the marginally better private school and so on. And so it is a way of showing how altruistic you are. And at the same time, of course, there's a great egotism involved in this. How these children are going to fare depends on me, on what I do. And so look at the agency I'm having and determining what's gonna happen 70 years later to this being that's under my care. Do we need to sort of unlearn both the excessive altruism and the excessive egotism?
- [47:48]
Emily Oster
Yeah, I think we are not helped by thinking of our children as something we are trying to accomplish, which is kind of both, like, has a sort of flavor of both of those things that, like, kind of I'm, you know, like, parenting is a thing. I'm gonna win and I'm gonna, like, do it, and I'm winning. I'm do it the best, and, like, my kids are gonna be the outcome of that. Of that winning, you know, both, because I think it puts far too much stress on our kids to be somehow like, something that we're gonna. We're gonna win, but I think also gives us too much of the illusion of control that, like, actually it probably doesn't. What we do on these smaller scales. Probably doesn't matter. Doesn't matter too much. And it also, you know, that whole atmosphere, like, forgets the piece of parenting, which is like, why one becomes a parent in some sense. Which is like, it's really like, your kids are really fun. Like, you know, they're just like, like, my kids, like, hanging out with my kids is. Is really great. Like, I think they're just great, interesting people. And if I'm. If we're only thinking of the kids as somehow either something we're serving or something that we're using as a tool to like, further our dynastic aspirations or whatever it is, we lose the fact that they're like, interesting, fun people who we probably do like because they're like us. And so, you know, that's like, that's. I think of that a lot in these sort of conversations a lot of people are having in policy circles now around, like, why people don't have kids. And we sort of like, pitch kids as like, this really hard. Like, parenting is this really hard job. It is hard. Like, the aspects of it are hard, you're tired, et cetera. But it's also like, incredibly cool to like, have these people who are just like, you can't believe how much you love them. And it's like an extremely interesting, totally unique and amazing experience which we completely lose sight of if we're just thinking about it. Like, it's just another job that you have to, you know, achieve promotion at or whatever.
- [49:46]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much for listening to
- [49:49]
Podcast Narrator
what I believe is a really interesting
- [49:51]
Yasha Monk
episode of the good fight.
- [49:53]
Podcast Narrator
In the rest of this conversation, Amity
- [49:54]
Yasha Monk
and I talked about some of the
- [49:56]
Podcast Narrator
work she's been most well known on recently, which is her data driven criticisms of a lot of pandemic policy. She argues that we got some things right, like the fast development of a vaccine, but many things wrong, including the school closures. And we discuss why it is that we so often get those kind of epistemic questions wrong. We don't just revisit some of the big questions about what that policy would have looked like, but also ask about how we can reconcile our shared faith in the importance of evidence and data driven analysis with the fact that the very authorities which claim to be based on data driven analysis and evidence so often get things wrong. What does that mean for the trust or mistrust we should have in institutions and social elites? If you want to listen to that part of the podcast, and if you want to support what we do here, please go to yashamonk.substack, become a paying subscriber for less than the cost of one cup of Starbucks coffee a week and earn my eternal gratitude. Yashamung.substand.com
- [51:07]
Yasha Monk
thank you so much for listening
- [51:09]
Podcast Narrator
to the Good Fight.
- [51:10]
Yasha Monk
Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be like Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about
- [51:18]
Podcast Narrator
it, share it on Facebook or Twitter.
- [51:21]
Yasha Monk
And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [51:35]
Emily Oster
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.