EP. 31 / Emily Oster - Econ Professor + Parenting Data Expert - helps you be a less worried parent + make better decisions
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Emily Oster is here - economics professor at Brown, 3x best selling author who basically debunks all your parenting myths with DATA!!! She wrote expecting better, crib sheet and the family firm…
We talk about how you can worry less about your parenting decisions… how moms can think about deciding their career path to find balance…and that even though working makes people happy and parenting makes people happy - but we’re not doubly happy when we do both! So Emily is here to help us find the path that’s right for us (aided by data!!)
Plus a rapid fire of should you drink when pregnant, how much screen time should your kids have and how Kim’s lucky her husband also uses data in their household so basically their home isn’t like an all-night clown show.
Jacent Wamala licensed marriage and family therapist turned money mindset coach joins us for our Real Mom Moment.
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Show Takeaways:
How to make better decisions
What the data shows about how we can have better work-life balance
How much screen time kids should have
Should pregnant women drink
Quotes:
About what the data shows how we can have better work life balance.
“So a career can make you happy, having children also makes people happy, but there's not like a double happiness boost. So women who work and have children are not as happy as if you added those 2 happinesses together.”
On how to make better decisions for your career and family
“What are the 3 things that are important for you to do every day to make you happy? Or here's a schedule, show me your best week? If this were your optimal week in terms of what were you doing every hour of the day. What do you want Tuesday to look like because your life is pretty much just Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays and and if you're not happy every Tuesday that's like a seventh of the time that you're not happy and so try to make your Tuesday like you want.
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EPISODE LINKS:
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTS
Kim Rittberg (00:01):
I am fangirling here because the one and only Emily Oster joins us. She is a three time bestselling author who basically debunks all of your parenting myths with data she wrote, expecting better crib sheet and the family firm. We have a great chat and cover so much territory. You do not wanna miss this. We talk about how you can worry less about your parenting decisions, how moms can think about deciding their career path to find balance.
Emily Oster (00:26):
A career can make you happy. Having children also makes people happy, but there's not like a double happiness boost. So women who work and have children are not as happy as if you added those two happinesses
Kim Rittberg (00:41):
Together. But don't worry, we dig in further on how to actually solve that issue. Plus she answers some of your burning questions. Is breast best? How many times does it take for your kid to eat a vegetable to be open to eat actually eating it again in the future? Can you drink while you're pregnant? How much time is too much Screen time?
This is mom's exit interview the show for moms who wanna craft the career and life they want. Each episode you'll meet inspirational moms across various industries and levels who are working and living life on their own terms. And they'll bring you actionable tips from finance to business development to happiness to crushing that imposter syndrome. I'm Kim Rittberg. I was a burnt out media executive at Netflix, US Weekly and in TV news. I wanted a career where I was fulfilled at work but present at home with my kids. So I started working for myself and I love it, but not every day was easy or is easy. I wanted to explore with all of you how other moms were creating careers on their own terms. They're carving out flex jobs, starting their own businesses, they're taking back control. Join me and make work work for you instead of the other way around.
Are you trying to grow your business and you feel like, ugh, there's so much to do? Well, don't worry, I got you. I have a few slots left in my brand new life coaching group. Basically I'll hold your hand and teach you how to attract your ideal client and grow your business with video and podcast new sidley dancing required <laugh>. Unless you like to dance, that's fine. You'll get a system and I'll give you a blueprint to make awesome video. I'll give you all my insider knowledge from working at Netflix People Magazine and Pop Sugar about how to make engaging content that converts leads into clients. It'll have live coaching weekly q and a and Slack support. So check out my site, kimrittberg.com and let's connect. I love helping you grow your business.
I wanna share something so cute that I'm doing with my daughter, but that I'm actually a little worried if I talk about it's going to go away. But cuz we're all friends here, I'm going to do it. I bought this journal where my daughter and I write something in it and we pass it back to each other. So one night mom writes and then the next night daughter writes and they sort of gamify it so it feels fun to her. I was very worried that she'd be like, oh this is terrible mom, why are you making me do this? But we've been doing it for a week and even if it ends tomorrow, I at least have a bunch of pages done and it's really, really sweet. So I ignore the potential rejection and I just recommended it gently and it's happening, which is very cool.
And now seriously, I cannot wait to hear from Emily Oster. She's an economics professor at Brown, bestselling author multiple times. She's written crib sheath, the family firm and expecting better. She was a time 100 most influential person. Basically Emily looks at data behind our choices in pregnancy and parenting and it helps us make better, more informed decisions and be more relaxed. Parents, she's a great newsletter called Parent Data on data pregnancy, child rearing and whatever else is on the minds of parents. My husband also on a personal note was in a few of her college classes and I'm basically fangirling over her cuz she's super smart and also hilarious because on this show we talk about how can we organize our careers and lives to have more balance And we dig into questions. How do we find the balance that works for us? So I wanted to ask Emily about that and she says the data is not conclusive, but Emily says we can learn from some of the data that has been uncovered related to happiness. And from that ask really specific questions.
Emily Oster (04:27):
Women who work are happy with their job. So a career can make you happy. Having children also makes people happy, but there's not like a double happiness boost. So women who work and have children are not as happy as if you added those two happinesses together. And so it suggests that there is some offset. And I think we see that and we can talk about it almost in the conflict that people have with themselves or with others around how do I balance this? And that balance can be really hard.
Kim Rittberg (05:03):
So if family makes us happy and working makes us happy, and of course we work cuz we need money, but if family makes us happy and working makes us happy, but when we combine the two, we're sort of, it's a lot. It becomes, it doesn't become one plus one equals two. What sort of useful questions can we ask ourselves when we're assessing where to go? So if there isn't hard data, how do we make these decisions in a more thoughtful way?
Emily Oster (05:28):
And I think the first thing is you can ask what do I want? And it is hard to ask what do I want? Because that question's very fake, right? Well what do you mean I don't know, I want a pony. It's like I want a lot of things.
Kim Rittberg (05:42):
I don't want a pony.
Emily Oster (05:43):
You don't want do be fair. I once wanted a pony and now I'm like, I'm like yeah, you guys can have snails. I want an optimal pet is a snail, so not a pony. I'm
Kim Rittberg (05:53):
Going to try to sell my son on the snail he is five and begging for a pet going to
Kim Rittberg (05:56):
Actually we also killed a snail, sorry, we did also kill a snail. We tried that
Emily Oster (06:01):
<laugh>. Okay, it's a mix. Think about what you do with a pony. Alright, so I think it is hard to access this idea of what would make you happy. So one of the tools I talk about in the family firm is trying to make more concrete some of those ideas. So rather than just saying, well what would make you happy in a vague way, which for some people they can call up the answer to that, but for many of us it's hard. I say well think about it more concretely. What are the three things that are important for you to do every day to make you happy? Or here's a schedule, show me your best week. If it were your optimal week in terms of what were you doing every hour of the day, what would that look like? And that exercise can be quite clarifying in terms of both what you wanna do.
Sometimes clarifying in terms of conflict between what you're doing and what you wanna do or conflict between what you wanna do and what your partner wants to do, particularly around family time. So in essence, really saying, here's what I wanna do every day and this is what's going to make me happy. Forces some of those conversations. Another way to say it is what do you want Tuesday to look like? Because your life is pretty much just Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays. And if you're not happy every Tuesday, that's like a seventh of the time that you're not happy. And so try to make your Tuesday.
Kim Rittberg (07:30):
I asked Emily if there was an ideal amount of hours that would make us happier. Of course it's no news to all of us that here in America we work much longer work weeks than in the rest of the world. Emily says, while there isn't hard data, we can use this super handy thought experiment and thought process can help us really drill down to make our lives what we want.
Emily Oster (07:53):
So in economics we have this idea of optimizing, sort of optimizing everything that you do. And the way that you optimize the sort of central idea and optimization is that if you had one more unit you would or one more dollar you would be willing to, you would be equally happy to spend it on any of the things in your life that you're spending it on. So that's the idea, to put it in the concrete space of time, what this would say. If I give you another hour of the day, if I said I give you another hour now the day is 25 hours, you get one more hour, you should be equally happy to spend that hour with your family, with your job at your hobby or whatever it is among the tasks that you do, among the things you do with your time.
If you had another hour and you said, I'd be happy to put that hour anywhere, then you are optimized because you're saying I'm doing exactly the right amount of these things and it's not that I'm doing them equally. It could be eight hours of work, three hours with my kids, nine hours of sleep, whatever. But I'm balancing it such that at the margin I'm equally happy with each thing. And if you told me if you gave me another hour, there's no question, I would definitely spend it at work. Well it's possible you're not spending enough time at work now. Or if I gave you another hour and you said for sure I would spend it with my kids, I miss 'em so much, I'm definitely, I would love to spend another hour. Well that suggests that maybe you're not spending enough time with them. And it's worth looking at the question of is there a way to get more of that time, even in a world with 24 hours in the day.
Kim Rittberg (09:32):
So looking at where is there a deficit by the way you get to use the word concavity enough in conversation. So this is
Emily Oster (09:38):
Me, it really doesn't come up that much. It's sort of like I'm working on a way to get trigonometry language in because that's one that I never get to use,
Kim Rittberg (09:46):
I'm going to carry with you. I'm going to be like, oh I interviewed Professor Emily Oster this week, so I'm really smart by osmosis. So generally it's about what do you feel like you're missing out on? What do you feel like you need more of and optimizing that and not in how I feel this week, but how I feel like on AV an average day, not the best, not the worst, not when you write in your journal, today was the best day ever or today is the worst day ever. It's that average day and how do you get that average day better?
Emily Oster (10:15):
And I think also trying to move away from thinking about our hours as linking to how much we love something. So one of the things I've written about is the idea that even though I love my kids infinitely more than I love my job, I still want to have more hours of my day at my job than with my kids. And so the fact that on average my child happiness is really enormous, is infinite. And on average my job happiness is also high but not infinite. It doesn't mean that I want more time with my kids in part because the fourth hour with my kids sort of diminishes in excitement and the fourth hour at my job is about as good as the first hour. So there's a little bit of balance there where I think sometimes we get into a space particularly as moms where we can say, well if you really love your kids, of course you should wanna be with them all the time. And it that's almost to say, well I only work because I have to. And it becomes not okay to say, well I work because I love my job and I work more hours of the day than I spend with my kids. Not because I love my kids less, but because this is the way that I am the happiest. And separating out those two things about sort of hours and overall utility happiness is part of good decision making.
Kim Rittberg (11:37):
And I think that speaks to, I think we all know plenty of women who are choosing to work who could financially be stay-at-home parents. So it's not necessarily that it's only financial based. I mean a lot of articles are written about the choice and it's a privilege to have the choice. Of course
Emily Oster (11:51):
It's a privilege to have the choice, it's
Kim Rittberg (11:53):
A privilege to have the choice, but obviously there are so many parents who are choosing and having that conversation. So I think that's an interesting point to bring up. So basically you'd say as parents are considering, do I work part-time, do I work, should I switch to that job with more flexibility? It's hard to measure that you're saying with data it's hard to, for data to help make us make those decisions.
Emily Oster (12:18):
And also we should be very expansive about those decisions. So we so used to thinking about those decisions as should mom stay home or not? But there are a billion life config configurations that you can have. There's mom works part-time, dad works, mom works full-time, dad doesn't work, mom works full-time, dad works a little bit. There's two moms. Sometimes that's easier because it removes some of the heteronormative aspects of the way we think about engaging with the labor force. So in making these decisions correctly or in the sort of optimal way is going to require turning off some of that. And so the phrasing that I use in one of the books is what is the optimal configuration of work hours for adults in the household, which is much longer than should I be a stay-at-home mom? But it captures the very wide range of what is the optimal way to organize the time at work of all of the adults that we have available. And let's just think about that in a way that is not, trying not to link it to societal expectations or whatever. Just link it to what is the thing that's going to make us happy and putting together, we need money to be happy, we need resources, we enjoy our jobs in different ways, we need time with the kid, whatever it is. But think about it in a kind of big picture, not in this sort of binary choice space.
Kim Rittberg (13:44):
And then do you think also some of it is of course how many hours our full-time jobs are because if you have a double working parent house and let's say on average they're working 40 hours, which I don't know if that's average or under plus the commute, it's like both parents are working a 45 hour week. So that is why it's challenging to do the optimal configuration because it is sort of the school hours don't match up with the work hours. And I know that you've written a lot about it, it's the financial calculation of what childcare costs, but also the mental calculation of when someone's sick, who's home who who's doing the afterschool stuff, all of that. So is that a part of it, do you think?
Emily Oster (14:29):
Absolutely. I mean think that that's a part of all of this calculus and it's a part of thinking about this as a big picture because the question of who, how much are we each going to work is completely enmeshed with the question of what happens when the kid is sick and what do we do on school vacations or at three o'clock in the afternoon? And again, we sort of get back to if you sit down with the calendar of the week and you say, this is what I wanna have happen, that's an opportunity to say, okay, well if we want our lives to look like this, then we need to figure out this other piece of it and we should figure out this other piece of it before we implement the plan. We don't just want the other piece of it to kind of assume it's going to work out because it won't not going to work out if you haven't worked it out.
Kim Rittberg (15:20):
Okay. Alright. I have a question because when we're trying to figure out our optimal life situation, we're sort of looking at an average Tuesday or an average Thursday, but I feel like my husband and I joke that we're like, we have everything is great until one person's sick. You know what I mean? And then the house of cards falls. So do you base your life upon the worst case scenario, catastrophe planning, not catastrophe, it's not catastrophic for someone to be sick at home, but do you plan around what happens when someone's sick? Or do you say, well that's really an out of the ordinary instance, it happens X times a year. You sort of really think of it as a mathematical calculation cuz I feel like most people feel like on a day-to-day fine. And then as we saw with covid, when schools are closed and everything, there's just no answer.
Emily Oster (16:06):
Yeah, I mean I think it is very tempting to think about the average. I think that covid sort of forced people to think about a little bit more about what is my contingency planning. And in some ways some of the changes post covid for at least some set of people have made that contingency planning a touch easier because it's a little bit more acceptable to work from home. It's a little bit easier to work from home. There's some more pieces of flexibility. But yes, I think in an ideal world there would at least be a plan. I mean, this was a piece of advice that one of my very close friends gave me when I had my first kid, which was decide right now who stays home when the nanny is sick. And that she was just decide that now this is even before Penelope was born, she was like, that's the most important thing because in that moment, neither of you will wanna stay home.
You both are going to think that what you have to do is the most important and you know, need to figure out that contingency before you have a conflict in the moment. And I mean a lot of this, this advanced planning is in part and attempt to avoid conflict with your spouse or to surface conflicts at a moment when you're not mad when you can work them out. Because it is true that when you are both trying to achieve things professionally and you also have kids, it's hard for two people to be leaning in at the same time and doing the kind of job they want with parenting. Everyone has that situation, but I think for many people that's tough and it is a place that people get resentful.
Kim Rittberg (17:42):
All right, you have hundreds of thousands of people following on social media and people ask you questions all the time. What is the question you've gotten asked the most and what is the answer?
Emily Oster (17:55):
So many of my followers have small kits. So I think the most popular questions are things about breastfeeding. So can I quit breastfeeding now? That would be a popular one. And so there's a lot of specifics like that. There was also a very broad class of questions, which is should I worry about blah? And likely is everything, should I worry about Zika? Should I worry about a covid in this particular situation? Should I worry about lost some of its disease? Some of it's, I heard the knife, yesterday's question was, I heard the knife blocks have a lot of bacteria. Should I worry about that? Should I worry about phs? Should I worry about different kinds of schools? My kid doesn't play an instrument, should I worry about that? It's just like parenting is endless series of just worries. And I think particularly because of some of the sort of ways I interact in the world, that's a lot of what comes, that's a lot of what comes in.
Kim Rittberg (18:53):
So what's the answer if almost everybody's asking you Emily, dot, dot dot, should I worry about.dot? What's the best way for them to make a decision about that specific thing?
Emily Oster (19:03):
I mean, usually the answer is it doesn't matter too much. <laugh> like a felt like a fair amount of the time. And I think this is a lesson from that. I sort of learned myself a lot actually in writing crib sheet that a lot of the choices we make, particularly in early parenting there's a lot of good choices and you don't need to do one or the other thing to have it be yeah, isn't some one choice. That is correct. And so I think that's a sort of important underlying message in a lot of this, which is you should do the thing that works for your family or don't worry too much. There's kind of small pluses and small and minuses. Occasionally there are things you should worry about. But I think in addition to mostly you shouldn't worry about this, there's also this really important distinction between worrying about something and being able to do something about it.
Many of the existential things people worry about are deeply out of your control. So on the one hand you could be worried about it, it could be a thing of concern, but it is also not something that you can change. And so distinguishing for us, particularly for those of us, and I count myself in this group who have a fair amount of anxiety just in general, there's a really, really important moment to be like, I could spend time worrying about this, but it's actually not productive. And so I can think about acknowledge the worry and then try to just not think about it anymore because actually this is not something I can do anything about.
Kim Rittberg (20:41):
So basically whatever it is that you want to do, do it confidently. Because I think what you're saying is it's that nagging and the questioning ourselves. Should I sleep train? Should I not sleep train? Should I bottle feed? Should I not bottle feeded? And then as your kids get older, are they too young to cross the street or they went or are they the less kid in the neighborhood to be allowed to cross the street? But whatever you choose, go with it confidently because it's right. Be confident in your decisions, be
Emily Oster (21:04):
Confident. And I think that's part of this, all of this, we mean a lot of what we've been talking about. I sort of put in this umbrella of deliberate decision making and being thoughtful about the choices you make. One benefit of being thoughtful in those ways is that then you can be confident. So one benefit about being thoughtful about whether you wanna work outside the home and be away from your kids is that once you have acknowledged, okay, I thought about this and I made the right choice, it's much easier to move forward. And I mean, my working mom, we all have these moments when we're going to a work trip and my kids are like, I can't believe you're leaving us. This is my son said the other day, who will take care of us? I was like, your father and everyone in the house is here for you. He's just, oh, I don't know, leave me. And I think that in those moments it's easy to be like, oh, you're right, I'm so terrible. But if this is the right choice, it's much easier to be like, yeah, I don't know. You're just going to have to work it out for yourself. There's some cereal and the cabinet enjoy.
Kim Rittberg (22:05):
I feel like it's when we're reading the family firm, these kids are reading how to manipulate my parents with love at these suboptimal moment <laugh>,
Emily Oster (22:15):
How to really push their
Kim Rittberg (22:17):
Buttons. I feel like there's a little picture book that even is from newborns on up is how to make your parents do whatever you want with a really big smile. My husband studied economics ironically with you in college. That's true. He hasn't written three books, but that's cool. He's really smart. Also I think it's helpful because he does see the world in a completely different way than I do. And I think to your point of assessing, he assesses situations differently. And I do think it allows us to make decisions deliberately. We have totally different decision. Mm-hmm. Making styles. I'm like, let's make a decision. Let's decide it by tonight, tomorrow's the next thing. And he's like, let's think about it. I'm going to think about it and research it a little bit. And I'm like, oh, okay, I guess. And then a few days later we come together and then we have a decision and we've both sort of talked it through and he has that, well what's the worst case scenario?
What happens if we don't? Or what happens if we do where that's just not how my brain works, but I find it helps us come together with a decision as I like the word deliberate. It's intentional. And whether it's right or wrong, well, I don't know, we'll find out when our kids on the therapists couch in 20 years, but at least we're not heming and hawing every day and worrying about that. And I think the other thing we were talking about job decision making. I was working for 15 years. I was really happy with my career, but as my industry got more volatile and I started having kids, I'm like, all right, I think I wanna see if I can work for myself and build a career where I like it and I'm happy I'm earning good money, but with more flexibility. And I think I sort of stepped in and out of it.
I wasn't sure at first, but then a few years into it, I really made the decision, absolutely I'm going to work for myself and I'm going to try as hard as I can to make this work for me. Cuz it gives me the flexibility I want. And now when people say, oh, here's a job listing or does this interest you? I'm like, no, I see jobs that look so cool and I'm like, that would be the best job for me. I would really be good at that job and I would have fun at that job. I'm like, I really don't want a full-time job and that's okay. And I think living in that certainty, I never think, oh, I should send in my resume. I'm like, no, then I can't get my daughter after school on Thursdays and then I can't leave room for just in case. So I think to your point of just really taking the data point and seeing what a Thursday would look like, and knowing that has really helped me because I think there's so many inputs throughout life, both from people and articles and everything, and I think it's just helped me live in a different state.
Emily Oster (24:57):
I think it's very easy to hear inputs from others, whether it's about your personal choices or your parenting choices and if you are not confident to let them kind of worm their way in. And I think that one of the things that the confidence about this delivers is the ability to say, thanks so much for sharing. And then <laugh> like to just move on.
Kim Rittberg (25:17):
<laugh> a parent of two and you're a professor, but you're also at this point really, you have a business, have three bestselling books and you have I'm sure speaking engagements and all of these other things. So in your career path, how has being a parent impacted the decisions you make? And then second, my question will be how do you balance it now that you have not only a full-time professor job but also this business? So
Emily Oster (25:44):
In that way?
Kim Rittberg (25:44):
So
Emily Oster (25:46):
The sort of answer to the first thing is it is only because I am a parent that I have all of these, this other thing, my business really started, I mean expecting better is now 10 years old. I sold that book when I was 35 weeks pregnant with Penelope. So everything that came after that, all of the work on parenting, the books, the newsletter, all of this stuff that I'm doing sort of came out of the experience of being pregnant, of wanting to use these tools I was using in my job to speak to my pregnancy and then wanting to write about them. And that book kind of catapulted the whole thing. And the second book really turned it from a weird hobby into something that was much more of my time. I think over time, balancing work with parenting has gotten easier. As my kids have gotten bigger it maybe easier is the wrong word, I have more clarity about how I wanna do it.
I think early on there was so much time that the kids could have taken and much more conflict for me about how much time should I give now They actually have much less time for me and it has become easier for me to think about how much time I want with them. And so that balance has gotten easier. What's gotten much harder is the balance within my work between the kind of being a professor and the sort of doing all of this other stuff, which has become a much bigger part of my professional profile, a much bigger part of what I do day to day. And that's something that I am, that part is very much a work in progress to sort of think about how do I ultimately want that balance to look.
Kim Rittberg (27:31):
I have read that you had said that you were surprised that actually as the kids got older, you were wanting more time with them rather than in the early years. At what point have you found being not just a working parent but a working parent with also this other burgeoning business, which is now, it had been growing but now is extremely big. Have you thought about, were there times where you're like, oh, I want more time with the kids and how do I get that? Or were there other times where you're like, this is right in sync. I'm getting the time I want.
Emily Oster (28:02):
So I think there were periods when my daughter was young before I had tenure in which I would've said I want more time with the kids. And that some of the time that I'm working, it is sort of in service almost of FaceTime, but just sort of in service of trying to get to a place where when I get there I hope that I will be able to have a different balance. And I think that's a time we, even when my daughter was very, this is such a crazy thing, I'll tell you this crazy thing we did. So when I was working in Chicago, my daughter was born in April and I was back to work pretty quickly because I don't know, you gotta write papers but that we lived a 30 minute drive from work. We had made a very poor choice, which was a great choice before we had kids.
And it was a terrible choice because it was horrible traffic. And then traffic in Chicago was like unfathomably bad. And so we were living in this sort of far away place and we decided that we wanted more time. I wanted more time with our daughter during the day. And so we rented an apartment in Hyde Park, which is where the university was for the summer. We sublet some student's apartment so we could have our daughter there with the nanny for six hours a day. So we see more of her. So when I think about that, it's like, oh my gosh, I really must have wanted so much more time than I was getting to go through the process of subletting some dirty student appointments, <laugh> to get a little bit more time. So I think that was a sort of poorly balanced poorly balanced time. As I've gotten older and had tenure and had more control over what I do, it's just become much easier to say, here is the time I feel like I need to carve out. And now that my kids are big, that big-ish become very clear that what they need is units of concentrated time, not a billion hours, but saying we're going to spend an hour together every day or twice a week or whatever, when I'm just going to pay attention to you. That's become a much more important part of the way that we interact.
Kim Rittberg (30:12):
So looking back, you would've said to your supervisor, Hey, I need to leave once a week or twice a week at X time and then I will do more research at home or whatever is required to do it. Do you feel like looking back you would've done it differently?
Emily Oster (30:27):
I do think I would've done it differently. It's not quite the way you say it because I did not have a supervisor as an academic, you're your own supervisor. And so I think the pressure that I felt was partially just internal. I need to write these papers. And I think partially was a feeling correct or not, that being physically present at work was a way to signal that I was not just quitting to be a mom. And so I do wish I had the confidence at the time to spend more time at home in that first few months of my daughter's life, but it was, I don't know mean hindsight is 2020 or 2040, whatever it, there's things I would've done differently
Kim Rittberg (31:12):
Instead of hanging out in a sublet
Emily Oster (31:15):
Grateful
Kim Rittberg (31:16):
Dead with a great dead black light poster in the room. Exactly. That's a story for this time. So how do you balance in your life? What are your tips or how do you balance your life between deadlines, teaching, parenting? What are the top, if someone said were to say, what's your top advice for balancing them?
Emily Oster (31:39):
A main thing is don't expect balance every day. No day is balanced and that's just the reality. So I try to be balanced over the course of a month or a week or three months or whatever, but many days are either really concentrated in one thing or really concentrated in another thing. And that's just the reality and I don't know. The other thing is recognizing my own limitations. I have a very strong tendency to just be like, oh, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. I actually have a sticker on my desk that says say no, just it's a little thing I wrote to myself. It's taped it on with masking tape and it's just like I have to be better at just saying, I am too limited to do that. I just don't have the time to do that. It is not consistent with the other parts of the balance that I want to be achieving. But I don't know, I think balance is a kind kind of a weird word because I think it implies that we're able to achieve something that's just kind of hard, really impossible for almost anyone.
Kim Rittberg (32:46):
It's encouraging also to hear you say those things too. I'm the same, I'm always sure, I think I accepted a job swap with another person at a company because I was too quick to say yes a month later I'm like, this new job is okay, but I can't believe I said yes so quickly. I should have said, let me think about it. <laugh>, like last year I was asked to volunteer for something and I was like, you know what? It's not the right time. No, I'm really busy at work. No. And I really was proud of myself because it's not easy to say no, which is weird and no, whatever it is, for whatever reasons, it should be easier to say no, but it's not. So that's helpful to hear, say no. Yeah, say no when everything piles up. What falls to the wayside for you?
Emily Oster (33:26):
Sleep. And that's one of my most terrible habits. There was this period, so I get up quite early anyway, and there was this period actually early in the pandemic when there was just so much stuff. There was the kids were home, so we were homeschooling and then I would had all these extra job responsibilities for some weird reason. And so it was just everything was totally insane. And so I started getting up at 4 3 45, which is somewhat earlier than I had been getting up before. And at some point my husband was like, you have to stop that. That's not a healthy way to address this. And so I've been trying to work on other healthier ways to address it, but it's hard.
Kim Rittberg (34:12):
In all your questions and research, what's been the most polarizing topics you've covered?
Emily Oster (34:18):
Oh my goodness, Kim. Okay. How much time do we have in this podcast, <laugh>? Listen. So in pregnancy, discussions of alcohol for sure were kind of a big polarizing nature when it came to early childhood stuff. I think sleep training is probably the most polarizing or the most conflicting thing. It's interesting because I thought when I wrote crib sheet that breastfeeding would rise to the fore there. And I think that clearly that has some, that can be a quite polarizing topic. I think for whatever reason in the ways that I, the ways that I appear about that, it isn't that polarizing, but it's sleep training sort of took over there. So I mean there's a lot of aspects of parenting that are very polarizing. I think part of what happens is we want to do a good job, we want to do a good job and we want our choices to be right and we want them to be so right that they are right for everyone. And the recognition of this could be the right choice for me and not the right choice for someone else. And the fact that they did a different thing doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with my choice. That's just a really hard lesson in parenting. And when we don't learn that lesson, it's very easy to decamp into these groups and be like, you're not on my team. I'm on team sleep training and we're a win. And it's like, that's not, probably not super helpful.
Kim Rittberg (35:49):
Got it. So it really ends up being this whole thing. It's so funny, I'm, I don't really care what someone else does with their kid two states over. I only care about what I
Emily Oster (35:57):
Do. But on the internet people don't feel that way. Kim. People do not feel that way on the internet. You're right. They care a lot about what you do with your baby,
Kim Rittberg (36:05):
Right? You're right. I shouldn't tell people that I sleep trained at 12 weeks for both kids. So I won't, won't say that out loud. Okay. You might have said this before, but Mimi, this is slightly different. Do you ever have someone recognize you as a parenting data parenting expert at a time when you're kind of embarrassed doing something embarrassing in the supermarket or at a soccer game or whatever?
Emily Oster (36:27):
So the main place that people recognize me as a is on playgrounds and in the airport. And those are both times in which I am not doing what I view as a high end parenting. So in a playground, I'm always just on my phone because I feel that children should play alone but my kids are coming over, they're like, why don't you play with me? And I'm like, no, Instagram and just different stuff. And so people are like, oh, are you parenting expert? Yeah, your phone's the best thing. And then the other thing is that people will see me in the airport. I'm like, nobody's kids are good in the airport. You're either yelling, they want sugar, they don't wanna sit there. And I'm also a super anxious flyer, and so it's not anxious about flying, but it's anxious about being whatever travel makes me somewhat anxious. And so it's like I'm not at my best. And then people are like, oh my gosh. So I was like, yeah, hi. Like you must be so relaxed. Oh no, I'm not relaxed.
Kim Rittberg (37:28):
You're like, yeah, I read through all the data about flying and here I am, super chill,
Emily Oster (37:32):
<laugh>, super chill, super chill.
Kim Rittberg (37:35):
How much screen time do your kids have?
Emily Oster (37:38):
So my kids watch tell about 45 minutes of TV before dinner every day unless it conflicts with homework. So my older kid probably watches less than that because she has stuff to do, but they're allowed that time and they get a little bit of app time kind of here and there is a reward for, I don't know, different for doing other kinds of other pieces of their homework. So I don't know a good amount, a good amount of screen time. I feel
Kim Rittberg (38:12):
We're doing rapid fire professor, professor Emily Oster, who is the expert on not parenting. Parenting data.
Emily Oster (38:19):
Parenting data.
Kim Rittberg (38:20):
Alright, Emily. Rapid fire is breast best.
Emily Oster (38:24):
There are some small benefits to breastfeeding early on, but many of the claims that people make about breastfeeding, it'll make your kids smarter or thinner or they'll make them able to fly. Those are not supported in the data.
Kim Rittberg (38:37):
Okay? Kid can fly sleep training, amazing or terrible.
Emily Oster (38:42):
Sleep training does work for making your kids sleep better. It does not have negative long-term impacts on your kids in the data. It can work to improve parent sleep. It is not for everyone. It has to be something that you want to do.
Kim Rittberg (38:56):
Can you drink while you're pregnant?
Emily Oster (39:00):
The best data shows that small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy do not seem to negatively impact children. Not everyone will choose to drink during pregnancy, but that is what we see in data that comes from places like Europe where this is more common.
Kim Rittberg (39:16):
How many times does it take for your kid to eat a vegetable to be open to eat actually eating it again in the future?
Emily Oster (39:24):
About three. I mean, I think a rule of thumb is to offer a vegetables three to four times and that is how kids sort of start to develop a taste. So often they won't like it the first time, but they'll like it later
Kim Rittberg (39:37):
And is dip I I've read in your book dips Dips is the trick for vegetables.
Emily Oster (39:41):
Dips are very good for encouraging kids to try vegetables because yeah, they like the dip and then it gets them of accustomed to the flavor.
Kim Rittberg (39:49):
How much time is too much screen time?
Emily Oster (39:54):
So screen time is best thought of as is substitute for something else. So if your kid is spending nine hours a day washing screens, there are a lot of other things they're not doing with that time. If they're spending a half an hour a day or 45 minutes a day while you're cooking dinner when otherwise you would be screaming at them or they would be getting underfoot and getting in the oil then screens are a good alternative. It's really about thinking about what is the right balance of time relative to other things that they're doing. Not thinking about screens as something that is a good or a bad or has a specific limit
Kim Rittberg (40:28):
The right age for a kid to have a phone.
Emily Oster (40:32):
I am very skeptical about kids and social media. I think the evidence coming out is increasingly not encouraging. So I would really separate the kind of phone part from the social media part. There's not a concrete answer to either thing. Most kids are going to end up with a phone by about 12 these days. From my standpoint, neither of my kids has a phone. My daughter has one to call us in emergencies. I think she will and relatively soon have one that is usable for other things. But I am not going to let her be on social media for the foreseeable future.
Kim Rittberg (41:11):
What age is the right age for kids to be on social media?
Emily Oster (41:14):
I don't think we, I don't know data
Kim Rittberg (41:17):
Now.
Emily Oster (41:18):
No, there's definitely no data on that. I mean, think about, it's sort of new and the experiences kids are having are new. I mean, we have data from Facebook launching in 2007, which suggests that it increased depression among college students. So that was the Facebook of 2000 thousand seven.
Kim Rittberg (41:33):
And then there was that Instagram, the survey study about Instagram and eating disorders
Emily Oster (41:39):
And women. Yeah, I mean a lot of these things are really part of what's hard is a lot of these things are really hard to interpret. It's hard to know the causality, right? Is it that I'm looking at Instagram all the time because I'm already unhappy? Or am I becoming unhappy looking at Instagram all the time? I mean, I think that's really difficult to really to separate, but it makes me nervous as a person and as a mom.
Kim Rittberg (41:56):
So the right age for kids to be on social media is age 25,
Emily Oster (41:59):
Right?
Kim Rittberg (42:02):
So many amazing takeaways from this chat with Emily Oster. One of them is when you're trying to figure out what you wanna do in terms of your career, ask in a very concrete way, ask yourself what are the three things that are important for you to do every day to be happy? She says, basically, life is a bunch of Thursdays. So look at your best week and say, what's your optimal week in terms of what you were doing every hour of the day? Ask yourself also, if you had one more hour, how would you spend that hour? And you know what? It's totally okay if the answer is at work and ask for things like how much screen time is too much screen time, Emily says, think of the other things your kid might be doing instead of screen time. But overall, my biggest lesson from this fantastic chat is that we should all worry less.
We should be deliberate around our choices and have clarity around the nitty gritty, not just the theoretical on how we want our days to look and when we're making decisions. If we make our decisions with confidence that can help alleviate the stress around both parenting decisions and your home arrangements. And it'll give us more satisfaction and will feel less stressed and less conflicted. I love that You can get Emily Oster's newsletter on, it's called Parent Data and you can find her books on Amazon. It's all linked out on emilyoster.net and in our show notes. And here's when we feature a real mom life in its happiest, funniest, or grossest moments. This one is from Jacent Wamala, a licensed marriage and family therapist turn money mindset coach.
Jacent Wamala (43:41):
Hi, I'm Jacent Wamala, licensed marriage and family therapist turn money mindset coach. And the sweet moment that I can think of with my son who is six months old now, is really the book ends of the day when he wakes up and when he goes to sleep. I say this because it confirms why I started my business in the first place to help other women to have the freedom and flexibility financially to live life on their terms. And for me, it's really being present with my children and my family. And so being able to be the first face he sees when he wakes up smiling, which is so fun, and the last face he sees when he's going to sleep, knowing that he's cared about going to bed in ease and in peace with a routine that is consistent really makes me feel like I'm doing something right as far as being a parent personally. And it lets me know that what I'm doing is worthwhile because I get to help other women be able to create options and flexibility in their lives too.
Kim Rittberg (44:44):
Thank you so much for listening. We wanna hear from you. Tell us what topics you want us to cover and what questions you have for upcoming shows and experts. We will read everyone and we will use them. You can find us everywhere. Go to kimrittberg.com, scroll down to find the contact button, or you can DM me on Instagram at Kim Rittberg. Or you can leave your feedback right inside your review in the podcast app. Please follow the show in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave a review and a five star rating. And don't forget to share it with people who will find it valuable. It's truly meant to be a resource. And this is Mom's Exit interview. I'm your host and executive producer Kim Rittberg. The show is produced by Henry Street Media. John Horowitz is our editor, and Eliza Friedlander is our producer and publicist.