Poseidon is the god of the sea, Dionysus of wine and merrymaking, and Emily Oster? She’s the god of parenting. An economics professor at Brown University, Oster has built a massive and loyal audience by providing overwhelmed parents with the information and data they need to make solid and sound parenting decisions in a very confusing world. Her first book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, sold over a million copies and was translated into 19 languages, unseating the classic What to Expect When You’re Expecting as a fixture on many...
Latest episodes
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45 min
Episode Feature: How Camp Teaches Kids to Ditch Their Phones
Hi Raising Parents listeners—we’ve got a special bonus episode I’m excited to share with you from Emily Oster’s feed, ParentData. It’s all about the greatness—and importance—of sum…
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35 min
Episode Feature: ‘My So-Called Midlife’
We have a special bonus episode for the Raising Parents feed. It’s an episode of “My So-Called Midlife” by Reshma Saujani and Lemonada Media. Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls…
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50 min
Ep 8: Should You Have Kids?
For most of human history, having kids wasn’t much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a couple of options: Have child…
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51 min
Ep 7: How Important is Marriage?
The share of children in America growing up in single-parent families has tripled since 1950—from 10 percent to 30 percent. Children in single-parent families are three times as li…
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52 min
Ep 6: Are Smartphones Stealing Childhood?
In today’s world, many parents feel like we need our kids to have phones. We tell ourselves it’s for their safety—they may need it while walking to a friend’s house or when going o…
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46 min
Ep 5: Are Boys Being Left Behind?
Across the board in most advanced countries, girls and women are outpacing boys and men. Nowhere is this more stark than in education. When Title IX was passed in the U.S., the sha…
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1 h 07
Ep 4: Are We Overmedicating Kids?
Kids and teens today are more diagnosed than ever, across the board, whether it’s a disorder like ADHD or a mental health condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Say you’re 1…
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59 min
Ep 3: Are We Feeding Kids the Wrong Foods?
In January 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics surprised doctors and parents by changing its guidelines on treating childhood obesity to include the use of popular weight-loss…
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49 min
Ep 2: Have We Forgotten How to Discipline?
There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they’ve changed wildly in America over the decades. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the old school, 1950s approach: s…
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47 min
Ep 1: Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?
When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their…
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8 min
Introducing: Raising Parents
Raising Parents with Emily Oster premiers Wednesday, September 18, 2024.