Transcript: The Economics of Parenting

This is an audio transcript of the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes podcast episode: ‘The Economics of Parenting’

Soumaya Keynes
When I got pregnant, I think I was gifted three copies of the same book. My friends know me pretty well, that they know I like economics. They know I like nutty discussions about what the evidence really says. And in that book Expecting Better really delivered those things. And so did the follow-up books. Today I’m going to talk to the author of those books and ask about the economics of parenting.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. In this episode, I’m talking to Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, CEO of ParentData and straight-up celebrity among all the parents I know. She is the author of a fourth book that has just come out, written with Nate Fox, called The Unexpected: Navigating Pregnancy During and After Complications. Emily, hello.

Emily Oster
Hello. Thanks so much for having me.

Soumaya Keynes
So my first question is: why do you need an economist to help think about parenting? I mean, I’ve been searching this stuff on the internet. Some of the pushback seems to be of the flavour “Is an economist really better than a health professional when it comes to thinking about this stuff?”

Emily Oster
So my expertise as an economist is in data. I am a health economist by topic, but a lot of my work is on statistical methods, and I think a lot about data and what we can learn from it and what we can’t learn from it, and what constitutes better versus worse data. So I am really interested in understanding what the data says about the questions that we have often in pregnancy and parenting. And it turns out that space of academic research is often subject to concerns about the quality of data. And so I think the analysis, the unexpected pieces that I bring to this are really diving deeply into what is the best data that we have, what can we really say, based on what we see in the evidence. And that’s where the expertise of an economist comes in. I would say the other piece is a lot of what I talk about is decision-making, again, decision-making being a core part of economics. So yeah, very clear. I’m not a doctor. And there are many things that one would want a doctor for. I see my role as helping people understand enough that their conversations with their doctor are more productive, and that they can navigate some of the questions that you wouldn’t necessarily raise as often with your doctor, but are more about your preferences, particularly in the early parenting space.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, OK. I mean, my big takeaway was just because something is published in an academic journal or even just because some kind of national authority is recommending it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the evidence base that all of that is based on is of the highest quality.

Emily Oster
Yeah, I think both of those things are true. There is a lot of work published in academic journals that I think is quite deeply flawed, and it has a lot of kinds of flaws. The one that I probably spend the most time on is the question of what’s correlation and what’s causation? And oft, a lot of our papers have the form of one group does one thing and one group does another thing. And we’re trying to compare the outcomes for their kids. But it turns out the groups are different in all kinds of ways other than the characteristic you’re interested in. So separating out that particular behaviour from any other overall features of the families is really, really hard. So that’s probably the thing I say the most is correlation is not causation. There are some other problems with literature also.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, why don’t we get to those. Because I now want to walk us through, I guess, the chronology of the child production process, because we’re just going to stick with weird economics terminology for my own amusement. So starting in the beginning of the process, and actually, this is a question that you don’t discuss much in your books, but it’s coming up a lot in my social circles. The first question is, do you want to have a child? Right? Does the data offer any guidance on that? How would you advise people making that decision?

Emily Oster
So Russ Roberts, who’s another economist, has a book called Wild Problems, which is about the kinds of questions that we ask ourselves that are not amenable to the cost-benefit analysis that economists like. For me, this is his most salient example of a wild problem, that it’s actually very difficult to use either data or are like ledger of positives, negatives, whatever decision tool you want to think about the question of whether to have a kid, because it is so difficult to describe both what’s hard about it and what’s joyful about it. So people ask me, should I have a kid? Should I have another kid? You know, what does the data say about that? I could tell you things about happiness after a kid, how we would analyse that and so on. But I actually don’t think that that’s a question very well-answered by data.

Soumaya Keynes
It tends to go down, right? Happiness goes down.

Emily Oster
It’s interesting. Yeah, so experienced happiness is lower. Marital happiness in particular is the lowest in the first year after you have a kid. And when you do these like momentary happiness studies, people aren’t always that happy when they’re actively parenting. But if you ask people what’s the most important thing to you, what’s the thing in your life that brings you the most joy and fulfilment, it’s their children. For most people. You know, that’s like the most, the modal answer. So that’s the challenge that like the changing the diaper and dealing with the tantrum, that’s really hard in the moment. But the love that you experience with a kid, difficult to do. It’s just difficult to describe. And so it’s a wild problem.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. OK, fine. That explains why I was kind of googling through your website.

Emily Oster
I’m not gonna tell you that with data. Nope, nope.

Soumaya Keynes
No, no, it was, it was very unhelpful. OK. Well, let’s move on to the next stage. Right. So supposing you’ve decided to have a child and as you were saying, you know, correlation is not causation. There are a lot of bad pieces of evidence out there that don’t actually tell you very much. What is your favourite? Right. So, what is your favourite example of this is a correlation. It is not causation. This is actually seems to have changed behaviour a lot, but really is a myth that should be busted in getting like how to get pregnant.

Emily Oster
So let me tell you, I think there’s a slightly different data issue that’s most salient in how to get pregnant, which is the question of what’s the relationship between age and fertility. So one of the things people are most commonly told is that after 35, it’s like, that’s it. Like you’re giving the impression that, you know, when you hit the age of 35, you fall off a fertility cliff and that’s it. You know, there’s a word. It’s advanced maternal age, geriatric pregnancy. There’s a lot of like, judgmental-sounding words about this. I think what that misses, and I talk about this a lot in Expecting Better, is that biological processes do not work like a cliff most of the time, and not in this case either. So your fertility is highest when you’re like 16 or 17. It’s declining over that entire period, but nothing sharp happens at the age of 35. You know, 34 and 35 are pretty similar. Thirty-five and 36 are pretty similar. So there’s a sense in which people think of the age cut-off as somehow meaningful when it is not. And that is a fallacy of maybe misunderstanding how biology works, but also how the data works. The reason we got to that point is because that’s a natural place to build the age patterns. So if you said, I’m going to analyse, you know, fertility over time, well, let me look at 20 to 25, 25 to 29, you know, 30 to 34, 35 to 39. You will see, you know, 35 to 39 is below 30 to 34 is like, oh, well, that means as soon as you hit 35, you’re in this new bucket. That’s not true. That’s just because we chose to bucket it like that. And some of what I’m doing is trying to help people understand, you know, where does data come from and where would we get a result like that, and why might you be led to think there was a cut-off even when there’s not?

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. So moving on in the process, now you’re pregnant, right. And so my main takeaways from expecting back to your first book were, don’t smoke. That’s bad. Don’t eat tuna. Which was really upsetting for me, is that was the one thing I craved when I was pregnant. Wash vegetables, don’t drink eight cups of coffee a day, and some drinking is OK. Give me your kind of one other one that’s really important that I’ve missed.

Emily Oster
Don’t go on bedrest. Bedrest is a very commonly for still quite commonly prescribed treatment for a variety of pregnancy complications that has basically no support in the data.

Soumaya Keynes
Oh, OK.

Emily Oster
It’s prescribed in about, you know, it’s about 20 per cent of cases for all kinds of different complications, threatened pre-term labour, things like that. And, you know, I think it’s one of those examples where the experience that you would have as a practitioner or that sort of people would have seems quite positive because most of the time when you have threatened pre-term labour, most of the time, you know, it doesn’t result like everything goes OK. So you put somebody on bedrest. Most of the time it goes OK. You sort of infer from that this is a good idea, but in fact it would have been OK anyway, you didn’t see the counterfactual. And that’s an example of where having a randomised trial is really, really valuable because you see what happens to the other group. And it turns out in that case the same thing happens to them.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. So when thinking about all of these recommendations, the thing that I had kind of in the back of my mind was how do we distinguish between absence of evidence when, look, the data is just really bad. We can’t say if this thing is bad for your baby and evidence of absence. Right? Evidence that actually we know this thing isn’t going to harm your baby. Could you talk about how to tell between those two things?

Emily Oster
Part of the answer is that we can never be 100 per cent sure of proof of safety, I think, and that’s like an important thing to keep in mind in all places. So even for something where we have a huge amount of, you know, randomised trial evidence, imagine the largest randomised trial, you know, where they it was really good. There were hundreds of thousands of people. You did the intervention to one group and not the other group. You could still worry. Well, what if we did that trial with a million people? What if we did it with 3mn people? Is there something small we’re missing? So when we’re looking for proof, like no person could ever be harmed by this or ever benefited, we’re never going to get it.

So what we’re looking for in data is kind of where is the, I think, of a preponderance of evidence and sort of distinguishing between places where we have a bunch of evidence from different places. Sometimes there are different types of evidence that would suggest that something is safe within the bounds of understanding that we’re never going to be able to say it’s literally impossible this could ever harm anybody, because that’s just not in the scope of what evidence could produce.

Within that paradigm, it’s quite easy to distinguish between places where we have better and worse evidence. And actually one place I would pull in here is the difference between, you know, how much evidence we see about alcohol, like occasional alcohol consumption in pregnancy relative to how much evidence we see about marijuana consumption. I talk a lot in Expecting Better about, you know, what do we see about occasional light drinking during pregnancy, particularly in later trimesters? And there is a huge amount of evidence on that that suggests that we do not see negative impacts. And that comes from, you know, comparing women who drink to women who don’t. It comes from further controlling for the behaviour of their partners to try to get sort of difference out demographics, just like, you know, many, many, many studies have thousands and thousands and thousands of hundreds of thousands of women that kind of point in that direction.

Could you say again, like, what if we had 7mn women? And what if we had the entire population in the world? What if we had the largest randomised trial in the universe? Could we see something different? Some small impacts. I think the answer is, you know, maybe that’s true of almost anything, but there’s a lot of evidence there.

And then you compare that to something like marijuana use, where we have a little bit of evidence, but it’s still the case in most places. Until recently, marijuana was illegal. People who used it were quite differently selected, or at least people who admitted to using it were quite differently selected than those who did not. So that’s a place where we’re getting more evidence. But if you said like, how much do we have? The answer would be like maybe at one study from Canada. And, you know, maybe it looks a little reassuring on some things, a little less reassuring on others. And that’s where I think you want to go back to, like, well, would I be worried about this? And with something like marijuana, like, yeah, there’s animal model reasons that you might be worried about that. And then the sort of it’s that absence of evidence, but the quality of the evidence is sufficiently poor that maybe one wants to default to, you know, this is the sort of safer option or the option that we’re more confident is not an issue.

But, you know, these are hard questions, because I think the reality is that our evidence is never as good as we think it is, and yet we still have to make some choices.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, let’s talk now about complications in pregnancy. This is the topic of your new book. And so mostly here, you’re talking about kind of bad but thankfully fairly low probability events. So just thinking about myself personally, I am the kind of person who would just rather have all the information, right? I would like to know the chances of this very grisly, awful thing happening and the chances of that terrible thing happening. And armed with that, I can kind of, I guess, feel a bit less anxious about the unknown. But I have been told that I’m a bit strange. And many people don’t want that. Where are the cases where actually less is more? And how strange am I?

Emily Oster
So when we thought about writing this new book, which is really about pregnancy complications, and it really is about the things that can happen that are hard, which actually do happen for about 50 per cent of pregnancies. So it’s while these complications are individually rare, they’re kind of globally not rare. People will ask me, you know, do you recommend I read this book before I get pregnant? And I will tell them no. For most people who have not experienced one of these complications, this is going to provoke anxiety because as we know this from economics is like these theories of salience. Like once you start talking about something, it’s probability looms in your mind, right? You then all of a sudden you can’t think about other things. And that can be quite debilitating, particularly in cases where there’s just very, very small chance you will experience that.

In the new book, our idea is that you’ve picked up this book because something bad happened, you are already anxious, and they’re providing the context for understanding what happened, for understanding its risk of recurrence, for understanding what kind of treatments are, for thinking about the conversations. Those are things you need which can lower anxiety because you’re coming in already heightened in terms of that. So I think your approach of like, I want to know everything, even if nothing has happened, is pretty, pretty atypical.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, great. Well, I’ll take it.

Emily Oster
We’re in good company.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, great. OK. Well, I want to move on now to the next bit, which is the babies come out and it’s the bringing up of the child part. And so your next book after Expecting Better was Cribsheet. And for me, the main takeaways were don’t kill yourself if breastfeeding doesn’t work for you, do make the baby sleep on its back. Sleep training is fine. TV is maybe helpful to educate kids after the age of three. Before that man, what’s your top one that I’ve missed out?

Emily Oster Peanuts. Early allergen introduction is a good idea, but if I think about the overall message of Cribsheet, I think a lot of it is that there are many good ways to parent. So there are many fewer things in that book where relative to Expecting Better, where it’s like, really, this is a good idea, or, you know, we can be confident that X or Y, a lot of it is there’s some small benefits or some small cause. Here’s how to evaluate the trade-offs and make the choice that works for you. One that is not like that, that I do come down on. You know you should do this is introducing allergens early because it turns out that that reduces the risk your kids will have an allergy.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Great. You’d be very proud of me. My son gets approximately one kilogramme of almond butter, every every evening. Yeah. Is that ... is that not good?

Emily Oster
That’s definitely recommended. 

Soumaya Keynes  
That’s great. OK. So one of the things I very quickly discovered after having my child is that the national guidance on a lot of issues varies a lot, and I may or may not have done a bit of kind of international arbitrage, deciding that I was French for some purposes and American for other purposes, and British for other purposes. So I became very French when it came to sharing a room with my baby. In Britain, the guidance is they have to show up to six months. I did not do that, but I was very British when it came to sterilising bottles every time I used them up to a year, which was a lot. So my first question is, what is the wildest piece of kind of national level advice to new parents that you’ve heard of?

Emily Oster
The American Academy of Pediatrics comes out with a lot of guidelines, some of which make quite a lot of sense, like put your baby to sleep on your back. But in their latest Safe Sleep guidelines, they say that your baby should not wear a hat.

Soumaya Keynes
While sleeping? Why would they need to wear a hat while sleeping?

Emily Oster
Because their head gets cold. Babies ... OK, so first of all, you could say, why do babies need to wear a hat? I think that’s fair. They might not need to wear a hat, but the AAP doesn’t say your baby doesn’t need a hat, so don’t bother wasting your money on hats. Which I think would be a completely reasonable thing to say. What they say is hats are a suffocation risk which is supported by literally nothing. I mean, like, I get quite animated about this because I think part of the problem is we give new parents so many pieces of information and so many things to do without sorting them. Right? So we give them, you know, here are 4bn Safe Sleep guidelines starting with, you know, put your baby to sleep on your on their back. Don’t sleep with them in a chair. You know, don’t sleep in a, in an armchair and also don’t have them wear a hat. And when we give people this kind of list, how do they know which of the things are most important? You know, where are we telling them? Look, hats are kind of made up, but really don’t sleep with them in an armchair. And we’re not doing that kind of sorting. So we’re just leaving people often in a situation in which they really can’t do all of the things. It’s just like literally impossible. And we haven’t told them, well, if you can’t do the first best, what’s the second best? Instead, we’ve just said, well, if you can’t do the best possible thing that we’ve said, then just forget it. You’re a loser. Try again with the next baby or whatever is that. They we just aren’t helping. We’re not helping.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. I mean, it did feel like, I guess going back to the sterilisation thing in the kind of cost-benefit analysis, the cost to parents’ time wasn’t factored in at all. That, but also just on the sterilisation point, I guess my follow-up question was, is there ever a justification for international differences in these guidelines? Because you know, the thing at the back of my mind was, well, maybe there’s different water treatment in the UK, in the US, and so maybe the bottles are dirtier here or something. Does that make any sense?

Emily Oster
No. I mean there are situations in which there would be differences. So for example, the advice to boil water before use it for formula. That is completely ridiculous advice in places with potable water, with clean water. So the US, UK, developed countries, that is just a thing that doesn’t make any sense to tell people to do, it just wastes a lot of parents’ time and has no benefit. But that would be excellent advice in developing countries where the water is not safe to drink. And actually an interesting example of that, just like to nerd out for one second, is what the WHO says about formula versus animal milk. So in the US and I think in the UK, the recommendation is through a year, kids should get either breast milk or formula. And so if you’re aren’t breastfeeding you should give them formula up until a year. And then if you’re not breastfeeding, if you’re still breastfeeding, just keep breastfeeding if you want. But if you’re not breastfeeding, then in a year you would switch to cow’s milk. That’s at least the US guidance. So the WHO guidance has become a bit more nuanced. So what they say is that after six months, basically it would be OK to use either animal milk or formula. And the reason that that may make sense as guidance outside of places with clean water is that animal milk may actually be safer than formula made with water that isn’t safe. So that’s a place where some people have come up and say, well, the WHO says it’s not important to give formula for a year. That’s not really what they’re saying. What they’re saying is that there’s a trade-off. There are enormous benefits potentially to formula over milk. And those benefits could be outweighed by water quality. But that would be a different guidance in a place with clean water.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Well, look, I want to move us on to your next book, which was The Family Firm. And so now you’re talking about the older kids. My kind of key takeaways from that were one, sleep is really important. Two, the effects of mothers working full-time are pretty small. Limit screen time before going to bed. Having dinner together is nice. But if you don’t, you know, some kind of engagement between parents and children or the children and an adult is good. What’s the most important one I’ve missed?

Emily Oster
I think those are the main data takeaways. From the book, those are the big ones that mean a lot of what I’m focusing on in that book is trying to help people make better decisions. I think part of what happens as your kids age is the problems that you’re facing up against become more varied. So the sets of issues, the things that are occupying the time of parents, they’re just more different. And I think what many families are missing is a structure to decide on their priorities as a family and a structure for making bigger or harder decisions. And without those deliberate structures, we can find ourselves, particularly with older, busy kids, in lifestyles that we don’t love.

So some of this book is a reaction to people who are like, I hate all the travel sports I’m doing and all of the activities, and I hate everything about our weekends, it’s the worst. But what could I do about it? I just wanted to step back and be like, well, you know, you could quit and maybe you could sit down and think about what do you want? What do you want your weekend to look like? And how could you get there? Because there’s no rule that says you have to be in this schedule that you have.

And so that book is as much about decision-making and structures as it is about the data. But I will say my biggest data takeaway is sleep. That’s the one I’m constantly harping on. And I think it relates to these other things. So I think our older kids are not sleeping enough because they are doing too much other stuff. If your kid, if your 11-year old gets home at 10 at night from their afternoon activities and they still have homework to do, I can guarantee you they’re not getting the amount of sleep that they need to be a functional kid who is doing their best in their life.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, well, that seems pretty, you know, straightforward to aim for. OK, but I guess maybe slightly related. This has obviously been a huge topic recently. Where do you stand on phones?

Emily Oster
Well, how much time do we have? No.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Would you ban them in schools?

Emily Oster
Yes. OK. So that’s a ... It’s a very concrete good question. I think, absolutely, I would ban phones in schools. I see no evidence. And I’ve spent a lot of time both looking at the evidence and talking to people about this. I see simply no reason that kids should need to have phones in schools. And I think that many people agree with that.

A more complicated question is how do you manage phones with your kids. In the data, we certainly see some evidence of phones and particularly social media having negative consequences for girls. But it’s not all girls. There’s a lot more heterogeneity in that than you might think. Some kids definitely benefit from the kinds of connections they make. So I don’t think of phones as an all or nothing. It feels to me like a place where there’s huge value in trying to get to good phone hygiene with your kids in a deliberate way. You’re going to give your kid a phone. They don’t get to decide what they do with it or how long they can be on it, at least initially. It’s your phone, and if you come into it with that frame of I’m going to set the rules for how many hours you can be on the phone and whether it lives in your room. It should not live in your room at night. I’m going to decide what apps you can have on the phone, particularly if you’re giving this to, you know, 12 or 13-year old kid. You’re the decider and we need more of that frame on the phone conversation.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I kind of want someone to parent me with my phone.

Emily Oster
I totally want that. It’s my daughter. Like, the thing is, I feel like I’ve done an amazing job with my 13-year old. Except she’s just like, why are you on your phone? I didn’t have this kind of parenting.

Soumaya Keynes
Do you have an ideal age, like a minimum age, that you would give the phone to a child?

Emily Oster
Did we have to be realistic, I think it becomes quite difficult in our current moment for your seventh or eighth grader not to have a phone.

Soumaya Keynes
That’s what, like, 11 or 12?

Emily Oster
Mmm, 12 or 13. So I think in an ideal world, maybe we’d wait until that. That’s actually pretty old. And in my view I would wait as long as possible for social media.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Well let’s go to a break now. But when I get back, I want to ask Emily about how to make all this data that we’ve been talking about better.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, we are back from the break. So before we get on to making data better, I have a question about which of your books is most successful because I have a really strong prior on this, which is that it’s Expecting Better because that’s when people have time to actually read it. Is that right?

Emily Oster
Yes, you are right. So Cribsheet and Expecting Better come close actually. So because I think a lot of ... I think you’re absolutely right. That it is the time that is constrained. And when people are pregnant they are, particularly for the first time they are reading and reading and reading. They’ll read anything. And when you have a kid, you don’t have as much time. I think a lot of people read Cribsheet before they have the baby, and so we get a little bit of their time there. I think it’s much harder to sell a book about older kids when people are busy and they don’t want to read about what it might be doing wrong.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I’ve noticed those time constraints myself. Yes. OK. OK. Well, now my final couple questions are about how to make the data better. And so actually one thing that I really appreciated from your newsletter, one of my favourite posts, was when you surveyed your readers to ask about sleep training and kind of gathered data on what was most common in terms of when people did it. Is, is that something that you’re trying to do a lot, kind of generate data from the people engaging with your work?

Emily Oster
Yeah, we try to do more of that. I mean, I think what’s challenging is of course that’s not research data. And so it’s sort of, it’s not always the kind of data I want, which is like the randomised trial of this, you know, this, that and the other thing. But I think it’s probably undervalued in terms of the benefit for people, because seeing the range of how people are doing their parenting is often quite helpful in understanding almost the range of normal. So we’ve done some of that sleep training. We did a big survey about sex, which people wonder how much sex other people are having.

Soumaya Keynes
How much sex all other people are having.

Emily Oster
And I mean, like about the same amount as you. So I don’t know, we were trying to think about sort of when people with kids and like the modal is like once or twice a month in that range, but it is a huge range. And I think that was some of it was sort of surfacing, like many people who say they never have sex, there’s a small number of people who say they have it every day, like not many, like we call those liars. You know, let’s not be judgmental. You never know. So, yes, I mean, I think that there is a lot of scope for using data from parents collected in various ways, and we can do some of that. But actually, there’s many increasingly large numbers of either companies or mostly companies who are collecting data that I think actually quite, maybe quite useful in answering some of the questions that people have, particularly around things like sleep and breastfeeding. You know, there’s apps that are connected to your breast pump and those produced good data.

Soumaya Keynes
Would you do any of your own research using some of that data?

Emily Oster
I’ve worked with some of those guys. I’m thinking about some of these questions. There’s a few things ongoing and in which we’re trying to again, think about questions.

Soumaya Keynes
Can you give me a sneak preview? What are the kind of questions that you’re asking?

Emily Oster
No.

Soumaya Keynes
You can’t? Oh.

Emily Oster
I can’t, I can’t, but I’m ... There are people I’m talking to you about questions around breastfeeding and then questions around sleep. Those are the best. OK.

Soumaya Keynes
That seem like pretty pretty big ones. I guess I’ll watch that space. OK, so final question. You know, one of the big themes, is just how bad the data is that at all stages, I kind of got the hunch that the data gets worse as the children get older, partly just because of the range of outcomes that you care about seems to expand exponentially. The question, though, is how can we make that better? Right. So not thinking about companies, but thinking about regulations around pregnancy, thinking about, you know, funding. Who needs to change to make this not the kind of black hole of science and to shed more light on these super important questions?

Emily Oster
Money. It’s just money. I mean, all of this kind of research takes funding. And if we think about where does funding come from for academic research, it mostly comes from two sources for sort of medical research. It comes from companies, drug companies in particular. But in a lot of the cases we’re talking about in this sort of early childhood parenting pregnancy space, there isn’t an obvious commercial usage. Let me give you a very concrete example: mastitis, which is a very common complication of breastfeeding. There is an open question of the right way to treat this. Like what is the right way, if you’re sort of starting to get mastitis, like, what should you do to prevent it from becoming something you would need antibiotic treatment for? And there’s some very basic questions like, is it better to put heat or ice? That is super amenable to a randomised trial. And yet to do a trial like that, it costs money. Where is the company that’s interested in funding that trial? I mean, there’s no product. You’re not going to sell ice. You know, it’d be like, well, we have these boobs, you know, these icy boobs you put over your ... I mean, that’s not, that’s not a product that’s got a lot of life.

Soumaya Keynes
I sure there’s someone listening to this podcast who’s going to ...

Emily Oster
Yeah, like, I’m going to make I know it’s hot. I mean, it’s cool. It could be iced or hot. I can see a lot of, you know, the different sizes. Anyway, there’s some opportunities, but it’s limited for research like that. I think the funding is really going to have to come from basically governmental funding. And actually the Biden administration has now put a bunch of money into women’s health research. And I’m hoping that that can move in some of these directions. But really, it is that kind of funding from either government or from like other kinds of foundation funding that I think would be most relevant and important for setting these kind of outcomes.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Right. Final bit of the show I want to do a very stressful quick fire round. You’re going to tell me true or false. So we don’t know because there’s no evidence. OK. You’re ready?

Emily Oster
Yeah.

Soumaya Keynes
Am I ready? Eating cauliflower while breastfeeding will give your child gas.

Emily Oster
False. That’s false.

Soumaya Keynes
Amazing news. Are sleep regressions real?

Emily Oster
So, yes. In the sense that kids sometimes stop sleeping as well as they did before. But no, in the sense that there isn’t something. Exactly four months every kid does this thing.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Do sleep regressions mean that my child is sure to become an even bigger genius than they already are?

Emily Oster
No, false.

Soumaya Keynes  
Ugh. OK. Does anything actually help with teething other than we call it Calpol here in the UK, but, I guess Tylenol? Is that what you call it?

Emily Oster
Frozen bagels.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK. Interesting.

Emily Oster
Chewing on cold things.

Soumaya Keynes
Montessori methods: marketing genius or real?

Emily Oster
Marketing genius.

Soumaya Keynes
Acid. Like consuming acidic things will make your child puke a lot.

Emily Oster
I don’t know.

Soumaya Keynes
Whoa, we got you! (Laughter) OK. All right. Can a kid get sunburnt through a car’s glass window?

Emily Oster
No. The car’s glass window blocks the UV portions of the light.

Soumaya Keynes
I don’t need to use soap on my baby.

Emily Oster
True.

Soumaya Keynes
How old? When do I have to use soap? I only use soap.

Emily Oster
Good to use soap on hands because it kills germs.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not a savage like, come on, I use soap on hands. 

Emily Oster
If you need it to remove the dirt. Like, once they get to puberty and we have a lot of oils and stuff, it’s a good idea to use soap to remove those.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, but not for a while.

Emily Oster
No.

Soumaya Keynes  
OK, great. Well, this has been a wonderful personal consultation service to me. Emily, thanks so much for joining me. (laughter)

Emily Oster
Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight.

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Soumaya Keynes
That is all for this week. You have been listening to The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. This episode was produced by Edith Rousselot, with original music from Breen Turner. It is edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. I’m Soumaya Keynes. Thanks for listening.

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