(CNN) – Caring for younger children is often intensely physical, but with older children it can be intensely emotional. Why? Because there are many decisions to be made, and in a world where the middle class is shrinking, house prices are rising, and the social, political, and natural climate is hectic, everything is at stake.
For those of us who are disorganized, inconsistent, suffer from extreme burnout, have little time, money, and patience, or simply have school-age children, Emily Oster’s new book, “The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years“aims to help navigate the overwhelming pressures of parenting in the 21st century.
Economist Emily Oster’s book (pictured) is geared toward helping parents learn to make decisions for their families.
Should you start your child in kindergarten on time, or wait a year for him to be the oldest in the class? (Starting a child earlier means they might one day have slightly higher test scores … but it predicts worse performance in school.) Extracurricular? How many? How do you find a good school and how does that affect your earning potential? What is a good school”? How does a parent’s career affect things like test scores or obesity? When should children learn to read?

A father and his son read a book lying on the floor of their house.
The way to start, he advises, is to understand your own values, and there is a workbook to help you figure them out. When a family is faced with a big choice, he suggests a method called “The Four Fs”: ask the question, look up the facts, make the final decision, and follow up. Learning to make decisions with both data and business models takes initial time, but makes the process easier later on.
Oster’s method is not so much about making the “right” decision as it is about making a good decision for your family. After all, the answers to questions like when to give your child a phone or send it to sleep camp can vary from child to child, even within the same family.
CNN spoke to Oster about decision-making in the age of “snowplow” parenting, in which parents try to remove obstacles rather than teach their children how to get around them, as well as different ways to achieve a happy home. .
This conversation was lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: You claim that parenting in the 21st century is an exercise in “extreme logistical complexity.” What does that mean?
Emily Oster: When you cross the threshold of school-age children and all of a sudden your kids do things outside of school, you end up in a situation where surprisingly much of your day is logistical management: scheduling activities, driving, figuring out when it is. bedtime or how much sleep children need.
I think, in a way, this is different from how it was when I was a kid. There were fewer structured after-school activities and more unstructured free time, which may or may not be good, but did not require the kind of logistical management that characterizes this age of parenthood.
CNN: You say it’s not about what decision to make, but how to make it. Can you explain it?
Oster: The questions that people face are really different, and the answers can really be different, depending on your family, depending on which child is in your family, depending on all kinds of things. And it is difficult to know if you have made the right decision, because in some of these decisions we worry that if I do not do the right thing, something bad will happen in the long term. But you won’t find out about that until a long time in the future. There is no immediate answer.
We look for how we can think about making good decisions in the face of that uncertainty and that lack of immediate feedback. And much of the book focuses on how you can tell that you have made a good decision, and distinguish that from having made the right decision. You will never know if you made the right decision. But you can be sure that you made the decision correctly and that it was a thoughtful decision.
CNN: To what extent is this business-oriented parental decision-making model applicable?
Oster: This approach is best suited for time-constrained individuals who face many limitations. A big part of this is taking advantage of the time in the moments when you have it to make decisions that later allow you to make other decisions more quickly. Because we are busy, because we are limited in various ways, we make decisions on the sidelines, the moment they arise.
If your child says, “Can I do this after school?” And in the moment, your son is complaining. You are busy. You try to deal with his other brother. And you rush in and agree to him doing gymnastics after school with his best friend. But what you discover is that after-school gymnastics is actually an impressive break from routine, and it’s really hard to handle. You saved yourself a bit of time at first by not thinking carefully, but was it a good decision?
You wasted a lot more time afterwards and some resources and money etc.
CNN: Why are extracurricular activities important? Based on the data you have collected, it seems that what children do, in terms of physical or brain development, matters less than whether they have a sense of community or social belonging.
Oster: When people talk about this in the common realm, I think they have this pre-professional feeling that “my son should do this because it is going to lead to this kind of scholarship.” Or that they have to study music because it will make them good at math and then being good at math will take them to this or that place. Extracurricular activities are often discussed as a different way to achieve goals.
But when you dig into the literature and think about what it has to offer, most people don’t go to college because they like to play a lot of sports. What we do see in these extracurricular activities is the value of offering a set of peers, the social-emotional benefits of making children happy or feeling more secure. Children benefit from feeling like they fit in. But not all children are going to feel this way at school or in their primary group of peers. Things that happen outside of that are another way to get those benefits.
CNN: What do you notice in terms of changes in parenting in the era of the pandemic?
Oster: We are in an interesting moment right now. As people begin post-pandemic reintegration, if the delta variant allows it, there are many families where people did less things in the last year. There is an opportunity to think, OK, let’s add a few things again. Do we want to add it all? Or was it really too much? Do we want our children to spend more time of the day, week or month without structure and get bored and play in the yard? Many people wonder how many things are good. Will we be like before, with weekend soccer tournaments, or will we do less? The jury is not sure about it.
I think people have come to realize the value of face-to-face school for their children in a way that perhaps we hadn’t thought much about before. And I think that, especially for a set of parents who previously would have avoided screen time, it has arrived, and it will not go away.
CNN: You focus a lot on individual family decisions, but what kind of changes do we need at the political level to support families and give them options?
Oster: It is clear that the set of child care options that people have is not enough. There are some ways that parenting is difficult that we could probably improve. Policies could include things like flexible work hours and government-subsidized daycare.
CNN: What have you learned about highly educated women who work outside the home and have families? I have heard that they are the most unhappy.
Oster: It’s a bit more nuanced than that. What the data tells us is that having a family can bring some happiness, and that having a job can bring some happiness. But if you have both together, you don’t have more happiness.
I think part of that is that people are tired, and they are limited. This is more true in the case of women, who tend to do the second shift, raising children and doing housework. And that can be exhausting and make people feel resentful.
CNN: Sometimes in families we micromanage kids or partners in a way that we would never do at work. You emphasize that if you have transferred some responsibilities, do not criticize the method or the result. Why?
Oster: The reason why it is important is precisely because of the imbalance that exists in a home between the amount of work that people do. Part of the difficult thing about being a person who does a lot of things at home is that not only are you doing what needs to be done, but you have the knowledge of what needs to be done.
There is a difference between cooking dinner, literally having the ingredients ready in front of you, and cooking and all the other things behind it, planning dinner and buying the ingredients. There is a complete task, and then there is the homework part. In the book I talk about the idea of ​​transferring the whole task and saying, “If you are in charge of something, then you are in charge of everything.”
If you’ve told someone they’re going to do all of those things, then it’s really counterproductive to micromanage every stage of it, to stand on them to tell them the things to order for dinner. If you’ve told someone to plan dinner for Wednesday, what you should do is show up at the table that Wednesday and eat dinner. And that should be all your work. But it is very difficult in the moment not to micromanage.
CNN: This book is about making good decisions, but how is it helpful to less privileged people who have fewer options?
Oster: There are two parts to this book. One is about data and there are some types of questions like “How many hours should my children sleep?” or “What is the best way for children to learn to read?” which are not so much about options, but about learning something from the data. But I also think that good decision-making tools shouldn’t be the privilege of a specific group of people. No matter what situation you find yourself in, deliberate decision making has its value.
Lisa Selin Davis is the author of “TOMBOY: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different “.
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