The Most Important Job in the World

I had two negronis before I took a pregnancy test. Is baby okay?

Accidentally ate Brie cheese while pregnant! What to do? 

What if I went in a hot tub for just five minutes at 16 weeks pregnant? Did the fetus melt?

Had turkey sandwich at the airport. Do I have listeria?

Forgot to take prenatal vitamins for three months. Will my baby be less smart?

What if my water breaks in the shower? Will I know it happened?

One day past due date. Should I go for an induction?

Two days past due date. Should I call the doctor?

Three days past due date. Should I eat dates to start labor?

Seven days past due date. Do some babies just never come out!?

My closest friend during my first pregnancy was the search bar of Google.

I had no friends to ask—I was 27; my friends were years away from having kids. My own mother couldn’t remember so many years back. Besides, she advised: “We were allowed to eat deli meats back then!” 

So I’d frantically type my questions, and Google would present me with an array of unsettling and often conflicting answers from Reddit and British mommy forums circa 2005 (thank you, Mumsnet).

Then, Emily Oster fell into my lap. 

I don’t remember how or when, but a copy of the economist’s book of pregnancy wisdom, Expecting Better, landed in my apartment, and it is no understatement to say: It saved me.

At last, I had answers. Scientific answers. Data-backed answers. Answers based on peer-reviewed evidence. For a math-major married to an engineer, my husband and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Most importantly: I could finally stop asking the waiter if the cheese in the salad was pasteurized, which was a win for everyone who dined with me that year. (Not once did the waiter know the answer.)

It wasn’t just me. For millions of women all over the world (the book has been translated into 19 languages), Oster was a godsend. She wasn’t a doctor; she was better than one. Doctors often tell you what to do. Emily tells you how to think—how to weigh pros and cons, how to evaluate different types of studies, how to discern good evidence from bad evidence, when to actually worry, and when to chill out. Most importantly, she reminded me that I had choices during this bewildering and daunting time. I wasn’t just hurtling forward, alone, on a nine-month train ride.

Eventually, I got to a place, thanks to Emily, where I didn’t need Emily anymore. I was no longer consumed by the crippling anxiety of new parenthood, and I was starting to develop real confidence as a mother.

Then came 2020. My daughter was just a month shy of 1 year old when Covid hit. And I—along with millions of parents—was thrust into uncharted territory. Science suddenly felt politicized. And politicians and public health officials offered confusion rather than clarity and comfort. Into the fray stepped Emily, who had the guts to say what so many of us were intuiting: that school lockdowns will harm children, that masking 2-year-olds was foolish, and that schools aren’t super-spreaders. She didn’t approach these subjects with partisan rage, but with her characteristic calm and sobriety. (These days, she’s finally getting credit for being right.)

Today, I have two awesome kids and a third on the way. The questions swirling in my head as I fall asleep at night are now much deeper than “can I have sushi while pregnant?” ChatGPT can’t answer them.

I’m thinking about things like: How do I raise an independent and self-sufficient child in an era where we don’t even let our kids walk to the mailbox alone? How do I teach my children to be respectful? Are my parents right that we’re too soft on kids these days? How can I resist screens when everyone around me gives in? Why do so many kids have diagnoses these days? Are they real? Why are so many boys taking medication for ADHD? Why are so many teen girls unhappy and anxious—and how can I prevent my daughter from becoming one of them? How do I make sure my kids turn out to be confident, happy, successful adults? 

No one has really answered these questions, although there are plenty of momfluencers on Instagram trying to convince me that they have. Every day, I encounter a river of content from “parenting experts” who say that the answer to all of my questions is to spend every waking, nonworking hour with my children, attending to their every need with kindness and thoughtfulness and the wisdom of 12 TikTok videos, asking my kids how they feel about themselves, how they feel about us, how I feel about them, preparing them to be the next Chopin, all while making a roast chicken and green beans and a side of toxin-free, goat milk eczema cream, and never, ever raising my voice.

Parenting in 2024 has become an all-consuming obsession. But the paradox is that our kids are, by many measures, worse off today than 30 years ago. They are more anxious than ever. They’re more depressed than ever. They’re more medicated than ever. Kids’ reading and math scores haven’t recovered since their decline during the pandemic. Childhood obesity has risen to 19.7 percent in America, where the average child spends 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment each day. More kids are being raised without two parents in the home than ever before. And just a few weeks ago, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory, warning that parents are more stressed, worried, overwhelmed, and lonely than ever.

All of this leaves many of us wondering: What’s going on? How worried should we be about our kids? And what should we be doing, as parents, to change course, before it’s too late?

Luckily, I’m not only a mom with Emily Oster books on the shelf. I also make podcasts here at The Free Press. So we called up Emily and did just that.

Over the next eight episodes of our new series, Raising Parents with Emily Oster, Emily will bring her trusted voice to the most challenging and controversial parenting questions today. You’ll hear from dozens of experts, journalists, doctors, psychologists, and researchers including Dr. Becky Kennedy, Jonathan Haidt, Pamela Druckerman, Richard Reeves, Hanna Rosin, Abigail Shrier, Bryan Caplan, and Christine Emba, alongside those we most relate to: ordinary parents and kids, including 10-year-old Rafi, who is the only kid in his class who walks to school by himself; 18-year-old Ruby, who resisted peer pressure and refused to get a phone; and 6-year-old Asa, who really, really doesn’t like girls.  

Parenting—making choices about how to raise our kids—is perhaps the most high-stakes thing we do in this life. At The Free Press, we believe that parents, armed with the best information, can and should be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. 

That’s why we are so excited for you to hear Raising Parents. Episode 1—“Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?”—is out today. Listen and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

And if you like what you hear, let us know. Write to us at Parenting@TheFP.com and share your thoughts on this episode. Can’t wait to hear from you. 

Candace Mittel Kahn is an executive producer at The Free Press. 

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