Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know

"This is the only book on my list that is a self-help book. It’s not about how we need to improve our systems to give all children the kinds of opportunities they’ll need to thrive in adulthood, which is by far the most important problem facing parents today. But I love this book and her other books , because they’re fun and useful and they’re doing something profound in a low-key way. You feel like you’re talking to your brilliant older sister who has taken you under her wing and is giving you all her best advice. Oster brings to the table three ingredients that have been missing from parent advice books for a long time, but that are common in good research by economists. The first ingredient is a focus on causation versus correlation. Oster doesn’t just look at studies that say, ‘Hey, if you do this with your kids, they tend to have better outcomes.’ She’s more of a connoisseur. She looks to see if certain parental behaviours are not only correlated with child outcomes, but cause those outcomes, and she explains why that changes your perspective so radically. The second ingredient that she brings is cost-benefit analysis. In many parenting books recommendations are based on whether there’s evidence that something is good or bad for kids. But Oster goes another step and says, ‘Well, how good or bad is it? And how does that compare to the costs that I will have to undertake to make this choice?’ The third ingredient is her willingness to say ‘we don’t know, there’s not enough credible evidence.’ I love that because it’s so much more candid, and it highlights the vast gaps in our understanding that we really could fill if we decided to invest more heavily in research on children. By bringing in these kinds of more rational scientific ingredients, I think Oster’s work resonates with a lot of what female progressives were saying a hundred years ago when it was clear that we didn’t view parenting advice in the same way we viewed agricultural or industrial advice. We basically had a lower standard for parental advice. Even if you don’t agree with all of Oster’s conclusions, I think she’s done parents a great service by improving the terms of the discussion around how to raise children. Now I wish Oster would write these books targeting lower-income parents specifically because they have different constraints and considerations and they also need help navigating the evidence base. In my book I’m basically trying to shift our attitudes towards parenting, to view the child development aspects of the job more like we view flying airplanes or building houses. There’s no shame in not being able to fly your own airplane or build your own house. That is what we pay professionals to do. If we try to do it ourselves, there will be adverse consequences for ourselves and the people we love and for other people around us who we don’t even know. I argue we need to start viewing certain aspects of parenting in exactly that way so that we are more motivated to help people raise their children to be more successful and independent and happy in adulthood. I think it’s very hard to talk about this stuff—the fact that parenting is not a level playing field and there’s no quick fix, that small amounts of money or information won’t be enough. We see lower-income parents, in Annette Lereau’s book for instance, behaving quite differently from higher-income parents in terms of how they practice parenthood, and it remains almost impossible to talk about that without making everyone feel threatened or angry or scared. But it’s critical that we learn how to talk about that problem as a fact of life. Our failure to support parents is really damaging our entire society and economy, and it’s causing a lot of pain that serves no purpose. My book is an attempt to clarify inequalities around parenting, to give us a better way to talk about them and address them, and to get more people revved up about what could be possible if we made better collective decisions. I am advocating for a policy that I call ‘Familycare’, which is providing much richer public support throughout childhood, starting from birth, beginning with better early educational opportunities for all children up through college and early career formation. It’s called ‘Familycare’ because it’s akin to Medicare in terms of the scale of the investment. Conceptually, I think it’s doing something quite similar in the sense that Medicare broadens access to complex health services to all Americans and Familycare would broaden access to complex child skill development services to all Americans. Part of the point of the book that I was really excited to write was that the potential of this kind of policy is absolutely enormous. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It could literally close almost all the gap that we see between rich kids and poor kids. That is what the research has found. It’s not a small shift. It would transform the idea of class in America. Do I think this is realistic? Well, Medicare exists. And this investment is much smaller than Medicare. Many countries have rich early childhood education systems. I think it’s really about a cultural shift in how we view parenting and child development. It’s not going to happen overnight but I don’t think it’s utopian, not at all. It’s something we can do and it’s something America will have to do if it wants to compete with other countries over the next 100 years as human skills become the preeminent currency of nations. Yes, it is cheap, exactly. I’m glad you raised that point. What the research shows is that if we are able to do these policies well, it’s cheaper to do them than not to do them. In a way, we can’t afford not to do something like Familycare, because of all the adverse consequences that come from throwing this vast child development burden onto individual, isolated, overloaded parents."