Raising Parents with Emily Oster

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 summer camp. Especially in 2025. Camp is one of the few places where kids get a permission slip to be off their phones. Where the kids—who don’t quite fit in at school—get a fresh start, and maybe even find their people. (Yes, Emily is talking about her personal revelation at math camp.) And it’s a kind of exposure therapy for parents, too, as they learn to be okay with unsupervised play. Emily Oster and Steve Baskin, a career camp director and incoming head of the American Camp Association, get into all of that and much more.

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 children, or join a convent. But the 1960s ushered in a big change. With better options for birth control and expanded career opportunities for women, many people for the first time could choose how many children to have, and whether they should have any at all. Fast-forward to today: More people are choosing not to have children for a wide range of reasons. Having children, of course, is a personal choice. But it’s a choice that has broader implications. Everywhere across the globe—the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa—fewer children are being born. And strangely enough, having kids has become part of the culture wars. There are pro-natalist public figures like Elon Musk on one side saying everyone needs to have more kids now in order to save humanity. And on the other side, people like climate activist Greta Thunberg say rising sea levels are so catastrophic that having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But there’s no debate that the fertility rate is plummeting in America and around the world. Presently, American women, on average, have 1.8 kids. In the 1950s, it was 3. The replacement rate in the United States, which is the fertility rate needed for a generation to replace itself without considering immigration, is approximately 2.1 births per woman. Around the world, the fertility rate fell by more than half between 1950 and 2021, as many countries became wealthier and women chose to have fewer children. For economists like Emily, the speed with which the fertility rate is falling is cause for alarm. Economic growth depends, at least in part, on population growth. Retired people rely on generations of younger workers for support, through contributions to Social Security and taxes. With fertility rates in free fall, the math doesn’t add up. That’s the big picture. Now back to our own families. Our series so far has focused on the state of our children. Today, we cap things off with a fundamental question: Should we even have kids in the first place, and what happens if we don’t? *** Resources from this episode: Bryan Caplan: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids (Bookshop) Gina Rushton The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty (Bookshop) Leah Libresco Sargeant Helena de Groot Ross Douthat

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 on a school field trip. And then there’s the fact that for many parents, the idea of not giving your kid a phone—when everyone else has one—just doesn’t even seem like a possibility. By age 10, 42 percent of kids in the U.S. have a phone. By age 12, it’s 71 percent, and by age 14, it’s 91 percent. The pressure to conform is just too great. And the reality is that phones keep kids entertained, which gives parents a break—to cook dinner, to do the laundry, or. . . to scroll through Instagram on their own phones. The problem is that most parents have no idea what the effect of all of this phone time—46 percent of teens say they use their phones “almost constantly”—is. What are phones doing to our kids, their development, their physical health, their mental health, their social lives? Is the panic around cell phones like the panic that once met the invention of the radio or TV? Is it a kind of hysteria? Or are phones fundamentally transforming the essence of what it means to be a kid? Are phones. . . stealing childhood? If so, what should we do about it? Should we leave phone regulations in the hands of schools, or should parents take the initiative to drive the change? Is there even a middle ground, or have we passed the point of no return? Resources from this episode: Jonathan Haidt The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Bookshop) Ben Halpert Savvy Cyber Kids (Amazon) Johann Hari Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (Bookshop) Delay Smartphones

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 15 and you’re worried about that upcoming algebra test? Anxiety. You’re 12 and you weren’t invited to that birthday party? Depression. Scared to ride your bike again after that little fall last summer? PTSD. And with these diagnoses come a menu of medications that purport to fix your child. Today: What’s behind the rise in diagnoses—both for ADHD, mostly among young boys, and for anxiety and depression, mostly among teen girls? Are they really the most distracted, anxious, and depressed generation ever to exist? Or are we, perhaps, pathologizing what used to be considered normal feelings and behaviors—and as a result, diagnosing and overmedicating kids for. . . acting like kids? And what are the long-term effects of having millions of boys on speed and millions of girls on SSRIs? Resources from this episode: Abigail Shrier Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (Bookshop) Jennifer Wallace Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It (Bookshop) Sami Timimi Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture (Bookshop) Erica Komisar Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters (Bookshop) If you liked what you heard in this episode, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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: spanking. Then, there are middle-ground approaches: time-outs, warning systems, consequences, and punishments. And then, there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. These are the kind of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your child understand why they’re frustrated and to help them work through their frustration. “Gentle parenting”—sometimes called “respectful parenting” or “attentive parenting”—has become really popular in the last few years, and if your social media feeds are anything like ours, you’ve heard all about it and been told you need to do it. The question many parents are asking is: We have been told that spanking was bad, and we shouldn’t go back to it. But have we gone too far in the other direction? Has gentle parenting led us to permissive parenting, where kids are learning that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want? And yes, there are consequences of being too hard on your kids, but what are the consequences of being too soft on them? Today: How should we be disciplining the next generation of kids? And have we gotten too soft on them along the way? *** Resources from this episode: Abigail Shrier: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up Dr. Thomas Phelan: 1-2-3 Magic: Gentle 3-Step Discipline for Calm, Effective, and Happy Parenting Dr. Becky Kennedy: Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be Hal Chaffee: How to Spank Your Kids the Right Way

Raising Parents with Emily Oster premiers Wednesday, September 18, 2024.