Podcasts · Kids & Family

Raising Parents with Emily Oster

The Free Press

11 episodes · in order

Poseidon is the god of the sea, Dionysus of wine and merrymaking, and Emily Oster? She’s the god of parenting.

More about the show

An economics professor at Brown University, Oster has built a massive and loyal audience by providing overwhelmed parents with the information and data they need to make solid and sound parenting decisions in a very confusing world. Her first book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, sold over a million copies and was translated into 19 languages, unseating the classic What to Expect When You’re Expecting as a fixture on many pregnant mothers’ bedtime tables.

In this new series with The Free Press, Oster tackles the deep, difficult, existential, and often controversial questions facing parents today: Are we too soft on kids these days? How do I raise an independent child in an era of overprotection and helicopter parenting? Why are so many teen girls unhappy and anxious, and how can we make them happy again? Why are boys being left behind? Are kids overdiagnosed? What to do about the phones!? Is marriage important for raising kids? Should you even have kids at all?

These questions are more urgent than ever. That’s because, by many measures, kids are worse off today than 30 years ago. They are more anxious than ever. They’re more depressed. They have more diagnoses than ever before. They’re more medicated. More kids are being raised without two parents in the home today. Kids’ reading and math scores haven’t recovered since their decline during the Covid pandemic. Childhood obesity has risen to 19.7 percent. Kids spend on average 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment each day, and the average teen spends around 9 hours a day on their phone.

What’s going on with kids today? How worried should we be about our kids? And what should we be doing, as parents, to change course, before it’s too late? How do we raise good people—which starts with raising good, informed parents—in this strange, new world?

Over eight episodes, Oster speaks with over 50 of the world’s best parenting experts, journalists, doctors, psychologists, researchers, and more including: Dr. Becky, Jonathan Haidt, Pamela Druckerman, Richard Reeves, Hanna Rosin, Abigail Shrier, Bryan Caplan, Christine Emba, Johann Hari, Sami Timimi, Melissa Kearney, Ross Douthat, and many, many more. Oster brings her trusted voice—with its sobriety, wisdom, and humor—to the most challenging parenting questions of the day.

The best way to support this podcast is to become a Free Press subscriber today at TheFP.com/subscribe

Episodes

  1. Introducing: Raising Parents

    · 7:41 · Trailer

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

  2. Ep 1: Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?

    · 47 min · S1 E1

    When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church…

  3. Ep 2: Have We Forgotten How to Discipline?

    · 49 min · S1 E2

    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…

  4. Ep 3: Are We Feeding Kids the Wrong Foods?

    · 59 min · S1 E3

    In January 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics surprised doctors and parents by changing its guidelines on treating childhood obesity to include the use of popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, also…

  5. Ep 4: Are We Overmedicating Kids?

    · 1 h 08 min · S1 E4

    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…

  6. Ep 5: Are Boys Being Left Behind?

    · 46 min · S1 E5

    Across the board in most advanced countries, girls and women are outpacing boys and men. Nowhere is this more stark than in education. When Title IX was passed in the U.S., the share of students enrolled in a…

  7. Ep 6: Are Smartphones Stealing Childhood?

    · 52 min · S1 E6

    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…

  8. Ep 7: How Important is Marriage?

    · 51 min · S1 E7

    The share of children in America growing up in single-parent families has tripled since 1950—from 10 percent to 30 percent. Children in single-parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level…

  9. Ep 8: Should You Have Kids?

    · 50 min · S1 E8

    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…

  10. Episode Feature: ‘My So-Called Midlife’

    · 35 min

    We have a special bonus episode for the Raising Parents feed. It’s an episode of “My So-Called Midlife” by Reshma Saujani and Lemonada Media. Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code. She’s written several…

  11. Episode Feature: How Camp Teaches Kids to Ditch Their Phones

    · 45 min

    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…

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