ParentData with Emily Oster

If you spend any time in parenting circles, it’s hard to avoid being inundated with “types” of parenting. Parenting labels are not neutral. Some are positive, some negative, but they’re never just descriptive. And lately, the most ink has been spilled over "gentle" parenting (also called permissive or respectful parenting). Gentle parenting, at its core, is an approach to behavior characterized by acknowledging a child’s feelings and not using punishments or rewards.But does it work? Let's see what the evidence says!Today on ParentData, Emily reads her recent article on gentle parenting aloud, digging into both the data, and also how hard the data is to evaluate.Subscribe to ParentData.org for free access to new articles every week on data-driven pregnancy and parenting.

The United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave. We point out this fact a lot, but what does it really mean when a family doesn't have the ability to take time off when a baby is born?It means a lot of things. It means moms going back to work while still recovering from childbirth, it means parents struggling to figure out child care for their baby, and it often means babies going to group child care settings, which may be wonderful but do expose them to germs —  germs that are more dangerous when babies are small than when they’re bigger. We can talk about these different challenges and why they might matter for kids’ and families’ outcomes, but to figure out how much they matter and in what ways...that’s what research is for.Today on ParentData, we're joined by Dr. Katherine Ahrens and Dr. Jennifer Hutcheon, who are both epidemiologists and professors. They recently published a paper titled “Paid Family Leave and Prevention of Acute Respiratory Infections in Young Infants," an analysis of paid leave in New York State, and the impacts of that paid leave on hospitalizations for infants, mostly for RSV. The paper's bottom line is that paid family leave keeps babies healthier and keeps them out of the hospital, and now we have the data to prove it and to show that the effects are large in terms of numbers. But putting together a research paper like this is surprisingly tricky. You need to know what questions you’re asking, and you need to think about how you’re going to determine causality rather than just correlation. So we’re going to take their research from idea to final peer-reviewed paper, and we’re going to talk about everything you always wanted to know about how research is conducted. Subscribe to ParentData.org for free access to new articles every week on data-driven pregnancy and parenting.

Writer and excellent social media follow Bess Kalb ruminates on the best place to move your family to prepare for climate change, giving yourself intentional permission to worry, and the forbidden pleasures of a s'mores Pop Tart.Subscribe to ParentData.org for free access to new articles every week on data-driven pregnancy and parenting.

Nutrition, along with sleep and screens, is one of the most contentious parenting topics there is. And questions about nutrition are particularly hard to answer with data, because disentangling correlation from causation is nearly impossible. What we eat is so wrapped up in everything else we do that it’s very challenging to point to a particular food or even a particular eating pattern and say that it’s healthy or unhealthy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we know nothing.Today on ParentData, Dr. Robert Davis is here to talk us through what we do know. Robert has a PhD in health policy, is an award-winning health journalist, and, most importantly, he’s a voice of sanity who realistically explores the nuances of nutrition, the food industry, childhood obesity, and how challenging it is for individual parents to try to parse it all. We talk about diet versus eating habits and the importance of language around that issue, food fads in the recent past and what we keep not learning from them, what Robert calls “nutritionism” (like obsessing about omega-3s instead of thinking holistically about our diets), whether ultra-processed foods are really as bad as we’re led to believe, kids and Ozempic, and how heavy a hand parents are supposed to take when it comes to their kids’ nutrition.This is a tough topic. We need to eat, we need to feed our kids, and we don’t fully process how stressful it is to feel responsible for our kids’ health and, as they get older, their body image. Hopefully this conversation can help alleviate some of that stress.Subscribe to ParentData.org for free access to new articles every week on data-driven pregnancy and parenting. Listen to Emily's article on ultra-processed foods. Robert Davis' website