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This is NPR's Life Kit, and I'm Elise Hugh.

Parenting is full of decisions. Things like, should I get my kid a phone? And if so, when

should I get that phone? How many after-school activities should my daughters be doing?

The best we can hope for with a decision structure of any sort is to feel like we made the decision

in the right way. But it's not really possible to know we made the right decision. And sometimes

recognizing that, I think, is helpful for sort of actually making a decision and moving on.

This is economist Emily Oster. She is the author of a new parenting book called The Family

Firm, a data-driven guide to better

decision-making in the early school years. And the idea of having a family operate a little bit

like a business or a family firm, as she calls it, can help parents slow down and make rational

decisions. I think really at the core it means taking seriously the decisions we make in our family.

The motivation for me here was thinking about the kinds of choices that we are making as our kids

are older and that actually realizing that many of the tools that I use to organize my work

life would also be really helpful in organizing my home life and that they would

make it easier to make good choices and choices that I was ultimately happy with in my house.

She's written three books on parenting now.

And Emily says treating decision making like she means business has made parenting much more

manageable.

But even for the expert, parenting children between the ages of

...