Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

This episode is brought to you by Boombox Gifts, memory boxes filled with personal messages and photos from friends and family for your next special occasion.

Check it out at Boomboxgifts.com. Hi, I'm thrilled to be interviewing Emily Oster, Ph.D., who's a professor of economics at Brown University. She's the best-selling author of Expecting Better, Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is wrong and what you really need to know, and her latest book, which is CribSheet, a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York, Nesquire, among other publications. Emily received her BA and Ph.D. from Harvard, so she's a total moron. She currently lives in Boston with her husband, also an economist, and their two children.

Thanks for coming on Mom's Don't have time to read books.

Thank you for having me.

It's such a thrill to be able to talk to you.

I feel like you've become such a guru on all things parenting from such a thoughtful place.

So I feel like I get my personal dose of expertise this morning, so thanks. So can you tell

listeners what crib sheet is about? Yeah, so crib sheet is about parenting and it's about using

evidence to make parenting choices. So it's about breastfeeding and vaccinations and sleep

training and co-sleeping and all the kind of big things that come up in the

first few years of life and also some of the smaller things that come up and really about kind of

looking at what does the evidence say about these choices because I think there's a lot of

noise that we get when we are thinking about these choices from people who want

to give advice and some of the advice is well-meaning and some of the advice is bossy and mean

and some of it somewhere in between that. And this book is really about saying what does the actual

evidence say about those choices and how should you think about making the choice that works

for you? Since in a lot of these settings, it is not obvious from the data, what is the right thing to do? That there aren't that many places where it's like you should definitely do this or should definitely not do this. There are a few, but not that many. And so much of the work of the book is to really say, okay, here's the evidence. Now, how should you make this choice?

So when I was talking to our mutual friend, Anna, she had said, I, who's also an economist, she said, you know, I've reviewed all this literature, but it never occurred to me to write a book about it. So what made you not only review all the literature, I'm assuming, for your own kids, but then take it for the benefit of everybody else.

Yeah, so, I mean, this started when I wrote about pregnancy.

So my first book is a sort of similar approach to pregnancy.

And I think I had a reaction that I, and it's funny.

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