Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Goff. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn how parents can get smarter about making big decisions with best-selling author Emily Auster.

And why scientists think a supernova we saw nearly a thousand years ago may be a completely

new type of supernova.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Parenting comes with some tough decisions.

For some of those decisions, you can use data

to make the best choice.

But others aren't so easy.

That's what inspired today's guest to write her latest book.

Emily Oster is an economics professor at Brown University and the author of several books on parenting

including her latest the family firm a data-driven guide to better decision-making in the

early years.

It's full of data-backed answers to questions ranging from how much screen time is too much,

to how do you pick the best school. For today's conversation I asked her if there was

one thing parents should do first to help them start making better decisions.

The whole first part of the book kind of has two sort of big picture ideas. So one is the idea that you should in any phase of parenting, but this is a good phase to kind of revisit.

You should think about sort of what you want your life to look like and what are your priorities?

And, you know, priorities in kind of a big picture sense, but also priorities like, what do you

want to happen every day?

Like, do you want to sit down for dinner every night? Like what do you want your weekends to look like? You want them to be like super free, you want them to like have a lot of activities in them, like that you should start by outlining that because that will influence a lot of the downstream decisions that you make.

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