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Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Lisa Pressman, and today I'm welcoming back Professor Emily Oster.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of Expecting Better.

And there's a fully revised Expecting Better, which talks about why the conventional pregnancy wisdom is wrong and what you really need to know.

She's also the author of crib sheet, a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool, and the family firm, a data-driven guide to better decision making in the early school years.

The reason why I love her work is because she removes the noise from data to help all of us interpret from a completely objective standpoint.

And she's an economist. She's not a developmental psychologist. Her approach is really like, I'm looking at this because I understand how to read data. And I'm going to help you so that you don't get driven crazy by noise that's out there.

In honor of the tenure anniversary of Expecting Better, we're having a conversation, and this one is for those of you who are expecting or have younger children, and you're thinking about how to interpret all the information that's out there, or if you're interested in data in general.

If you enjoy this episode, please don't forget to write a little review. It always helps continue to get the podcast out. And of course, you can throw in a five star rating. And if you have any feedback DM me on Instagram at raising good humans podcasts.

This is going to be probably the question you get every time you talk to anybody. But what are some of the changes in Expecting Better? Like what has happened in the last decade?

So it's so interesting because I do, I get that question all the time. And we've updated the book a few times. And so I can tell you a little bit about some of the big things that have changed.

But I would say I have to kind of two perspectives. So one is that science is always changing, right? There's constantly new studies. And so one of the things that's challenging about a book like this is you want to be about data, but you want to be about the newest data and making sure that we're adapting to changes.

On the other hand, not as much changes as you think because most of the time when a new study comes out, it's not that new. You know, it has all the same problems as the last study and it just in general, we don't move knowledge in big ways that often.

There are a couple of things that are sort of big changes since Expecting Better came up. So one is the landscape for prenatal testing. So when I wrote the book initially, we were in a world in which the kind of non invasive options for testing were very limited. They provided some information, but not very much.

There was this very large innovation of cell free fetal DNA testing in 2015 or so, which meant we can get a much, much more information about chromosomal issues from a simple blood test.

So that's just like a huge technological change is completely changed how we do things. I would say the other really significant change is a very large randomized trial called the arrive trial, which evaluated the relationship between induction and C sections and argued that actually induction sort of in a routine way.

A 39 weeks actually wouldn't increase the risk of C section and that has changed just some extent how medicine is practiced at the end of pregnancy and how how many people are offered a 39 week induction, how much that is.

So those are sort of two things, but many of the things people wonder about like what about this new study about this, what about this new study about this, it's like, yeah, those kind of supported what we thought before, then really move us very much.

And so something in there is a lesson about how much we overreact to all new studies for me anyway.

I totally agree and I think what's so interesting is when people talk about developmental science and they're like, all the new science says the following ways of interacting with your child or this relationship, it's like all transformational and I'm like, it's decades of science that existed.

And it's incredible to me that now people are like, there's a revolution happening in one of my favorite pieces of this is brain scans.

So there's so much where people are like, well, we didn't we put people in a brain scanner and we saw that like their brains look different with this and it's like, of course, their brains look different.

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