Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-seventh one. They’re all combined together this month.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. If you are “college-educated, liberal and affluent” and have had a baby in the past few years, you most likely know of Emily Oster, economist at Brown and author of Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need To Know and Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool.
Oster’s central argument, so central that she doesn’t need to tell us it’s an argument, is that parenthood is a series of choices. “As a parent, you want nothing more than to do the right thing for your children, to make the best choices for them.” Some version of this sentence, which appears in the introduction to Cribsheet, is repeated ad nauseum throughout both books, and I can only assume we’ll see more versions of it in the forthcoming Family Firm, about elementary school.
When I had Bea, or maybe when I was pregnant, my mom said something that spoke to the way I feel about Oster’s ideology: she said no one could ever choose or not choose to have children. It’s just something you do or don’t do. “How could you ever make that choice?” she said. The fundamental thing of it, what you end up doing either way, feels not like a choice but like Letting Go (to quote the title of Philip Roth’s underrated second book).
Expecting Better and Cribsheet are helpful in small ways, like describing why and how sleep training really does work or showing the range of healthy weight gain during pregnancy. But for me, those small things are canceled out by the big ways in which they’re hurtful.
The passage I’m about to quote is such low-hanging fruit, and Oster is being intentionally provocative when she writes this. I think a lot of parents read this kind of assertion as honesty and appreciate it for that, but if you haven’t read Cribsheet, I want you to know there’s an extremely popular book going around with this in it:
I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing ratio is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day.
It isn’t that I like my job more than my kids overall—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I’m ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research.
“It should be okay to say this,” Oster writes. It is okay to say this: it appears in a smash-hit book.
Why does this passage upset me so much? The terms “happiness-maximizing ratio” and “marginal value” read a kind of order on something that I believe has no order. But if that is the way Oster’s mind works, I respect that. I don’t necessarily like that, but it’s not what upsets me.
What I really hate here the repetition of the word “amazing.” It’s such a social media-style nonword, a word you can write without imagining anything or asking your reader to imagine anything. My kids are “amazing.” The first hour with them is “amazing.” To reach for that same word again to describe them, just a couple sentences later—well, that move puts a sheet over the real stuff, the actual place where what Oster calls “choices” are made. The living part of it. The part that takes data and smashes it against the window, leaves it on the counter to spoil overnight, drops it from the stroller and breaks it.
That weird defensive exclamation point after “I love my kids.” I’m pretty sure this is the only time the word “love” appears in the book. Why include that sentence at all? Why bother to tell us your kids are “amazing”? What it should be “okay” to say is the “happiness-maximizing ratio” and “marginal value” stuff without the “my kids are amazing and I love them,” stuff, which could have been generated by an AI program. Maybe it was!
Oster is telling us that data will set us free. Free to be honest, free to determine “what works for your family” (another oft-repeated phrase in these books). But I see this as a book written by someone in a societally and culturally imposed prison, directed to others who are in that prison, telling them the prison is “amazing.” She’s not presenting a way out through data; she’s presenting a way to imagine you have a sense of agency where you don’t.
The major “choices” Oster tackles, like breastfeeding or formula, going back to work or staying home, crib or co-sleeping, feel so grimly crucial not because we as individuals are “neurotic” (a word Oster often uses to describe herself), but because we parent in a country that gives parents so little support. Do we really have control over these things? They’re a row of dominoes arranged in a sandbox, always just about to all fall over. How do you breastfeed if you’re back at work? And if you figure out some way to engineer that, how do you do anything but the ill-advised co-sleep? Wouldn’t you be too tired to do anything else? These aren’t individual choices that you can game out.
In Cribsheet, Oster glances at other countries and their parental leave policies, and then offers a parenthetical:
“(Let’s leave aside our anger that the US makes people fight for six weeks while these other places are arguing about one year versus two.)”
But we’ve done too good a job at leaving aside that anger! There’s a sense of scarcity, of scrambling for resources and time and help, that bleeds into our relationships with other parents. Oster has something to say about that, too. “People, this has got to stop. All cross-parental judgment is unhelpful and counterproductive,” she instructs us.
But why are we doing “cross-parental judgment”? Why is it so hard for a mom who “stays home” to find words with which to respond to the information that another mom works? Why is it so hard to tell another mom you breastfeed or use formula? Why is it so hard to figure out where to put your child during the day? Why is it so logistically difficult to go to a store, or go anywhere, with your child? Why does my gynecologist ask me what my husband does, ask me all about his job, and never even ask if I work? Why, why? Why are all the men in the kitchen talking about LBJ, when I’m the one who read the Caro books, the one who made my mom take Bea so I could write about them, too? Why are Brian and I so rarely together with Bea? It’s always each of us alone with her and the other madly catching up on work, only ever catching up.
Because we’ve done such a good job at leaving aside our anger at our insufficient national policies, as instructed.
There was a good piece about Oster in the New Yorker a few years ago, by Lizzie Widdicombe, that quoted Stephen Levitt, the Freakonomics guy, called Expecting Better “the Bible of my circle.” He says of Oster’s approach, “Economists focus on how the world is. A lot of parenting advice is focused on how the world should be in someone’s mind.”
But my mind has in it a vision for a better world, and I don’t want to let that go. I think it would be wrong to let it go.
It’s funny that Levitt calls Expecting Better the Bible and then says it’s about the actual world. It is a Bible, saying, here, believe these stories about “how the world is,” live by them.
Saying,
Sincerely,
Lucy
Lucy, this is a brilliant critique. I haven’t read Oster’s books but I’ve read articles about her work, and now your blog post, so take my perception of her POV with a grain of salt. It does seem to speak to a very narrowly defined class of people who do have a choice of 8 hours of work, 3 hours of children (or whatever their own personal preference is), without taking into account the labor of the people who care for the children the other 21 hours, and what choices are available to them. There are entire networks of other caregivers who, no doubt, aren’t paid the income Oster earns—those networks support Oster’s choice. Your right to imagine how all of this could work more equitably.