Emily Oster sells women lies about having it all
From the series Emotional Kintsugi by Glen Martin Taylor
Ever since I read Emily Oster’s first book, I’ve tried to ignore her, but her bestselling books just kept coming. I found solace reading complaints about her sloppy analysis. And I took the MacArthur Foundation to be delivering a secret message when they gave her husband, Jesse Shapiro, a genius grant for describing misinformation in mainstream media.
But I can’t hold back anymore.
Workplace advice that ignores reality
One of Oster’s pet topics is that people should stop hiding kids at work. She advises people to just leave work to pick up kids. She is “calling on companies to change.” Meanwhile, back in reality, women don’t get promoted when they leave work early.
That’s the thing about women telling other women what to do: don’t look at what the woman is doing now. Look at how that woman got to where she is. Oster is an economist who uses numbers to justify not taking care of her kids. And mainstream media is too scared to touch the research that says “unless you’re living in poverty, you’re hurting your kids by having two parents work.”
So Oster cites the research that shows correlation between parents who stay home with kids and improved outcomes. Then she summarily dismisses it because she refuses to deal with the nuance of correlation vs causation. This is very convenient for Oster because she also says she doesn’t care about the research because it’s so uninteresting to take care of children. She only wants to be there for the parts that interest her.
Following in her parents’ footsteps
This is not surprising because Oster’s parents both worked in very big jobs. And, to give you an idea where family fits into their equation, their children have different last names. There is no family name. The parents are very important in Oster’s family, so you can imagine that Oster grew up and thought: great! Finally it’s my time to be important. And then she made a career out of justifying the idea that it’s a waste of time to make the kids feel important.
Oster’s message is: A child should compete for a parent’s attention by being interesting. She does backflips to use research to justify it. If you take the route she took you’ll get what her mom got: a child who grows up to think that taking care of children is not important.
You don’t need research to know that if your parents think childcare is too boring to focus on, then the children internalize that they need to be interesting in order to be loved. And they spend their life on the interestingness treadmill trying to find love for themselves—unable to get off the treadmill to prioritize making children feel important just for who they are.
What the research actually shows
Here’s what we know about middle-class families: when both parents work full-time, they hurt their kids. Please don’t tell me parents are happier working. No piece of research says that matters. The point of family is not to make parents shine.
Don’t talk about working part-time, working from home, parents working together. You’re missing the point: if no one’s full-time job is the kids and you are not living in poverty, then you are working because you want nice things or a vacation, but those are not as important as making kids your job.
This is the research. I’m sorry that you wish kids felt important even if you are not making them important. I’m sorry that someone just won the Nobel Prize for spending the last 30 years explaining why jobs worth doing are very full-time jobs.
The lies we tell ourselves
Today middle-class women don’t admit to giving up raising their kids to someone else. And they don’t admit to running a family full-time. Because there has been so much pressure on women to win against other women that there’s nowhere left to go.
The only thing left to do is lie. To ourselves and to each other. This is where Emily Oster comes in. Emily tells us that it’s fine to do a half-assed job at work (leave to go pick up your kids!) and it’s fine to do a half-assed job at home (if it’s boring, don’t do it!)
But Oster has a full-time job as an economics professor and she just started a company. So she is not doing a good job taking care of her kids. Yes. I said someone is a bad mom. Because if we don’t say who is a bad parent, then why would any woman stay home with children to parent them? The great thing about work is there are measures of success. We have the data to measure parenting success. But people are scared to stand up and say we should use the data.
What women are actually choosing
Yet even without that encouragement, women are leaving the workforce because they’d rather be home with their kids. The participation of women in the workforce has not increased in the last 30 years, and today 50% of highly educated women choose to not work full-time. (This data has been synthesized by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, whom Oster cites regularly.)
Jobs in corporate life are full-time. Most college-educated families have divided family labor rather than have two parents working full-time. They divide labor because that’s what is most effective for families.
Pontificating about how policies need to help women work more is just Oster telling women to make the choices she made. But the economic research she cites is from Goldin, who specifically shows women leave the workplace regardless of the policies in place. Women leave because they want to.
We need to stop saying that some people are too good to stay home with children full-time. Too interesting, too educated, too rich, too white. Whatever it is, you are not too anything to make sure there’s a parent staying home with your children. Don’t have kids if you don’t want to take care of them.
I don’t know anything about parenting research, but I remember my mother, a housewife with six children, was so haggard that I wouldn’t bring home notices from elementary school because I figured she was already stressed enough. My sister, to avoid the same haggardness, had a job where every penny went to day care: like working for free.
This year I read a slim advice book by a grandmother. In chapter one she passes on some advice she was given:
…Let your children know you are delighted to have them… Not something my poor mother could do, but something I try to do with my disabled clients. (where I only work eight hour shifts)
I love this comment. There are two things that really resonate for me. The first is that when parents look like they’re overwhelmed kids perceive the parents cannot care for themselves so kids start caring for parents. I see this in my own life. And I hate to admit it, but i see when my kids do it with me.
Also, the part about delight. I wish this were the standard for good parenting. Did you kids feel like they delighted you each day just by being themselves. I think about what makes people have kids.
I clicked every link in this post. You literally cite no research suggesting or claiming that children do better when mothers don’t work, while repeating over and over that the research says so.
Sarah, you can’t just click, you need to read the content too.
Sarah, you’re right. I rely on on Oster’s research. I’m not criticizing the research she presents. I’m criticising the chapter where she says she is going to disregard the resarch because her work is so much more interesting than her children. I don’t think it’s acceptable to decide how much attention and care children get from parents based on how intresting they are to the parents. It messes up the kids.
Said another way: Oster and I have different opinions about how much a parent should weigh interestingness in their life. I give it much less weight than she does.
Ok, I understand.
It’s admittedly been about 7 years since I read Cribsheet, but part of why I made the original comment is that I’m social scientist with a decent familiarity with the research on the topic, although it’s not my specific area of expertise.
What Oster (and most high-quality research) addresses is about daycare vs time at home with a parent prior to about age 3, whereas you make it sound like it’s well-established evidence for 0-18.
The evidence that there are benefits on average to a parent staying home are limited to highly-educated mothers (that’s what you mean be middle-class?) and it’s not an effect that appears in all settings, eg seems to depend on quality.
This is also a flawed approach to applying research to our actual lives. Studies like these estimate what we call average treatment effects, but individual treatment effects may vary. (In fact, this is why we find different effects for highly educated mothers from lower educated mothers.)
The importance of considering the individual effect vs the average population effect can be illustrated most easily with an example about breastfeeding: breastfeeding has modest health benefits on average for babies. Some women, however, experience what’s called dysphoric ejection reflex, which causes them to feel extremely depressed at each letdown. This can have enormous mental health costs. Mental health of mothers is also an important factor affecting the well-being and development of the baby, and makes it such that the net individual effect of breastfeeding may be negative for such mothers, even if average affects are positive.
In a similar way, there are women who may become depressed from being full-time caregivers—not simply bored and selfish, as you are suggesting. Having a depressed caretaker is probably not all that beneficial. Presumably, the average positive effect comes from primarily from attentive, engaged parents who have the energy to provide a more emotionally and cognitively supportive environment than the daycare alternative.
Following this type of decision process IS following the research. It’s simply incorrect to assume the population averages will always apply to you.
I can also see how “ highly-educated mothers” means highly resourced. I’m highly educated but my dad was the first person in my family to get more than a college degree and maybe the only one in our family history who did. So education is not really enough. You also need culture and context and it’s more true to say that highly educated mothers had a whole lot of that, but not always. That’s why I hate how this conversation always comes down to some kind of personal decision rather than one about how women need more support raising families no matter which path they choose.
I’m curious if you personally experienced daycare. I begged my mother not to put me in daycare and she didn’t. She would be in jail for letting me stay home alone now. It worked out great for me. I was 6, btw… living in a major city.
In 1993 I helped establish a new daycare in Maine which was meant to primarily serve low income families. Babies and toddlers sobbing every day for months when their mothers left was tough. Some kids got super attached to me (I worked with the preschoolers)..it was painful for them all. And it was an incredibly beautiful and intelligently run operation. Top quality. People can decide what they want. I say, ask the kids.
Something I’m wrestling with: the generational costs of staying home.
My husband’s mother stayed home to care for them and consequently, they don’t have enough money saved for retirement or to pay off their house – and they lived frugally and saved. We won’t let them live in the street, but where is that money going to come from? We won’t be able to care for them, our retirement and our son without 2 parents working, and I’m far from poor. It just brutal out here for working sandwich parents.
Hey, Abby. Knowing your circumstances outside of this comment, I first want to say I have a lot of respect for the decisions you and your husband have made so far – so, go team!
You could reframe how you see the situation by deleting “and consequently”. I think there are tons of families that do not have enough money to manage themselves financially all the way through to their death. I am not sure society is set up in a way that most people could do that. And given how much extra childcare costs with two fulltime parents, it’s not clear to me that the second income actually moves the dial over the long term.
I guess that’s where I’m not the norm- in my family, we talked about saving, investing & entrepreneurship as soon as we could make money (and before by demonstrating frugality in all things). Being financially independent was one of the biggest values my folks centered on- so it’s jarring for me when people don’t think about these things and expect it to magically all work out. And, I realize I’m coming from place of privilege: low cost of living location, stable family and relatively consistent incomes.
That said, we’re two high enough earners that our income covers childcare with extra for investing and now it makes even more sense to keep us both working as we have 2 MORE dependents: his parents.
They live in a high cost of living area, don’t want to change anything about their lifestyle and aren’t well or sane enough to work. I guess I’m grumpy about all this because I will have to keep working to support a mother who never worked and then criticizes me for doing so – and wouldn’t deign to help us with said child, either.
Thanks for the space to vent, I know I’m not the exception, but the rule for childcare, parenting and caring for seniors in this country, at this time. Heaven help us!
That’s exactly what came up for me as well. I’m in the social class where my family was able to pay for my college education but they aren’t going to give me the money to buy a house, nor is there a trust fund with my name on it.
I unschool my kid and work from home part-time, so every day my kid gets to see my putting work over spending time with him.
My own mother was definitely the type to say that taking care of children was not interesting to her. Yet she still had three kids.
This country does not value either children or seniors. I visited a friend living in HUD senior housing owned by a private investor. The high-rise apartment building was in terrible condition, with a bed bug infestation and garbage stacked to the ceiling in the trash chute closet. Unfortunately, many seniors, especially those who are divorced, widowed, or disabled, lack the financial or other resources needed to remain in their homes.
I was fortunate enough to stay home with my son for the first year and a half of his life because I chose to withdraw my retirement contributions. I simply was not willing to place my 6-week-old baby in childcare for 10 to 12 hours a day. When I returned to work, he spent half the day with my mother and attended preschool for the other half.
I spent retirement money when my first son was born, too. I feel so validated hearing that from you.
“Meanwhile, back in reality, women don’t get promoted when they leave work early.”
So I was struck by this because it seems things *might* be different in some of the European countries. I have a Dutch friend who works for a Dutch corporation and she’s high up in the ranks. She’s gotten promoted every time she’s had a child—she said that in the Netherlands (at least in the corporate world) they are very attuned to work-life balance and pay particular attention to women with families. She works (hybrid) very normal hours and has a ridiculous amount of vacation time and maternal/paternal leave time. Her family’s life is extremely peaceful and their kids are (thus far) amazing. I’m going to see if I can find research (vs my anecdote) that studied EU women with children who work outside the home or do not.
This cannot be a mathematical truth.
What I mean by that is someone who is high up in the ranks of a company has responsibility to a wide range of people and therefore cannot totally control their hours. People in business get paid to deal with problems and problems are by nature unpredictable.
Children, also, do not have predictable problems.
So this woman has two sets of people who depend on her in an unpredictable way and their needs are time sensitive. No one in the universe can do a good job of attending to both these sets of people simultaneously.
So let’s just stop saying that it’s possible. It’s insulting to people who work fulltime and it’s insulting to people who care for children fulltime. She is not superwoman. She has the same 24 hours in the day as everyone else.
This is why the data about women in working is so consistent across cultures.
Def europe does this better! I read that in countries that have prenatal leave the kids do way better than in families that can take time off before giving birth because they have enough money. Socialism is the answer!!! Capitalism sucks!!
I have to say that after commenting that I don’t agree with you on most things, for sure I agree one thousand percent with your perspective on this one. Did you notice how no one ever asks the kids what they think.
I’m happy to hear we agree on something! I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of asking kids directly. Kids have no rights, so we are not required to ask them. Maybe that should change. I think about that….
I just got back from end of year school expo and all the teachers say the same thing about my kid: she smart, she’s reserved and she’s ready for fourth grade. But no one really understands why she isn’t more…confident? I feel like this is because I stayed home with her. She doesn’t seem me as assertive or having a big life. The amount of isolation that happens when you stay home with kids is so bad for the parent which really is, in turn, not great for the kid. I think that staying home has done her some harm and I think leaving her would have done some harm too. I really don’t know that we have a good solution to the needs of young children. Overall our culture does a very bad job.
Okay. Hold on. Why does your daughter need to “be assertive” and want a “big life”? Surely you can imagine that not everyone has those personality traits and there are other very desireable traits outside of those.
Also, staying at home with kids defintiley does not have to mean isolation. My kids and I were traveling all over the place while I was home with them. If I had to guess I’d say that you are not assertive and you are not desiring a “big life” so that is reflected in how you parent at home with your daughter.
I think you need to separate what is your proclvity and what is hers, and whether she is getting what she needs at school/home and if you need to go out of your own comfort zone to get her that.
My natural state is to sit on the sofa and read and write all day. It was a real shift for me to run around with the kids all day doing their stuff. It was unnatural to me for sure. It’s hard to know where we stop and where our kids start. But it’s really important to keep working on learning that. I’m still learning.
Lol..once again I agree completely with this response. I have taught students ranging from preschoolers to graduate students over the course of the last 35 years. I have taught many of the same students over the course of several years. I have taught many siblings. There are all kinds of people in the world, and no two are alike. Not everyone is going to be perky and eager to talk. And there is nothing wrong with being reserved.
Thanks both! Yes, I meant she doesn’t SEE me, not seem — so I was talking about myself.
Penelope, I’m genuinely not sure what you want anyone to do with this information.
You devote a lot of energy to tearing down Emily Oster’s data interpretations and parenting choices. What’s the takeaway (besides the usual…working women are the worst)? That life should conform to research findings instead of real-world values and circumstances?
Show me one person who designed their life around academic studies. People make choices based on needs, values, and realities. Plenty of parents would love to stay home, and can’t. Others are arguably healthier parents because they work. Both can be true.
In the 70’s and 80’s, I was a latchkey kid. My younger brother and I came home to an empty house every day. We did some household chores (quickly and badly) so that we could play outside or watch tv. We made good and bad decisions on our own, without looking over our shoulder for approval or denial. We became self-reliant, confident, and in our own ways, leaders among our peers. Those are the traits we took into adulthood.
For what it’s worth, I don’t have kids. Thankfully, child-free women don’t usually end up on your hit list. Working husbands and fathers don’t either. It’s always mothers who seem to get under your skin, even though that topic has been studied and reported on ad nauseum over the decades. Aren’t bored with this topic already?
Here’s what I know about you, from reading your blog for years and years. You’ve written about being a single parent, estrangement from abusive parents, working and starting up successful companies, breakdowns and mental health struggles and marriages that didn’t work out. Your story is one of survival and slogging your way through hard things…the very stuff you don’t acknowledge or criticize in others.
Your performative teardown of Oster isn’t just unproductive, it’s hypocritical and tone-deaf. Not a single person has ever mapped their life around a published study, OR a judgmental blog. You’ve read ALL the studies, and haven’t designed one day around the findings, never mind your entire life. So again, what do you want anyone to do with this information?
This is a really thoughtful comment. Thank you. Hopefully you’ll think I have a thoughtful response.
I did design my life around the studies. I did a one-year publishing extravaganza aobut the reserach about how to decide where to live. And after all that research, I moved out of NYC based solely on the data.
Here’s what I found out: all the data was true. But we choose to believe only what we want to believe. And it clouds our ability to use the data. I think I devoted ten years of writing on my blog to this premise.
Now I’m thinking specifically about our proclivity to ignore data that’s right in front of us. That we actually have all the data we need to make the right choices, but we don’t like the results of the data. It’s really really hard to be told that what we want isn’t right for us, or our family, or what we want doesn’t exist. It’s human to live in denial. I think this is really what I’m interested in.
I see it in Oster very clearly. It’s much harder to see it in ourselves than in other people. I hope my blog is a mirror for all of us to get better at seeing what we ignore.
I really enjoyed this post and all of the thoughtful comments on it. I hadn’t heard of Emily Oster, though I would have voraciously consumed her books had my children been younger.
I want to respond to these specific comments here because I really resonated with them, but I’m not sure what I want to say…
My siblings and I had an essentially hands-off childhood, and it didn’t fare well for us. We couldn’t figure out social dynamics on our own and came away defeated, ostracized and feeling like losers. “Free-range” childhood isn’t so great when there are no adults to help guide the children who need it.
I’m definitely making choices for my own family based on needs, values and realities and not on what the data says. But I love data and I love hearing about what Penelope and Emily have to say about the data. I find it useful and all this stuff, including the comments here, does influence me even as I am ramping up my work hours during my children’s teen years. (I’m hoping for the best possible outcome, given our particular circumstances. I know, I know. I’m likely deluding myself. 🙈)
I know that Penelope can be hard on working moms, but I don’t see it as harshly as some others see it. Maybe it’s because I find a lot of nuance in Penelope’s writing. Maybe it’s because Penelope is so forthcoming about her own life. Maybe it’s because it gives me a pass for not being more successful in my career. Maybe it’s because it gives our whole sex a pass for not having more world power by now. (I’d like women to have more power. I’d like society to be structured such that guiding a child and providing opportunities for them does not require the full-time devotion of one parent for 20 years. I’d like to believe that it won’t always be like this. But I do think Penelope is seeing things pretty clearly as they are right now, and I do find Penelope’s take on Emily Oster useful, even as I don’t follow what the data says either. (I, too, do follow some of it. And, if my children were younger, I’d read Emily’s books, because how she’s applying the data to her own life sounds interesting!))
it is lonely to immigrate to north america and realizing you still can’t have it all. even with all the money on the table with how hard i worked, believed and could have earned. i have tons of rights here legally relative to home country. i’m glad i have rights to be a woman. I’m tired from trying to enforce all of my rights all the time. If “having it all” is portrayed as a right and choice, i feel a pressure to defend that choice and right for future girls.
I’m not saying it was a wrong choice to move to north america for a better financial opportunity and leave toxic cultures. Gaining a financial resource meant losing other types of resource. It is hard to feel non-financial losses when your brain is organized around scorekeeping. I feel the pain of losing $500 more than I can feel the pain of hearing my child saying “mom stop talking, you are hurting my feelings”. I feel like a terrible mom equating the value of that in dollar values.
So reading Oster for parenting data is an incomplete source of data for me to take it seriously eventually. It’s a data flavour of the week based on selective science. For a while, it did make me feel good data backed up my pregnancy and parenting plans. Getting pregnant was a scientific effort. Then when my child got older, nothing beats watching someone else giving their all into my kids for a couple of hours. Phone downs. No school talk. No practiced back and forth how-are-you conversations. Just, what do we wanna do right now now now.
Research paper writing, data analysis cannot ask a child to quantify the # of moments in their day who and where and how someone made their day feel awful and special. If only research scientists could give feedback to the parents based on data collected from their kids. The mom has to trust at least one person in this whole world, to leave their kids with. And the same person that the kid trusts to give feedback about how well they are doing at home and outside of home. And someone to triangulate delivering those messages on a regular basis. if it’s not grandma then who. If it’s not an aunt then who. If there is not a grapevine in the extended family, then who.
Hey Penelope,
After reading your blog for years and being coached by you twice, and if I’ve correctly interpreted everything you’ve shared so far, your advice for most women is to have children unless they have a big career (which they should know by 20), and then stay at home with the kids so they don’t ruin their kid’s lives or their marriages.
I don’t have a big career, so I had kids and closed my lifestyle business. Breastfeeding my second for a year, the brutal sleep deprivation that ensued, and the challenges of being a SAHM sent me deep into PPD. I weaned, hired a nanny, and asked my husband for help, and by now I’ve concluded that, as you say at the end of your post, I probably shouldn’t have had children.
So I’m wondering if maybe you should recommend childfreedom for more women. Perhaps it’s not optimal for their happiness, but at least they’re saving their children from having terrible moms.
Thanks.
The transition to being a mom is really hard. It’s not something that happens in one or two years. But we need to be honest about work as well. Most women don’t enjoy the harsh and competitive work environment either. And it’s really difficult to succeed in the workforce after age 40. You probably would have gotten sick of your lifestyle business because it’s a dead end, and it’s the opposite of personal growth – it’s doing what’s comfortable for your current lifestyle. With parenting it’s always new, always different and you always have to grow to keep up. Most of the things in life that are worth doing are really difficult. I think you’re probably more well suited for parenting than you realize because each of us is well suited for personal growth and a high learning curve. It makes life interesting.
Take anti-depressants for PPD and then maybe keep taking them. I’ve been on them for a long time. I used to think I was on them because I’d yell at my kids, but now that my kids are gone I see I’d just lose patience with other people in my life. So maybe it’s a blessing that our kids force us to see that we need medicine.
Wow. Looking after your own kids is “uninteresting.” You’d question why a person like that would choose to have kids. I jumped at the chance to quit my career to nurture my family full-time. It was the best decision I ever made and probably the most rewarding. The decision to homeschool let me finally see what I’d been put on this earth to do. One of the worst decisions was getting a degree. Back then it was expected of us, it was a conveyor belt, school, then university. Thankfully it didn’t have the debt attached in those days.