Parenting Expert Emily Oster: The #1 Parenting Mistake That Causes Unnecessary Stress (Use THIS Data-Backed Framework to Debunk the Biggest Parenting Myths!)

20:23So I think one thing for people to understand is just, you know, this is a real factor in infertility. So there are plenty of opportunities to extend the life of fertility. IVF is very effective. Egg freezing can be an interesting option. But the reality is that it is harder to get pregnant when you're older than when you're younger. And that is something that I think people should know and at least understand that there is some trade-off there. It's not impossible, but it is harder. And then you have to trade that off with the fact that you may or may not be ready to have a kid when you're 20.

20:53You may not have the partner you want. This may not be the right time. And so I think just being realistic about the existence of those trade-offs is kind of all you can do in terms of making decisions, is the other piece I would often remind people is that your kid doesn't go away after like the first six months to a year. And so there is a little bit, sometimes I'll sort of pair of people be like, well, this year is a really good, like this is a good year for me because like it's a down year at work. And it's like, well, after this year, like he's still gonna be around. And so I think just sort of understanding that your life is going to, no matter when this happens, aspects of other parts of your life are going to change and evolve.

21:32As your kids get older, they're going to get easier, but also in other ways harder. And this is going to be part of your life forever. And so I would almost never tell people, like, find the best year. It's like, you need the best 18 years. It's like, if you have a good solid 18 years, possibly more.

21:48Jay Shetty:Yeah, I have a mentor that used to tell me, when you have kids, you've got to write off. He used to say, and he's raised three kids and they're all adults now and has a great relationship with them. And he was like, Jay, just write off seven years of your life per kid. Like that was his advice. And I was like, yeah, that's interesting. I don't have kids. But that same point, as in like it wasn't just a one-year thing or a two-year thing. But I appreciate what you're saying because I think, and this isn't just about kids, it applies to so many things, but to parenting as well. I think the question we often ask as humans is, is this the right time?

22:23Jay Shetty:And it's almost like the better question is, do we know how this is going to change our life? Right. Right. Do we know how to adapt? Do we know how to build the environment for the group project? Like, do we know what that's going to require? Yeah. Is more of an important question than is this the right time? Because time is kind of undefined as to what it's valuable for. Yeah. And I think it's very, very hard to ask, is this the right time? And be confident about that over the period that we're talking about. You know, it's just like, you just can't know. And so I think it is really much more, as you say, about kind of crafting.

22:55Like, is this, how can we make this setting work for this project that we are embarking on?

23:25Jay Shetty:completely changed my perspective. That moment reminded me how powerful a simple connection can be. And did you know that 2026 will mark 150 years since the first phone call, March 10th, 1876? From that one call, it all grew. The first long-distance lines, the first call across America, the first across the Atlantic, the first commercial cell service, even the first 911 system. AT &T has been connecting people in so many ways for 150 years. I can't help but wonder how many lives were changed, how many important conversations happened, even how many lives were saved. All because people could reach each other.

24:04Jay Shetty:150 years of connecting. That's not just history. That's a reminder. When technology brings people together, we can do incredible things. Connecting changes everything. AT &T. This is the moment everyone in business has been waiting for. AI is rewriting the rules, and if you're not ahead, you're already behind. Here's the reality. AI is moving fast, really fast. Hey, it's Dean Graziosi. And a lot of people think they have years to figure AI out. The truth is, you might only have months, maybe less. I've never seen technology move this quick before. Right now, AI is helping people save hours every week, automate work that slows them down, and move faster than ever.

24:43Jay Shetty:But here's the challenge. Most people feel overwhelmed trying to figure out what makes sense for them. The two biggest names in personal growth are stepping in right now to cut through the noise. That's exactly why Tony Robbins and I are hosting a free virtual AI Advantage Summit on April 23rd through the 25th. We're bringing together people who are actually using AI in the real world to show you what works. No complexity, no overwhelm, just a clear path to start using AI in your business, your career, and your life. So join us April 23rd, the 24th, the 25th. Reserve your free seat at AISummitRSVP.com.

25:15Jay Shetty:That's AISummitRSVP.com. This is Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab. And this message is brought to you by Simple Mills. On our show, we talk a lot about strategies like temptation bundling and implementation intentions, those research-backed ways to make good habits stick. And there's some powerful evidence to suggest that the right snack can also support the other habits you're trying to build. Take a snack like Simple Mills. Their almond flour crackers are made with almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Simple Mills refers to their almond flour crackers as sunshine in every bite.

25:51Jay Shetty:And there is truth to that. It's a snack that lifts you up instead of weighing you down. And if you haven't tried them yet, Simple Mills Pop 'ums are light, airy, cheese-puffed crackers made with vegetables. A quick crunch like that can reinforce the habit loop without sabotaging your energy. Find Simple Mills at your grocery store.

26:19Jay Shetty:one of my favorite things about what you do is using data to bust myths and also bust these things that we get stressed about and overwhelm us so what we created for you was a debunking myths okay game for pregnancy and child care so what i'm going to do is i'm going to read a bunch of myths, cliches, things that we've all heard, and then you can give us the data-driven answer and the insight behind it. So the first one is, it's okay to drink one glass of wine when you're pregnant. Yes, especially in later trimesters. I mean, if you look at the data, it's very clear that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad and binge drinking at any time of pregnancy is very dangerous.

26:57But if you look at the data that looks at occasional drinking during pregnancy, it just doesn't show those kind of effects. And we actually do have a lot of data on this because in many places outside the U.S., this kind of alcohol consumption is much more common. And we have reasonably good approaches to sort of figuring out causality there. And so that doesn't mean everyone is going to choose to do this, but I think that it is something that looking at the evidence, many people are comfortable with the occasional drink.

27:27Jay Shetty:Got it. Okay. I was not expecting that. I didn't know that. Next one. Pregnant women shouldn't drink coffee. That is a myth. That is a myth. So there is some discussion about links between caffeine in the first trimester and miscarriage. It turns out that those links don't show up pretty much at all until about four to six cups of coffee. So if you are consuming a sort of typical person amount of coffee a day, you know, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. That is, there's no evidence of downsides there. But even when we look at people who consume like a tremendous amount of coffee, it's like data from Sweden or people are consuming like eight cups of coffee a day.

28:09It's probably the case that any links with pregnancy loss are just driven by nausea. So people who are really nauseous don't drink coffee. And that's also correlated with lower risks of miscarriage. There's a lot of stuff going on in the data, but the bottom line is that some coffee is totally fine.

28:26Jay Shetty:Well, OK. You can't eat sushi while pregnant. Also not true. How do people come up with this stuff then? So sushi is, you know, you can get foodborne illness from sushi. Uncooked fish is more dangerous than cooked fish is just like that. But that's always true. And it is not more true during pregnancies. This is something I sort of talk a lot about is thinking about, OK, you should generally think about trying to avoid the norovirus from your sushi. And you should be thinking about that when you're not pregnant and when you're pregnant. There's no particular risk to sushi during pregnancy. Okay.

28:59Jay Shetty:You can't get Botox while pregnant or breastfeeding. Okay, Botox. You know, this is the number one question people ask me. Really? Yes. This is like the number one question, which is amazing. That's fascinating. I know. It's only started like in the last five, you know, I've been doing this. What was it before that? Something really sincere? It was much more like coffee. no it's always lifestyle stuff but like Botox like really people are really into Botox yeah so you're not going to be able to find someone to get you to do your Botox when you are pregnant although there is no evidence that it would be dangerous it's just like no one's going to do that during breastfeeding it is fine the Botox doesn't go into your milk and you can do it if you want to have your Botox I always tell people that your face looks great you don't need Botox people are like oh my god thank you then they're like oh but what about GLP-1s that's their next question oh and what's What's the take on that?

29:49So you shouldn't be on a GLP-1 when you're pregnant because that's not a time for weight loss. But during breastfeeding, you know, generally, if you're sort of early on in breastfeeding and the supply is still being established, being on a GLP-1 can lower your breast milk supply. And so that is probably a reason to avoid it. But if you're later in breastfeeding, there's actually good evidence that they don't pass through to the milk. So if people want to go back on their GLP-1, it should be fine.

30:17Jay Shetty:All right. I think this one's a big one. Okay, we have some milk here. So we have breast milk or formula. Does it make a difference? Both are great options. There are some small short-term benefits to breastfeeding, lower risk of gastrointestinal illness, some slightly lower risk of eczema. But a lot of these long-term things people are told, like breast milk makes your kid smarter or thinner, they can fly or whatever, that stuff is all correlation, not causation. So both of these options are very good ones. Are there any negatives for formula? I mean, I guess that you could sort of say, well, if breast milk lowers the risk of gastrointestinal infections, formula raises it.

30:59Depends what you're thinking about as your baseline. But I think in that sort of in that comparison, there are some of these things where breast milk shows up as positive. But I think it's just much, much, much smaller. The data shows it is much, much, much smaller than what a lot of people are told. Right.

31:15Jay Shetty:And the socioeconomic conversation is interesting there as well, isn't it? Yeah. So one of the reasons why I think we are so frequently hearing, you know, breast is best, breast milk has all these positive benefits is because the people who are breastfeeding are very differently selected than the people who are who are not. So breastfeeding tends to be associated with higher maternal education, higher maternal income, other resources. And those things themselves are associated with higher performance on IQ tests. And so one of the things that's really interesting in something like the breast milk IQ linkage is you can see if you just compare kids who are breastfed to kids who are not, you see big differences in IQ.

31:59If you control for you just for some differences across the moms, those effects get a little smaller. If you adjust for more differences, if you adjust for, say, mom's IQ test, they get even smaller. And then if you compare siblings, so one kid's breastfed, one's not, but it's the same mom, you see no effect. And that sort of tells me that these initial effects we're seeing are really about differences across who's breastfeeding and who's not, as opposed to the effect of the breast milk itself.

32:24Jay Shetty:Right. And then I've spoken to moms as well who are like, also formula is really expensive too. So it's like a. Both things are very, I mean, both things are very expensive. You know, people will tell you, you know, oh, breastfeeding is free. It's like, I'm sorry, does my time have no value? Like, actually, these things are both expensive. Formula costs money, breastfeeding costs time. And I think it's not, it's not obvious that one of these is, is cheaper. I mean, I will say like, you know, my mother, when I was writing all these books about pregnancy, I read both the set of pregnancy books that my grandmother had in like the 1940s and the ones that my mom had in like the early 1980s.

33:02And there's a there's Dr. Spock. Spock was like the core to the 19 early 1980s. And in his book from the time when I was born, he's got this discussion of breastfeeding. And this is a time in which people were sort of still coming back to breastfeeding after a long period of like formula is the best. And he says something that's like, you know, like breastfeeding a lot. You might try breastfeeding. A lot of people like like it. A lot of people think it's good. You know, enjoy it. And that's sort of how he puts it. Like, this is something that you should you should try because it might end up working for you.

33:36And I think like that message, I think, is really good. Like, you should try this and we should help people figure out how to breastfeed, which is not that easy. And we should be supportive of it because it may work for a lot of people. Which is different from saying we should be telling people that if you don't do this, your kid's going to suck, which is how a lot of people are hearing that messaging. And that is not a healthy message and is not true. And it is not helpful to anything.

34:03Jay Shetty:Yeah, it's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And not taking into account what people do for work, how much time they have, how much income they have, not taking into account all of that. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons, so I had written Expecting Better, which is a book about pregnancy, and then I was not sure if I was going to write a second book. It's like a long time between the two books. I had to have a second kid and all kinds of other stuff. But I think the thing that ultimately pushed me over into writing Cribsheet, which talks all about breastfeeding, among many other things, is the emails that I kept getting from dads.

34:32And I remember this one very vividly that was like, my wife is so like is like killing herself over breastfeeding and she's depressed and she is all like this is she said, you know, she has to do this. And really, like, I want to help her. Like, I think she would listen to you. Can you tell me how important is this really? Like, what does the data say? And I think that moment of someone being like, this is really harming my family. And I think that it would make people feel better to know what the data really says. That was kind of, I think that's just really important.

35:05Jay Shetty:Yeah, and I think we underestimate, and this applies to other areas of life as well, where stress about something you care about doesn't end up having a good impact on it. For example, staying healthy is important, but stressing about staying healthy is kind of working counterintuitively against you as well. and it doesn't really help. And so similarly, it's a hard thing with children, I can imagine, because you care and it's a different level of dedication and devotion to a child than it is even to your own health. But stress is always gonna be reflected poorly as well. That's more likely to have a bad impact.

35:41Yeah, and I think we also have to recognize like some of what we're like, like the reason we're having kids and we're doing this is like, because it's fun and because we want our family to be functioning in a nice way. And if somebody is very unhappy, if mom is very unhappy, that is negatively affecting how the family is functioning. And sometimes I'll say parents are people, too, because I think we often forget that they are an important part of the family.

36:04Jay Shetty:What do you wish men knew about pregnancy that maybe they don't because they don't experience it and they don't really understand what's going on? I think it is very hard to really understand the experience of pregnancy. I think there's various things I tell men, you know, like, fun fact, like you get a pee on women pee on themselves a lot because there's a lot of pressure. There's like things like that, which I think it's good. It's just good to know the stuff that is that is going on. But I think much more important is sort of understanding, like, how can I engage when the baby arrives like that?

36:41But, you know, that's the time when we often get this sort of bifurcation of mom and dad where the woman ends up doing more of the work and sort of just learning more. And then she knows more and then he doesn't know. And I think there's like a real opportunity in that moment to kind of both lean in to learning how to do everything at the same time. I would worry much more about that than about kind of understanding all of the nuances of pregnancy, which are just, it's hard to explain.

37:13Jay Shetty:Yeah. Got it. Yeah. No, I'm just asking for myself. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people would be like, oh, you know, you should understand how uncomfortable it is. Yeah. It's pretty, like, it's pretty uncomfortable. Not even that. I think it's what you're saying makes sense to me. It's almost like it's the preparation piece. I think it's, you can never fully empathize with how painful it is, how difficult. Like you never, that isn't even it. but it's yeah how can men better prepare for example i had a lot of people that i know whose partners went through like postpartum like afterwards and a lot of men i knew just didn't understand what was going on and they were just like she's gone crazy she's just depressed all the time like you know those kind of things and it's almost like i think we're learning a bit more now i hope and and conversations like this are all to help raise awareness to have the right conversations to prepare for the project to set up homes in a better way to know what may come next you know and so i think there's all of that where it's like you don't you don't know what that person's going through and if is pregnancy brain a real thing for example like is that real not not really no i think it's just you're tired um yeah yeah but i think something to come back to like the pre-pregnancy something i would say is you know for for people who are going through like ivf uh which can be very like time consuming and you know a huge amount of work i think that is a place where women will often take the vast brunt of this experience and where actually there's way more that could be shared because there's a lot of logistics.

38:39There's a lot of like paying attention to when are we doing this and just keeping up to date. And that is a place where I think men could lean in far more. You know, you can't take the shots. You're not going to be, you know, having your eggs harvested. But fundamentally, like there's a lot of logistics.

38:53Jay Shetty:One of these high-end diaper versus everyday diaper, affordable diaper. Does it make a difference? I wish I could tell you the answer to this. My kids are 10 and 14, and we use that diaper. And it was fine. I will say people swear by the coterie diapers, but I haven't seen anything outside of the Anik data on that. I mean, those worked great. No complaints about the big brand diapers on my side. Okay, amazing. Good to know. Talk to me about the difference between wooden toys and plastic toys. Plastic toys that make noise are super, super annoying. Your kid will love that and it will drive you out of your mind.

39:38I love it. It's so great. You like it, but we had this. So to look at the data, you know, people will say, oh, your kid has to have wooden toys. You know, fundamentally, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that some toys are, you know, toys can be developmentally appropriate. right and so some of these making sure that your kid has some things to do that are kind of matching their developmental phase is good you know stacking blocks are good for certain ages sorting things are good for like some stuff like that but does it need to be made of wood or you know carved in some particular way no and kids do like the electronic stuff super annoying i i've definitely

40:19Jay Shetty:talked to parents who believe in like montessori techniques or all of that which is all about wood but there's no data behind that there's no no there's no data on that i mean i think it's fine if that's something like there's nothing wrong with that yeah um and i think some of this stuff in parenting is a little as much about kind of shaping an experience that you feel good about as it is about you know optimizing your kid in in some way and i think that's so some of it i just tell people like that if that's something you enjoy like that's great i'm gonna be over here with my like pull ladybug pull toy that's in the same song yeah it's it's so hard because it's so hard to think about it like I my mom was extremely loving but extremely disciplined and so I had a very clear schedule after school but a lot of love in my life I look back on it and feel very grateful I have a very disciplined life I have you know and it's like but who's to say that that was the thing that I don't have no idea right it's it's so hard to point to where some of those great qualities come from and the challenges come from and also to separate out genetics yes you know your mom was very disciplined you're very disciplined well is that because she gave you discipline is that because you were always going to be a disciplined person you could have grown up in any environment like we you know we know genetics matters a lot yeah and so does environment yeah uh okay back to the myths yeah breastfeeding will help you lose all the weight quickly no sorry it will not uh there's the i think the data shows that you breastfeeding women lose an average over like the first year like 1.5 more pounds so no because you eat more you breastfeed it gets calories and then you consume more calories just like anything else okay it's not a way of loss there's no magic pill for that no there is a magic pill it's called it's called it's epic oh yeah yeah you can't dye your hair while pregnant that is a myth there was some discussion of hairdressers having some but it turned out there's really no data on that hair dies fine.

42:16Jay Shetty:Okay. You can't sleep on your back while you're pregnant. This is also a myth. So people for a long time were told not to sleep on their back because of concerns about compressing a vein. And it is true that that can happen, but it turns out, you know, if that's happening to you, like you'll be uncomfortable and you will move. And when we got better data to look at some of the things people were concerned about, the risk of stillbirth, actually it turns out sleep position has nothing to do with that. So So if you should sleep in, it's very hard to sleep when you are pregnant. And if you are comfortable on your back, you should try.

42:51Eventually, that is likely to become uncomfortable.

42:53Jay Shetty:Got it. You can control whether or not you're going to have a boy or a girl. You cannot control this. Outside of like, if you have embryos, you can implant embryos of particular sex. But a lot of people have this idea that like male sperm swims fast and doesn't live as long. And so if you have sex close to ovulation, no, just no, that doesn't work. Natural birth is better. I hate the phrase natural birth, but it is not better. There is epidurals are very, and different kinds of pain relief are very safe and effective, and there's no better there. Taking Tylenol during pregnancy is not safe. That is a myth.

43:35There is, many people heard the president and RFK say that Tylenol causes autism, but when you look at the best data on this, we do not see that link. okay you can't use retinol during pregnancy uh so you cannot use accutane during pregnancy so the the sort of oral form of vitamin a is linked accutane is one of the small number of things that are very very clearly linked to very extreme birth defects like what i think it's missing limbs a lot of sober like i mean they they so actually the restrictions on pregnancy if you are on Accutane, you have to be on multiple kinds of birth control. There's like, this is like a very, it's a category X, which is means like you cannot have that in pregnancy.

44:18Retinol is a form of vitamin A. And so there's people will sort of say, okay, well, is this the same here? But turns out the absorption through your skin is so, so, so, so, so, so much less than taking something in oral form. And so most people will say like out of an abundance of caution, don't take this, but there's nothing in the data that would suggest it's risky. And a lot of people use retinol throughout pregnancy, sometimes by accident. We don't see much of a negative effect. So I always tell people like, you're fine to quit this, but if you were using this early in pregnancy, you shouldn't freak out.

44:53Jay Shetty:Yeah. Going back to the Tylenol example and what you said earlier, it's so hard, some data is so hard to trust when you said like, you were like, you know, the big drug companies, for example, are funding a lot of the research. so it's like who would almost go against tylenol for example and that may not be the best one to pick on but i'm just looking at it from that perspective of that's one that's like is it just because the drug companies would do the research and then who else would pay for research against that yeah so i think in the case of something like people talk a lot about these issues of sort of funding funding conflicts and in the case of something like tylenol most of the data we have on this is not from, I mean, Tylenol is a generic drug, but the company that makes Tylenol is not, you know, is not doing these kind of trials.

45:39These are studies done on very large data sets that are collected, you know, by the Danish government on everybody in Denmark. And they have whether they took Tylenol and then things about their kids and they follow them over time. So this is all sort of like large scale government funded data set databases. When we look at drugs in general, yeah, a lot of the studies of drugs are run by pharmaceutical companies, but in a very heavily regulated way. Like the pharma company doesn't just get to decide like what to do whatever. They have to do a study to get their drug approved that is itself approved by the FDA.

46:14And so I think that those kind of conflicts are more complicated than many people think.

46:19Jay Shetty:Got it, understood. You should not do screen time before age two. Okay. screen time is perhaps the best example of correlation is not causation in parenting. And so people, you know, send me these studies that say, you know, screen time before the age of one is linked with, you know, all of these terrible outcomes. Look at the study and you'll have one group of kids are watching more than four hours of screens a day before the age of one. And then another group that never watches screens before the age of one. And then they compare them later. The thing I always want to ask people is like, imagine those two households.

46:54Do you think there's anything else different other than the screen exposure? Like, of course, those are really different households. There's many things that are different. It turns out you can see some of those in the data, but there are just all kinds of pieces of the differences that we're not going to be able to see in the data. And it is not surprising that we would find different outcomes for those kids, but that's just a correlation, is not a causal link. And so then we're left in a place with screens where people have to make a choice about how much to expose their kids to screens at different ages without very good data.

47:29So all the data we have is very crummy, but it is a set of choices you have to make. I don't think there's anything we would see in the data that would suggest, you know, your kid watching a half an hour of Miss Rachel, you know, a few times a week would be problematic. It's very difficult to imagine how that could be bad. And actually, what's interesting is the AAP has recently kind of dialed back their screen time restrictions to a set of guidelines that more or less say, just kind of think about it a bit more, like give it some thought. And I think this is not a terrible piece of advice that you should think about where screens fit in your day.

48:06If your kid's watching eight hours of screens, they're not doing other things that they should be doing. If they're watching a half an hour of screens so you can get dinner ready so you guys can all sit down together, like that's probably a good thing. And it's ultimately about making a plan that works for your family for when these screens will fit into your day, as opposed to saying like no screens, all screens, which isn't very helpful.

48:28Jay Shetty:Yeah. Is there any data to suggest that a mother's anxiety affects the child when pregnant? Not anything that you would think of as good. So there's a little bit of evidence that very, very, very stressful events during pregnancy. And we're talking here not like, you know, this was a bad week at work, but like your spouse died. That can show up in some small, like long-term effects on kids. But general anxiety stress during pregnancy, not so much. Very hard to study that because, of course, maternal anxiety and child anxiety are linked, but probably for both genetic and other environmental reasons having nothing to do with pregnancy.

49:13Jay Shetty:This is the moment everyone in business has been waiting for. AI is rewriting the rules, and if you're not ahead, you're already behind. Here's the reality. AI is moving fast, really fast. Hey, it's Dean Graziosi, and a lot of people think they have years to figure AI out. The truth is, you might only have months, maybe less. I've never seen technology move this quick before. Right now, AI is helping people save hours every week, automate work that slows them down, and move faster than ever. But here's the challenge. Most people feel overwhelmed trying to figure out what makes sense for them. The two biggest names in personal growth are stepping in right now to cut through the noise.

49:48Jay Shetty:That's exactly why Tony Robbins and I are hosting a free virtual AI Advantage Summit on April 23rd through the 25th. We're bringing together people who are actually using AI in the real world to show you what works. No complexity, no overwhelm, just a clear path to start using AI in your business, your career, and your life. So join us April 23rd, the 24th, the 25th. Reserve your free seat at AISummitRSVP.com. That's AISummitRSVP.com. This is Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab, and this message is brought to you by Simple Mills. On our show, we talk a lot about strategies like temptation bundling and implementation intentions, those research-backed ways to make good habits stick.

50:29And there's some powerful evidence to suggest that the right snack can also support the other habits you're trying to build.

50:35Jay Shetty:Take a snack like Simple Mills. Their almond flour crackers are made with almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Simple Mills refers to their almond flour crackers as sunshine in every bite. And there is truth to that. It's a snack that lifts you up instead of weighing you down. And if you haven't tried them yet, Simple Mills Pop 'ums are light, airy, cheese-puffed crackers made with vegetables. A quick crunch like that can reinforce the habit loop without sabotaging your energy. Find Simple Mills at your grocery store.

51:16Jay Shetty:one of the questions that we got when we announced that you'd be coming on the show and we're trying to get questions in from our audience was how do you deal with mom guilt because that seems to be such a widely held challenge that everyone feels guilty anxious stressed that they're doing it wrong and everything they see online makes them feel like they're doing it wrong and even the myths we just covered would make you feel like you're doing it wrong yeah so i think there's the biggest problem for a lot of people is you make a choice you do something and then someone is like why would you make that choice and then you feel like a crap i mean that's like a very that happens all the time yeah i think our best defense against that is to make our choices thoughtfully is to say i thought about whether you know breastfeeding was right for me or whether sleep training was right for me or whatever is your like topic of choice like sit down actually make those decisions deliberately.

52:08Like these are important decisions. They're going to shape your life. They're going to shape, even if they don't matter for your kid, they're going to shape how your life is, what your experience is like. You should make them deliberately and decide what's the right choice for you. And then recognize that that can't be the right choice for everyone else, but that you thought about this choice. I think if we kind of come into these conversations feeling like, I know that I made the right choice for me and I thought about it and this was the right choice and I could never be sure if it was, ultimately the right choice, but it was the right choice ex ante.

52:39I think that's a little bit protective. I think people could spend less time online. That would probably be helpful for some of this. But, you know, I mean, it's very, bomb guilt is a topic that I experience. And I think, you know, some of it is kind of just trying to recognize you're doing a good job some of the time.

52:59Jay Shetty:Yeah, no, thank you for sharing that. And it's, again, I can only reflect on it in other areas of life, but it's almost like it's the human trait of needing our choices to be validated and wanting other people to agree with our way of doing and thinking. Totally. And also how uncomfortable it is when everyone does tell you you're doing something wrong because they did it another way. So even if you're very happy with your choice, you get triggered by someone else who says, well, my kid's got this IQ level at this age and whatever. And all of a sudden you're triggered by it. Or someone actually comes to you and says, can't believe you did that like you know my kids are doing great and i never did that and so i think there's partly us crowdsourcing and outsourcing and being overexposed to lots of other people and how they do it then you have some frustrating people in your life who are telling you how to do it to be honest and and then there's just that coming back to what you kind of said which i really appreciate which is know why you're making the choices you make and be really clear about it in your group project again yeah and have some conviction and confidence that based on your set of beliefs, backgrounds, socioeconomic status, you're making the best decisions you can.

54:08Yeah. And I think that the point of recognizing that like your best decisions may not be other people's best decisions is so crucial because I think in these moments we are, we want our decisions to be right and we sort of want them to be so right that they're right for everyone else. And so when you make a different choice for me, it's, it's like hard for me not to read that as,

54:28Jay Shetty:as like you think my choice is bad or like, well, you, you know, I failed. Or I failed as opposed to just being like, yeah, this person had a different set of constraints and, you know, they made a different choice and different set of preferences, different set of constraints. And like the both choices could be right. We could adopt that approach a bit more. Some of this discourse would be like a little less. What is the data say about raising confident kids? Not too much. It's really hard to look at that kind of data. You know, we have pieces of... There's data about, you know, raising kids who are willing to take risks.

55:08So there's a lot, there's a literature about like grit and sort of how to develop grit in kids. And some of this is things like, you know, like the growth mindset stuff, right? Like you sort of want your kid to understand that sometimes things are hard and you have to, you know, push, like you can get better at something just because you are not good at it now doesn't mean you couldn't eventually be good at it. And I think that's kind of part of this. It's not exactly the same as confidence, but it's something that people are often trying to develop. What I will say is I think people take pieces of advice like that, which are very good and are based on data, that we shouldn't discourage kids from having a growth mindset.

55:48And it ends up getting distilled into advice that is ridiculous. Right. So people end up we go from, you know, a growth mindset is good. So it's good for kids to understand that, like, it's the values in the effort and it's, you know, worth trying. And they get to parents as never tell your kid good job. And it's like, well, what do you mean? Like, where's the it's like, there's no evidence that telling your kid good job is, you know, is is a problem. We could develop a growth mindset while occasionally saying a good job, you know. So you have these conversations. For a while, we were having these conversations where my kids would come home.

56:25My kids are a bit older and they would come home and they'd be like, you know, this is the score I got on this test. And we were reacting being like, you know, well, how do you feel about that? And finally, my daughter was like, stop saying that. Like, that's super annoying. That's so funny. And it was like, okay, fine. You know, it's like, it's okay to say good job.

56:44Jay Shetty:Yeah, that's so funny. That's amazing. I think there's just like there are many things like this where it gets parents are sort of looking so hard for these like here's something you can just do like super concrete, super concrete piece of advice. And we distill things that are very complicated into something very simple, which is often wrong. Well, I think it's hard because it goes back to the point I asked you earlier about when I was talking about my mom and my qualities and things like that. I was like, we almost, our mind for some reason, likes to think that there's a point to point connection of every action choice and decision that impacts something.

57:20Jay Shetty:So if a kid is struggling at school, we're like, oh, it's because I did this. Or, you know, if they struggle later in life in a relationship, it's like, oh, because me and your dad did this, right? We make connections feel very linear, even though they feel extremely cyclical, random, disconnected, and connected and complicated, quite frankly. It's just too complicated for any of us to know why or how that ended up happening. Absolutely. And I think we have somehow this kind of idea has translated, I think, for a lot of people into feeling almost that every moment with your child is an opportunity to mess them up forever.

57:58And I think that's, you know, so there was an episode maybe a year ago where people were very worried about hurrying. we got this idea of hurried child syndrome. You are, yes. I missed this. You did. That's so lucky for you. So there was all of a sudden, all this stuff on social media about hurried child syndrome, which was conveyed to people as if you're hurrying your child out the door in the morning and being like, get your shoes on, we have to go, that that's going to lead them to have terrible problems with anxiety later. And again, this name, if people are like, oh my gosh, like, but then it sort of for parents, they were like, oh my God, but like sometimes they do need them to get their shoes off.

58:34We have to go to, because we have to go to school. Like, what am I doing? You know, but every and again, had this feeling of like every moment, every morning when you get out of the house is an opportunity to screw it all up. Like you could be doing everything perfectly. And then there's that one day where you're like, get your shoes on. And that's it. Then later, when they're an unsuccessful, failure adult, it's because of that time that you said the thing about the shoes. Right. And that that is how it feels like. No, but I mean, I think it's it's sort of ridiculous when you put it like that.

59:02But I think it is how people were. It's how we feel.

59:05Jay Shetty:Yeah. And in the end, actually, hurried child syndrome is a totally different thing. Completely not at all like this, which is. What is it, actually? It's an idea coined by some guys in the 1970s that if we push kids to do sort of too much like pre-professional like sports and like just sort of grow up too quickly that that they miss out on some of the fun of childhood. But actually a very interesting set of issues related to some of the stuff John Hyde has talked about, like interesting set of issues to discuss completely unrelated to getting your shoes on. there's no evidence that pushing your kid out the door you know so i think it was just an example of something that kind of got into the into the zeitgeist but is is the stuff parents are hearing every day and i think if we could just dial down a little bit you'd be like hey there are some ways you could mess up your kid but like they're much bigger than this than these kind of tiny daily choices that you're that you're making yeah definitely i and again it's like i I often think about growing up because that's my only experience of parenting in that sense of being parented.

1:00:05Jay Shetty:And it's like both my parents worked. I don't think I got a lot of time in the weekdays with my parents, although we did on the weekends. But the great parts of the parenting were not, I never felt left alone or abandoned when I was at daycare or picked up and then my mom went back out to work. And if I ever felt lonely, I would just go to work with her in the evenings and lie by her foot and fall asleep while she did work. And then we'd come home again. And so it's like there was not a long term, you know, and again, I'm not saying that my experience is everyone's experience. All I can say is that, yeah, it's just that it isn't as causal as we believe it is.

1:00:41People often say, you know, they're like the first three years is really important. That's true. Like it's it's true. But when when we sort of look at that, like what what does that mean in the population? Well, what it means is that it's really important for kids to have, you know, a safe place to sleep, enough to eat, you know, someone who loves them, maybe some books, like some pretty basic things, which unfortunately, at least in America, a lot of kids actually don't have that. that's something we could work on. But many of the things that, at least the kinds of parents I talk to are worried about are kind of like, you're already doing like 95%.

1:01:15And now you're telling me like you're spending all your time obsessing about like, you know, the 0.3 % over here. Like you're good.

1:01:24Jay Shetty:What's your take on that coming from people's own unhealed stress, pressure, trauma, childhood? Like how much of that is coming from their own? Is there any data to suggest that we... I don't think there's a lot of data to suggest that. I actually have always read this as something completely different, which is it's coming out of the demographic shift and when people are having kids. So we, you know, it used to be you had kids, you know, you kind of graduated from college, whatever you get. Maybe you didn't go to college and you had some kids like in your 20s. We're now in a demographic space where a lot of people have kind of thought about like, OK, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get me to work.

1:01:59I'm going to get into college. I want to. I'm going to get in the college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to get the job I want. I'm going to get them. I'm going to make partner. I'm going I've been climbing a ladder of like professional, personal and professional things. And I've gotten to this point and it's like, OK, like all of these things I put a lot of effort in and I got it. And now I'm going to have a kid and I'm going to put a lot of effort in to win. Right. Like like sort of the children become the thing you're going to win next. And I think that generates an enormous amount of pressure, because if you think of your child as like a thing to achieve, it's difficult because it's not like going to not like getting into college you know it's not like if you work harder like like it goes better it's like goes much worse yeah um but i i think that's that's part of it is this feeling of kind of like this is a this is something that i could that i could win uh much more so than some of this unhealed i mean that's hard to know i'm sure people do have unhealed traumas but i would guess the demographic shifting is well yeah it's it's

1:02:57Jay Shetty:the hard toggle between saying it is a group project but it isn't because it's it's what you said earlier i agree with you there has to be a business plan almost but then it's not a business in that it it's so it's this it's yeah there's like a limit to what you can control yeah you can control there are things you can do to set up to make the the experience of doing this easier but that is different from being able to control the outcome and i think that's sort of the core the core distinction wanted to talk about one of the other big debates around sleep training yes uh this is probably what your day is filled with because there's no parent who's not struggling with sleep in some way, shape, or form.

1:03:33Jay Shetty:Is there an ideal way to sleep train one-size-fits-all model? Definitely not. I think, so first of all, there is definitely not a good one-size-fits-all. Sleep training is not going to be the right choice for many parents, I think, but it is going to be the right choice for some parents. So when we talk about sleep training, one thing people worry about is, is this going to cause long-term, terrible attachment problems for my kid. And can we back up and say, like, what do we mean by sleep training? Yes, please. Yeah, can you define sleep training? When we talk about sleep training, usually people mean some form of, like, encouraging independent sleep, which usually involves some crying.

1:04:14There's a wide range of things. So it ranges from kind of the sort of Ferber extinction method where you kind of do a nice bedtime routine, put your kid in the bed, close the door, and, you know, decide we're not going to come back for some amount of time and the kid will often cry for a long time. Usually it's a few nights of that and then they sleep. And then there's versions of this where you're sitting in the room with them, where you're coming in. So there's a lot of variations, but it almost always is in the service of trying to encourage a kid to fall asleep independently and to sleep, to sort of connect sleep cycles.

1:04:49So when we sleep, all people, including kids, we wake up every, about every 90 minutes between sleep cycles. And so good quality sleep for kids and for their parents means sort of the kids need to connect the sleep cycles in some way. And so then they are sleeping through the night. When you say baby's sleeping through the night, you don't mean that they're literally asleep the entire time. You mean that they are going back to sleep on their own after they wake up. OK, so sleep training usually involves some kind of crying. Sometimes people worry that this will cause long term attachments. We have a lot of data on this that suggests that that's not true, including some randomized data, some community-based data.

1:05:28There's a lot of evidence that sleep training is not damaging to children. And also a fair amount of evidence that it improves sleep for parents and that it sort of causes improved sleeps for kids in the sense of allowing them to connect these sleep cycles. Having said all that, I think that means for me, based on the data, that this should be in people's toolbox. That when you think about like, what am I going to do about the fact that we need to sleep? My kid needs to sleep. Sleep is really important. We have to decide this should be one of the things in the toolbox. It's not going to be the thing every parent pulls out of their toolbox.

1:06:03Often find this a little bit of a hard conversation that people kind of end up in sort of doing one of two things. Like one of two things is sustainable. One is some kind of sleep training where the kid's going to sleep independently and they're going to sleep for extended periods of time. And the other is co-sleeping. These can work really well for different families. The thing that actually is very hard is like, I'm not sleeping in the room with my kid, but they're waking up every 90 minutes and I have to go put them back to sleep. That's really unsustainable for almost every family. They tend to find that people kind of come into one of these two options.

1:06:36But that really means that you want to ask yourself, like, where are we trying to go? Like, are we hoping to all be sleeping together in the bed, which can work for a lot of people? Or are we hoping to be sleeping independently? And from there to kind of back out, you know, how are we going to how are we going to get there?

1:06:51Jay Shetty:Is there a right age to start sleep training if that's the choice you make? Probably not. So not before four or five months. And at that point, you are not looking for your kid to sleep all the way through the night. So many of these sort of sleep training approaches there are kind of about learning some independent sleep, than sort of putting together a schedule where you think, okay, at some point they will need to eat in the middle of the night. And then as they get older and they need to eat less, they'll kind of connect more of those things and eventually have a longer sleep. Right, got it.

1:07:22Jay Shetty:Are there any, I mean, I guess it's just painful for a parent to go to sleep thinking that their child's crying and takes a second to, you know. Yeah, I think, so one of the things we see in the data is that sleep training doesn't work well if you are not ready to do it. So the people who are ambivalent about this, who think like, I'm not comfortable with this, I don't, this doesn't feel right to me. This isn't going to work so well because like you're not, you're not, consistency is important. And it's just like, that's not going to work as well for that group. So I think a lot of it is about being sort of deciding that this is something that is safe, something that is effective, something that's going to work for a family and deliver at the other side of it, which is often, you know, just a few days kind of going to deliver a better environment for, for your family.

1:08:06Yeah.

1:08:07Jay Shetty:Anything else on sleep training that we've missed that we haven't talked about? Things that you get asked the most about it? So I think one thing that people really struggle with is actually sleep training for little kids is it can be a hard for like babies. It can be like a hard decision, but like it's not that hard to implement. Like if you're committed to doing it, it's not that hard to implement because your kid's in a crib and they can't move. A thing that becomes really hard is when people have toddlers and their kids are coming out of the room and we sort of there's often another period where people are spending a lot of time, a lot of complicated bedtime stuff.

1:08:39And that's actually a very different problem. It's not, it's more of a kind of a need for behavioral modification than it is a sort of sleep training. And so there, I think the main point for many people is just you got to decide where you're trying to go and then like decide a moment that you're going to consistently implement it. Kids tend to respond really well to consistency.

1:09:00Jay Shetty:Where did the theory or belief come from that if kids are left crying that they'll end up feeling abandoned? Where did that come from? So it's based on psychology of attachment theory, a lot of which was developed out of observations of kids who had very, very problematic attachment like childhood. So one place we saw this was in Romanian orphanages. So there was a period of time in Romania in which there were a lot of children who were unwanted. And they ended up in these orphanages where they were like basically just left alone for, you know, with very, very minimal care. There was a lot of abuse.

1:09:40And when researchers came to like observe these kids, they found the babies really didn't cry because they sort of had learned nobody would come. And then these kids had problems for very long periods of time. The difference between a baby that is left alone for days at a time with not enough food and sexual and physical abuse and all that, the difference between that and kind of crying for even a pretty long period of time for a few nights in the context of an otherwise loving and stable and happy household, those are really different things. And I think that they sort of know that, but there's kind of a porting across this, which I just don't think is appropriate, but that's where it comes from.

1:10:24Jay Shetty:Yeah, got it. I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible what connections we make when they're not really that connected. Yeah, I mean, I think this space is a very, this space is a tough one because it is hard to hear your kid cry and it's hard to think about sleep training for a lot of people. It is also incredibly helpful for many families. And I think that's worth noting. Yeah. Are there any data-driven techniques to help babies stop crying quickly? Just consistently implement this multiple, you know, over time. I think that's, there's no like this trick. I mean, it doesn't work for every baby, but it really does work on average.

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1:13:18Jay Shetty:I wanted to revisit screen time from the point of view of like as kids are growing up and not looking at you could advise whether it's valuable to look at specific ages or not. But is there any connection now? I know earlier you said, well, it was really not about causality or causation. It was just the fact that it's just a different socioeconomic condition and different opportunities and different education level of parents and availability of funds and resources and time and energy and everything else. If that's all it is, is there any data to suggest it matters on any level? Yeah, I mean, the answer is probably yes.

1:13:55This is a space where data is really new. So if you wanted to ask, what's the impact of being exposed to an iPad at the age of two on high school graduation or college graduation? We don't know because the kids who are exposed at the age of two haven't graduated yet. Yeah. So we're really in a data poor environment. When we look at younger kids, a lot of the the sort of questions we would ask are about displacement of other activities. So asking, you know, as kids do more and more of these, is that kind of displacing things that they should be doing, like that has sort of active positive value, like spending time with their family, going outside?

1:14:35Like what, you know, what are we replacing is kind of the question I would ask, as opposed to thinking about the screens per se as like good or bad. They are an activity which must be displacing something else. And so if they are displacing sleep, for example, that's really bad. We know kids don't sleep enough and they need a lot of a lot of sleep. There's a second question as kids get older about kind of the social media, the social media part of screens, where, again, we're in a very data poor environment. but I think there's, you know, reasonable people have reasonable concerns about girls in particular and the kinds of exposures that we get.

1:15:11And then you're layering on top of this, like a whole other AI thing, which like, that's new. And so we just, there's a lot of choices that parents are having to make that are hard because we have no context for them. And, and also our kids are much better at screens than we are. So a lot, a lot of the tools people would I put, you know, people, I add this tool to my kid's iPad to do this and that. It's like, are you kidding? Are you kidding me? You know, it's like, you know, your kid's school is putting up like these restrictions. Like, you know, they can't play this game. And they're like, oh, I just went to the website that's like called like my school blocked, blah, blah, blah.

1:15:51And that's where you get the games.

1:15:54Jay Shetty:Yeah, totally. totally tilting and windmills on this on this stuff given the the you know demographic given the the generational shifts yeah i'm a i'm a i'm a at least a supporter of most of or all of jonathan height's considerations around that as i don't know older age like i just feel like there's no need to be on social media before a certain age yeah it's like there's no need for schools to have phones like i just don't you know we all went to schools without phones and yes i think there's a few of these things which are like these things all have like little sort of different pieces. I think like phones in schools, like, yeah, that's distracting.

1:16:28You don't need a distracting activity. No need for that. I think the social media stuff, I also agree, like there should be some sort of thought about age. It's maybe going to be different for different kids. I think there should also be a fair amount of kind of scaffolding by parents once your kid gets these social media tools. Like you don't, you know, it's like a car, right? You don't just hand them the keys and say, enjoy, you like teach them. And I think this is kind of like a car. Like you got to be willing to take the keys away. you got to be willing to like help them learn, you know, what's the reasonable way to interact with this.

1:16:59I will say, I think that the relative to the kids who are now like 18, 19, the kids who are now 13, 14, at least in some cases, I think are actually much less into this. There was sort of a period of time when everyone had Instagram when they were 12. And this is actually dialed down a bit, which, you know, maybe it's just reflecting my, my kids' school, but I don't know.

1:17:22Jay Shetty:Yeah, it's different between just having screen time and then being on social media and being exposed to other people's lives and messaging. And I think they're two totally different conversations. And I like the way you just said it, that if you look to getting a phone, like getting a car, and if we were able to start helping society think that way, then it becomes a point of, I remember wanting a car and being like excited, nervous that I had to pass a test, preparing for the test, you know, all the levels that you go through to get there. and then you have your first accident and you know like that's scary first ticket yeah you get first ticket it's like you know it's it's but it it feels like a whole journey to get it rather than now a phone's almost like this expected yeah piece of life that you have no idea what it's exposing you to or your kids to and and it's a tough conversation with parents i love the scaffolding idea but i do think that it's hard when it's like oh well your friend's parents i gave them a phone at 12 and then but i'm waiting to you till 14 and they're like but wait a minute everyone at school had one at 10 and whereas if there's just rules that are not parents set yes i think parents could use help on this for sure um and you know ultimately there's like no substitute for knowing your kid on these things and every kid is going to be different and is going to be exposed to be differentially affected by these things and you need different things which is part of what makes parenting so difficult yeah yeah absolutely it's tough stuff uh a couple more things i wanted to talk to you about this one was about uh vaccines uh yes because i know there's a lot of conversation about that so vaccines and cdc guidelines change over time of course uh how would you consider parents think about navigating that i think parents should vaccinate their their children um on the whole i mean i think that you know the aap has a set of guidelines for many years the aap the american academy of pediatrics and the cdc had the same vaccine guidelines.

1:19:16And they are the sort of primary childhood vaccine series are have been enforced for decades and have been really safe and effective and et cetera, et cetera. And over the past year with the current administration, we have dialed way back the number of vaccines that the CDC has recommended. I think there's a fair amount of holdover from COVID where people were uncomfortable with some of the way that the COVID vaccine was pushed on people. And I think some of that is actually fair. Probably we do not currently need all healthy children to get a COVID booster. Europe doesn't do that. I mean, I think that's a perfectly reasonable position.

1:19:56What is not a reasonable position is people shouldn't get the measles vaccine. And so I think for parents, it's kind of thinking about what is the, if you want to think about what the evidence says about these vaccines, And these vaccines are really good at preventing disease and they are really safe and have been in use for a decade. So I find the current vaccine conversation really difficult to engage with because it feels like, what are you kidding me? Like kids are going to die of the measles. Like kids are going to die of the measles. Two kids died of the measles last year. More kids are going to die of the measles this year.

1:20:31In a single week in January 2026, there were more measles cases in the U.S. than all but a small handful of years over the past two decades.

1:20:40Jay Shetty:Because people chose not to. Yeah. So if you look at the graph, basically, we had like 260 cases of measles in a week. In almost all full years in the past two decades, we had like far fewer than that. So because people stop vaccinating and then measles is super, super contagious. And so if you get a small amount of outbreaks and the outbreak grows and we had a lot of cases. And I just think, you know, that means kids are going to die of measles who didn't need to die of measles. And that just feels terrible. Yeah. Do you think kids are being over-medicated in general? I mean, I think it's a totally different question.

1:21:15Jay Shetty:Yeah, totally different. It's interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot of probably to some extent. I think if we look at the data on something like ADHD and we look at what's happened to those kind of prescriptions over time, They've gone up a lot. And we do see some evidence that those are increasing. Those are higher for, say, kids who are younger when they are first in kindergarten. I think that's reflecting our expectation of kids in schools, which is totally different than it once was and particularly probably poorly suited, especially for boys. And so if we sort of think like, OK, we're going to bring a bunch of kids in who kind of aren't that great.

1:21:57at sitting still. And when they're not that great at sitting still, which is totally age appropriate behavior, we're then going to give them something that makes them sit still. And there's a good argument that we've been overusing that approach.

1:22:08Jay Shetty:Yeah. No, no. And totally two different. Which is a totally different. Totally two different conversations. Yeah. I think it's become hard. It's almost hard for, there's some people who never question it at all. And then there are, I think, some people who question it because there's a lack of trust or there's, for example, like you see the over-medication, you see the rise and then you go, wait a minute, there's so many updates in what's happening here and is it really helping and where's it, you know, so I think there's a lack of trust, there's curiosity, there's, you know, there's all sorts of versions of it on the spectrum of why and why we disagree or where they sit.

1:22:40Yeah. And I think the other, I mean, the other thing about vaccines is like, we haven't done a great job of helping parents understand, you know, like which vaccines are most important. I basically think everybody should get all of the vaccines on the schedule because they're all safe. But I'm curious whether we should be having more of the conversation of, OK, look, if you were only going to do, you know, there's a real hesitancy for good reason to have a conversation that's like, look, if you were only going to do three, these are your three. And I see why we don't want to have that conversation, because it implies that, you know, maybe there's some risk to these other things, which there are not.

1:23:15But it could encourage people to get some subset of the vaccines. It feels like such a complicated messaging, messaging play. You know, if we really think the most important thing is for people to get like the measles vaccine and the Tdap vaccine and the flu vaccine, like maybe we should be like pushing the rotavirus vaccine last, even though that is a very good vaccine. I don't know. This is very complicated. I wish people would just get all the vaccines.

1:23:41Jay Shetty:Got it. Understood. You have written, Emily, four books on parenting, I believe. If you had three messages for parents that you felt they really needed to hear, Yeah. What would they be? One is that there are a lot of right ways to do it. I think that's probably the core message of my second book, which is, you know, here are some data on stuff. But in almost every choice you're going to make, there are a lot of different good options and you just got to find the one that that works for you. So I think that's one pretty core message. I think a second key insight in everything I write is that correlation is not causality.

1:24:20And you should be really, really skeptical of a lot of the evidence that people tell you because a lot of it is correlation. I guess the third insight is I think people spend too little time thinking in advance about their plans and too much time in therefore in sort of reactive reacting to things that that happen. and we're very reluctant to put time in up front because we're busy. But there are many situations in parenting in which putting some time in up front, thinking about how you want to approach something is going to save you a lot of time and conflict later.

1:25:00Jay Shetty:I love that. Yeah, I love all three of those. And that last one, especially, I just think we think, like I always hear the advice of you're never ready to have kids, which I agree with, like that makes full sense. But at the same time, you're definitely not ready if you never thought about it. Like that, you know. Like you could be more ready. Yeah, exactly. You could be more ready. Exactly, which applies to everything, right? It's just that mindset of, oh, you never know what it's going to be like. And it's like, you're right. Yeah, I definitely, like as someone who doesn't have kids, I have no idea what it's going to be like to be a parent.

1:25:30Jay Shetty:I fully hold my hands up. I lose, I, you know, I get it. But I can think, I can prepare, I can try. And I probably will still fail and make mistakes. And I think that's the problem. We think planning means perfection. As opposed to. As opposed to planning just means planning. Planning, yeah. And that's all it is. And it doesn't mean it's going to be perfectly executed. Absolutely. Emily, last two segments. We have a this or that. Okay. And then our final five, which we do with every guest on the show. So this or that parenting version. Gentle parenting or helicopter parenting? I don't like either of these.

1:26:04Jay Shetty:Explain. Why? I mean, I think gentle parenting, as a lot of people have interpreted it, is kind of permissive parenting. It's sort of like, I'm not going to put any boundaries. And I think that's really problematic. So what is good gentle parenting or what is the version? I think there's a good version of kind of punishment, parenting without rules and without consequences, which is much more about just setting boundaries. It ends up looking really similar to parenting with rules and consequences. But, you know, the kind of like saying what the boundary is, following through on the boundary. That's a very clear part of almost any evidence-based parenting approach.

1:26:43But gentle parenting, as many people seem to interpret it, I think does not work. So I think I'm going to go with helicopter parenting, which is being over-involved, which I also think can be quite problematic, but perhaps less so.

1:26:58Jay Shetty:What is a proven approach to parenting? So I think that the best set of evidence-based approaches we have to like behavior modification are things where you have a clear set of expectations, where, you know, when there's a behavior, kind of a behavioral issue, there's a clear set of kind of expectations, consequences and rewards. That's often what we see supported best in the data. So something like 1-2-3 magic or one of these. What's 1-2-3 magic? So 1-2-3 magic is one of these sort of evidence-based parenting approaches, which is just, it's a particular way to kind of scaffold, like when your kid does something bad, you give them like three warnings and then there's a timeout.

1:27:39It's very effective.

1:27:40Jay Shetty:Right. Yeah. I mean, it seems to follow the common sense of what life looks like. Yes. Life has choices and actions. They have consequences. And then they see the reward, like that's kind of what. That's what it works as an adult. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. As an adult, that is life. Yep. Yeah, got it. Natural remedies or medicated products? Generally medicated products. I think that there's a lot that we have learned over time about, say, antibiotics, which are the reason that many people are not dead. So I'm going to go with medicine, although there are certainly places where we sort of overuse antibiotics and we have a better off just like not using them because people don't have a bacterial infection.

1:28:23But overall, medicated products.

1:28:24Jay Shetty:A strict schedule or flexibility? Can both work. Personally, so personally, like my family has a very rigid schedule. One might say too rigid. Because of you. But that is, no, actually, I have much more because I mean, yes, it's a combination of me and my husband, but I think that he is even worse than I am. But like, that is what works for us. Like for us and our kids, like we really, we like to know what's expected. Like on the weekends, like we know what we're going to do. There are calendar invites. Like if we're going on a hike, my husband puts a calendar invite with the drive time in it because he's insane.

1:28:59And like, but that's for us, that's really great. I think for other people, like flexibility can totally work. This is one of the core things I think you need to figure out about your family, which is like what version of this is going to make us feel confident and happy? There is not a right answer, but there probably is a right answer for you. You know, if you're a person who just wants to like wake up on Sunday morning and be like, let's find out, whatever, you're going to be really annoyed when your spouse is like, why didn't you put the calendar invite in for the drive time? But if you're a person who like really wants to have the calendar invite, you know, it can be frustrating to be like, well, let's just do where the wind takes us.

1:29:34Well, how long will it take to get there? Yeah, exactly. So I think you just got to find, you got to find what works.

1:29:40Jay Shetty:Absolutely. Two under two or waiting? Oof, two under two is tough. Again, I would say for me, I wanted to wait. I like the four-year age gap worked real well for me. One kid carry their backpack while the other kid is you're carrying the other kids. The hunter-gatherer birth spacing. Is that dated to that? So this was the common hunter-gatherer birth spacing. I think we think because one kid can kind of walk on their own when you're carrying the other one. My sister and I have a four and a half year age gap. So great. But I think, you know, if you're like a little older or there's sort of some other reason why you want to get them in close, that is very tiring.

1:30:24It is very, very tiring to have two little babies at the same time. You need good scaffolding.

1:30:29Jay Shetty:Got it. Plastic bottle or glass bottles? People are so worried about microplastics. This is not an important source of microplastic exposure relative to the other sources of microplastic exposure. We don't know that much about microplastics. that's like a whole other episode you could do with somebody else. I think people should avoid glass bottles because they shatter. And then glass will be everywhere. And hurt the kid. And hurt the kid or you. Yeah. Timeouts or time-ins? I don't even know what a time-in is. I'm a fan of timeouts. I think timeouts work well. How does a good timeout work? A good timeout works when your kid knows that the timeout is the punishment.

1:31:06They know that we're going to have a set of like, you know, they know they're at risk for the timeout and they have an opportunity to fix their behavior. This is why something like a counting approach or warning approach is good, that you follow through on the timeout when you say that you are going to, when the timeout is appropriately timed for the age of the kid, shorter if they're younger, longer if they're older. And then when after the timeout, you don't discuss it anymore. It's not like there's no shaming. There's no, it's just like you're in a timeout, you're calm, you put them in the timeout, they have a chance to cool down, you have a chance to cool down.

1:31:37Nobody is yelling. I think that can work extremely well.

1:31:40Jay Shetty:Yeah, I was going to ask you, are there any more strategies like that in parenting once the kids are growing older that you found extremely useful? You have a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old. Yes, when the kids were little, we found timeouts to be a very helpful approach. I think in general, we found consistency is very good. I will say now a lot of my considerations are how can I get my children to continue to speak with me? and I have found that my very best approach with older kids is to be available. And so I spend a lot of time like after dinner when they're sort of in their rooms, like doing homework or doing whatever, like sitting in the den of our house, which is like kind of near their rooms, just like sitting, I'm like working on my computer, whatever.

1:32:23And then if they happen to want to come out and talk, I like immediately close the computer and can talk to them. And that sort of like just being there when your kids are ready to talk to you, I think is a strategy that works pretty well. The only other strategy, really like deeply seated strategy that we have is don't lie. Try not to lie to my kids. That's why they knew about Santa Claus before everyone else. It was like one time my son was like, was like, mom, is the tooth fairy real? And I was like, do you want to know? He was pretty old. He was like, I was like, do you want to know the truth?

1:32:57He's like, yeah. I was like, no, it's not. He was like, I didn't think so because other fairies aren't real. I was like, yep, you got it. that's so funny now when he loses a tooth he's just like can you put it then put money in my

1:33:07Jay Shetty:allowance yeah absolutely that's so funny that's everybody so even even the fun white lies the yeah i you know i it's interesting i think this santa thing comes up all the time people should i lie should i was like i don't know i think my my husband is jewish and he was just like i'm gonna tell our kids santa's real it's not for me yeah yeah got it uh emily this has been so useful thank you for busting all the myths thank you for providing all the data and And being so open and honest about so much that we're still figuring it out and we're still researching and still trying to find good data to back.

1:33:39Jay Shetty:So we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five. These questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum. And so, Emily, this is your final five. The first question is, what is the best parenting advice you've ever heard or received? Try not to think about it. Question number two, what is the worst parenting advice you've ever heard or received? Don't put mittens on your child because she'll never learn to use her hands. that's brilliant that was my mom said my mom was so great but uh that was bad advice that was bad advice that's so funny uh did you ever follow that no this is ridiculous i did look it up i like went so far as to research it that's good that's what it's like to have a baby question number three something you used to believe was true about parenting but now you disagree with that if you do the same thing for two kids you get the same outcome no fascinating yeah you have to adapt you have to you kids are it's so easy to think you did a great job on the first one and then yeah and then and then they're just different kids need different things yeah uh question number four is there a list of three qualities you try and instill in your kids like three things you think are universally important in my own kids yes um I think respect for others, following through on your commitments and you trying to pursue excellence and the things that you choose to do.

1:35:02Jay Shetty:How do you do that as you get older? Like what's your approach to that? Some of it is that we say that some of these are our core values. So following through on our commitments is something we will tell the kids are is a core value. And some of it is how you is like what you try to the things that I try to do in my own life and model. And, yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of modeling and then some explicit, like, this is how we operate. Yeah, it's that express and then be the example. Exactly. You've got to explain it, make sure they get it, but then they've got to see it through you. Fifth and final question we ask is to every guest who's ever been on the show, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

1:35:42I'm going to go with comprehensive fertility education for people at multiple times of their lives.

1:35:49Jay Shetty:Ideally through the education system or? It's a lot. We could sure I'm going to be able to implement it in whatever way I want. But, yeah, I think through we spend a lot of time telling people like how not to have kids when they're in like they're younger. And then we never tell people how to have kids when they're older. And I think there's a piece of that that's about parenting. But there's another piece which is just like I think that people don't understand their own bodies very well. and I would like them to understand them better. I love that answer. I couldn't agree with you more. Do you think that's even realistic?

1:36:26Jay Shetty:It feels like it needs to be realistic to get to. It feels ridiculous that we haven't got. It feels ridiculous. It feels ridiculous. Like you're saying that, I'm like, yeah, this is the thing that every human, not every human, but humanity is going to need to do for a long, long time. And the fact that you literally walk home out of a hospital with a baby and you know nothing about it. And you have to self-educate and read a book. It's ridiculous. But like it's listen to podcasts. I'm like, it's insane. Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is we used to like live in a society. We used to live in larger groups.

1:36:59Where like you didn't have to know this. Just like everyone was having babies all the time. And also like the older people were doing this. And I think as we have moved away from religious communities, as we have moved like away from our families, it does feel a little bit more like there's missing both some of the I mean, there's like basic fertility stuff. but then also just sort of like shared. There is a need for somehow, the parenting advice is filling this gap, but I'm not sure we're filling in quite the way we need to.

1:37:25Jay Shetty:Yeah, no, I love that. I think that'd be so powerful. And I also think that even though we did get away with it in the past because of bigger communities and bigger groups of people, I don't think that was really solving the problem either. It was just covering up. Just a different way to cover it up. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Emily, it's been such a joy talking to you today. Thank you so much. Where would you like our audience to find you? Of course, they can follow you across social media. we've mentioned your books. We'll put the links in the comments. And you can find me at parentdata.org, which is where I have links to all of these things and then many, many resources to help you make it easier.

1:37:57Jay Shetty:Amazing, parentdata.org. Thank you, Emily. Such a pleasure and look forward to doing this again. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. If you loved this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. A therapist once said to me, that if your parents didn't know how to hold you, you developed a mind you hold yourself with. It's a fate of pain and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain. Making space for ourselves is one of the most important things we can do, giving ourselves the time and the room to try new things.

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