Podcast · Kids & Family

Raising Parents with Emily Oster

by The Free Press · English · Kids & Family

Start from episode 1 WhatsApp

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 49 min
Latest: 6 Aug 2025
Language: English

Latest episode

6 Aug 2025 · 45 min

Episode Feature: How Camp Teaches Kids to Ditch Their Phones

Hi Raising Parents listeners—we’ve got a special bonus episode I’m excited to share with you from Emily Oster’s feed, ParentData. It’s all about the greatness—and importance—of summer camp. Especially in 2025. Camp is one of the few places where kids get a permission slip to be off their phones. Where the kids—who don’t quite fit in at school—get a fresh start, and maybe even find their people. (Yes, Emily is talking about her personal revelation at math camp.) And it’s a kind of exposure therapy for parents, too, as they learn to be okay with unsupervised play. Emily Oster and Steve Baskin,…

Play episode WhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 10 most recent

9 Apr 2025 · 35 min

Episode Feature: ‘My So-Called Midlife’

We have a special bonus episode for the Raising Parents feed. It’s an episode of “My So-Called Midlife” by Reshma Saujani and Lemonada Media. Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code. She’s written several books, including Girls Who Code, Pay Up, and Brave, Not Perfect. And now she is sharing her insights from midlife on mic. Reshma Saujani sits down with Emily Oster to discuss midlife, from scheduling sex to career pivots to parenting struggles to pregnancy and parenting myths. We want to play that episode for you today. You can check out “My So-Called Midlife.”
S1 · E8 · 13 Nov 2024 · 50 min

Ep 8: Should You Have Kids?

For most of human history, having kids wasn’t much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a couple of options: Have children, or join a convent. But the 1960s ushered in a big change. With better options for birth control and expanded career opportunities for women, many people for the first time could choose how many children to have, and whether they should have any at all. Fast-forward to today: More people are choosing not to have children for a wide range of reasons. Having children, of course, is a personal choice. But it’s a…
S1 · E7 · 30 Oct 2024 · 51 min

Ep 7: How Important is Marriage?

The share of children in America growing up in single-parent families has tripled since 1950—from 10 percent to 30 percent. Children in single-parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level and, on average, they have a higher likelihood of poor academic performance and higher dropout rates from high school. Those translate into lower earnings in adulthood. And although it is very difficult to separate correlation and causality in these data, and hard to say whether single parenthood matters beyond poverty, there is no question that the associations are very strong.…
S1 · E6 · 23 Oct 2024 · 52 min

Ep 6: Are Smartphones Stealing Childhood?

In today’s world, many parents feel like we need our kids to have phones. We tell ourselves it’s for their safety—they may need it while walking to a friend’s house or when going on a school field trip. And then there’s the fact that for many parents, the idea of not giving your kid a phone—when everyone else has one—just doesn’t even seem like a possibility. By age 10, 42 percent of kids in the U.S. have a phone. By age 12, it’s 71 percent, and by age 14, it’s 91 percent. The pressure to conform is just too great. And the reality is that phones keep kids entertained, which gives parents a…
S1 · E5 · 16 Oct 2024 · 46 min

Ep 5: Are Boys Being Left Behind?

Across the board in most advanced countries, girls and women are outpacing boys and men. Nowhere is this more stark than in education. When Title IX was passed in the U.S., the share of students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program was about two-thirds men and one-third women. Just 50 years later, the numbers have reversed: Bachelor’s enrollment is now 58 percent women and 42 percent men. So, not only is the gender inequality we see in college today wider than it was 50 years ago, it’s the other way around, with men on the bottom. The difference in master’s degrees is even more striking.…
S1 · E4 · 9 Oct 2024 · 1 hr 8 min

Ep 4: Are We Overmedicating Kids?

Kids and teens today are more diagnosed than ever, across the board, whether it’s a disorder like ADHD or a mental health condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Say you’re 15 and you’re worried about that upcoming algebra test? Anxiety. You’re 12 and you weren’t invited to that birthday party? Depression. Scared to ride your bike again after that little fall last summer? PTSD. And with these diagnoses come a menu of medications that purport to fix your child. Today: What’s behind the rise in diagnoses—both for ADHD, mostly among young boys, and for anxiety and depression, mostly among…
S1 · E3 · 2 Oct 2024 · 59 min

Ep 3: Are We Feeding Kids the Wrong Foods?

In January 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics surprised doctors and parents by changing its guidelines on treating childhood obesity to include the use of popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, also known as semaglutide, for children ages 12 years or older. And parents all over the country were faced with yet another difficult decision: Should I consider a lifelong weight-loss drug for my 12-year-old? The fact that this is even on the table at all is a pretty shocking indictment of the state of our kids’ health. Nearly 20 percent of American children and adolescents are…
S1 · E2 · 25 Sep 2024 · 49 min

Ep 2: Have We Forgotten How to Discipline?

There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they’ve changed wildly in America over the decades. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the old school, 1950s approach: spanking. Then, there are middle-ground approaches: time-outs, warning systems, consequences, and punishments. And then, there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. These are the kind of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your child understand why they’re frustrated and to help them work through their frustration. “Gentle…
S1 · E1 · 18 Sep 2024 · 47 min

Ep 1: Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?

When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms. That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking…
S1 · 6 Sep 2024 · 8 min

Introducing: Raising Parents

Raising Parents with Emily Oster premiers Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

About Raising Parents with Emily Oster

Poseidon is the god of the sea, Dionysus of wine and merrymaking, and Emily Oster? She’s the god of parenting. An economics professor at Brown University, Oster has built a massive and loyal audience by providing overwhelmed parents with the information and data they need to make solid and sound parenting decisions in a very confusing world. Her first book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, sold over a million copies and was translated into 19 languages, unseating the classic What to Expect When You’re Expecting as a fixture on many pregnant mothers’ bedtime tables. In this new series with The Free Press, Oster tackles the deep, difficult, existential, and often controversial questions facing parents today: Are we too soft on kids these days? How do I raise an independent child in an era of overprotection and helicopter parenting? Why are so many teen girls unhappy and anxious, and how can we make them happy again? Why are boys being left behind? Are kids overdiagnosed? What to do about the phones!? Is marriage important for raising kids? Should you even have kids at all? These questions are more urgent than ever. That’s because, by many measures, kids are worse off today than 30 years ago. They are more anxious than ever. They’re more depressed. They have more diagnoses than ever before. They’re more medicated. More kids are being raised without two parents in the home today. Kids’ reading and math scores…

Raising Parents with Emily Oster is a English kids & family podcast from The Free Press. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: The Free Press
Language: English
Category: Kids & Family
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 49 min
Latest episode: 6 Aug 2025
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1766973918

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English kids & family 6

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.