Back in May, Emily Oster debuted on the 2022 TIME100 list. I was mortified to know so little about someone my colleagues considered one of the most influential people of the year, no less someone with a cultlike following in the parenting space who teaches at my alma mater. So I gave myself a bit of a crash course on Oster, an economist who specializes in health data.
Oster is a font of knowledge about pregnancy and parenting. She’s very forthright about who she is and how she thinks, as both a parent and a professional. “When there isn’t any data, you can approach this in whatever way you want, including finding a parenting coach to counsel you on what to do. But I’m not that parenting coach,” she told my colleague Eliana Dockterman, who wrote about her this week in an article titled “Emily Oster Still Thinks Data Can Help Ease (Some) Parental Anxiety.”
I admit that dealing with data intimidates me. My editorial brain lacks confidence in my ability to analyze numbers as a way of thinking through a decision. But Oster makes a great argument for using data in approaching parenting, even for anxious people like me: “I don’t think of myself as someone who is unsympathetic to the fact that people are very afraid,” she says. “But I still think that having information is a way to move through some of that anxiety.”
Are you among Oster’s 150,000 Instagram followers? Do you use data as a parenting tool? Write to me about it—or anything!—at andrea@time.com.
Best, Andrea
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