The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years (The ParentData Series, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm. She writes the newsletter ParentData and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg. She has two children.

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Creating the "Big Picture"

In his book on families, Stephen Covey, of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame, argues that your family needs a "mission statement." This is a grounding document to highlight your central family values. It's not dissimilar to the mission statement a firm might have. Your central family values may be religious or articulate a family-first focus. They might say something like "Prioritize family time and raise thoughtful kids." Maybe your mission articulates a particular approach to child independence (i.e., are you a free-range parent, or more of a helicopter type?).

You should have such a mission statement! But I'm going to suggest going beyond that and directly addressing the interaction between these broad priorities and concrete decisions. When I talk about creating the family Big Picture, I'm talking about these overall principles, but I'm also talking about confronting "What does Thursday night look like?"

There's a parallel to firms. The statement "Create a great search engine and don't be evil" is perhaps a good mission statement for Google, but it's not a recipe for how to run the firm. Just as "Prioritize family time and raise thoughtful kids" may be a good broad mission, but it doesn't tell you the right bedtime.

These logistical details matter, because if you fail to think about the logistics holistically, you could find yourself almost accidentally in a very different place than you imagined. Each individual choice may seem inconsequential in the moment, but they add up.

Think, for example, about birthdays. Imagine you have three kids, all in school, in classes of twenty kids each. And imagine that each kid in each class has a birthday party. That is sixty birthday parties a year. When each Evite rolls in, you think, "Oh, okay, it's just one birthday party." But by the end of the year, you've spent literally every weekend at Sky Zone, Jump For Fun, Kidz Kastle, or, my personal favorite, Dave & Buster's.

At some point you may think, "Enough is enough," and put the kibosh on attending any more parties that year. But then it's your middle daughter's best friend's birthday and she absolutely has to go. So that's another weekend down.

In economics parlance, your sequential birthday approach means you're making each invite decision "on the margin." But while adding each marginal birthday has a small effect, the aggregate may be, quite simply, not acceptable.

In the grand scheme of things, birthday parties are a minor issue. But this kind of slippery-slope experience can pervade our parenting decisions. You let in one late-night extracurricular, then another, and pretty soon your image of dinner as a family at six every night has vanished. And if this dinner is a priority for you, that's a problem.

It shouldn't escape our notice that failing to articulate these priorities is a recipe for conflict in cases where there are multiple decision makers (say, two parents) in the household. Let's say bedtime by 8:30 is a key priority for me, and I've worked out the family schedule so it happens every night that I'm around. Now imagine that I'm out of town for work and I call my partner at 10 p.m. to learn that the older child is still up, watching The Great British Baking Show.

"WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!" I yell through the phone.

"This is your rule, not mine," comes the retort. "You want it done your way? Don't leave town."

What is the problem here? Perhaps many things, but at least one is failing to get on the same page about bedtime as a priority. If you have two (or more!) parents involved in raising a child, they'll inevitably parent at least slightly differently. My husband, for example, adheres much less stringently to the every-other-day bath system than I do. When he's in charge, baths tend to be a little less frequent. And this is okay, because although I have a particular bath system, it's not actually that important to me. In contrast, maintaining a fixed bedtime is extremely important to me. But unless we had talked it through, how would Jesse know that my feelings on bath frequency and bedtime are fundamentally different?

It is also useful to recognize that every small thing cannot be a hill to die on. If you start this process and it turns out one of you has rigid preferences about everything, that doesn't leave much space for joint problem-solving. Articulating priorities together may help you recognize which are really important to you and realize that they cannot all be equally crucial.

The first step in creating your Family Firm is to outline your mission, and then think carefully about what your family will prioritize, what your day looks like, and the basic logistics of your family. To be clear, you could think about this at any time in life-before kids, with an infant, with a toddler-but around school-entry time is a good point to revisit your mission statement carefully. For one thing, once your kid is in school, you'll adopt a schedule that you will keep-more or less-for the next thirteen years (or longer, if you have other kids). For another, this is often around the time things calm down at least a bit and you get more mental space to think about your choices.

The Process

Creating the family Big Picture is not the activity of a single afternoon, and you'll probably need to revisit pieces of it more than once as your children age. And you may choose to do this a bit differently. That's okay! Think of this as a guide or a starting point.

To help you out, I've made a workbook. In the pages that follow, I'll talk about structuring some of these conversations, about writing things down. You don't need a workbook to do this, but I think it will help.

(Also, I love workbooks. True story: My mother still remembers that at my third-grade parent-teacher conference, Mrs. Totman said, not entirely positively, "I just cannot understand why she likes workbooks so much.")

There are two basic steps. First, at the broadest level, expressing and aligning values and priorities. Second, getting to the more granular: creating the day-to-day schedule, establishing some family principles, and assigning responsibilities.

But before you get into actually doing any of this, please read the next section of the book, which has some big data pieces you might want to consider. As you think about the family schedule, knowing more about sleep-Is it important? How much do kids need?-is important. As you think about your level of parental involvement with your kid, you may want to consider what the evidence says on the relationship between parental involvement and children's independence or performance in school. The data chapters won't tell you how to make these choices for your family, but they may provide some important input.

Step 1: Values and Priorities

In a business-school class in negotiations, a common topic is the "Theory of Anchoring." Basically, the opening bid in a negotiation "anchors" the price. By the same token, collective decisions can be thrown off by having one person publicly state their views first. If we are trying to decide, as a firm, how much to bid for a company, and the first person to speak suggests $20 million, I may be embarrassed to say I thought it was worth only $2 million. But knowing that we disagree is valuable! One approach to learning that is to ask people to write down their valuations privately and then share them simultaneously.

We'll take a similar approach here. Start with all the parenting stakeholders, whoever that is in your family. This exercise is likely to be useful even if you are parenting alone, just not for quite the same reasons. Everyone gets a piece of paper (or a copy of the first workbook page) and writes down:

Your overarching family mission statement. Whatever you want! One...