Author event! Emily Oster and Cara Natterson

Zibby's Bookshop is so excited to welcome Emily Oster and Cara Natterson! Thank you to Tumbleweed Day Camp for sponsoring the event!

About the book:

“Emily Oster dives into the data on parenting issues, cuts through the clutter, and gives families the bottom line to help them make better decisions.” –Good Morning America

From the bestselling author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet, the next step in data driven parenting from economist Emily Oster.

In The Family Firm, Brown professor of economics and mom of two Emily Oster offers a classic business school framework for data-driven parents to think more deliberately about the key issues of the elementary years: school, health, extracurricular activities, and more.

Unlike the hourly challenges of infant parenting, the big questions in this age come up less frequently. But we live with the consequences of our decisions for much longer. What's the right kind of school and at what age should a particular kid start? How do you encourage a healthy diet? Should kids play a sport and how seriously? How do you think smartly about encouraging children's independence? Along with these bigger questions, Oster investigates how to navigate the complexity of day-to-day family logistics.

Making these decisions is less about finding the specific answer and more about taking the right approach. Parents of this age are often still working in baby mode, which is to say, under stress and on the fly. That is a classic management problem, and Oster takes a page from her time as a business school professor at the University of Chicago to show us that thoughtful business process can help smooth out tough family decisions.

The Family Firm is a smart and winning guide to how to think clearly--and with less ambient stress--about the key decisions of the elementary school years.

Parenting is a full-time job. It's time we start treating it like one.

About the authors:

Emily Oster is on a mission to empower parents by providing the data and tools they need to make confident decisions.

After getting a PhD in Economics from Harvard, Emily went on to pursue research in health economics and now works as a Professor of Economics at Brown University.

As a mom of two, she was inspired by her own pregnancy and the lack of clear information to guide her decisions, from prenatal testing to induction. She decided to use her economics background to review and analyze the data on pregnancy and parenting, and write a book to help other parents navigate these topics.

In addition to being a professor, Emily is the founder and CEO of ParentData, a data-driven guide to pregnancy, parenting, and beyond. ParentData’s weekly newsletter now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, along with a strong social media community. Emily is also a New York Times best-selling author, whose books include Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm and most recently, The Unexpected. She has sold over 1 million copies thus far.

Dr. Cara Natterson is a leading voice in puberty and adolescent health. A pediatrician, speaker, and the co-host of the This Is So Awkward podcast, she is the author of ten books including the bestselling This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained and the New York Times bestselling The Care and Keeping of You series. When her own kids started puberty, Cara founded Less Awkward, the first company aimed at making puberty less cringey and more comfortable with both product and content. Cara graduated from Harvard college and Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained at UCSF. She has two college aged kids and lives in Los Angeles.

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