The New Faces of Optimized Motherhood – Mother Jones

It was only a brief reference. But the singular mention of Emily Oster, the immensely popular parenting guru and economics professor, in a New York Times editorial was enough to kick off a small scandal.

“Pretty disappointed that @ProfEmilyOster would choose to lend her credibility to prediction markets (which are, in practice, sportsbooks with a side of wagering on elections and oil futures), particularly when one considers the harm they are bringing to kids and parents,” Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, wrote on social media.

The frustration came from the specific revelation that Oster had been a key speaker at a breakfast event hosted by Kalshi, the leading prediction market valued at roughly $40 billion. Estimates suggest people under 21 traded more than $5 billion on the site from January to August this year. Multiple lawsuits have accused the site of “running an illegal gambling operation” that skirts existing laws aimed at protecting kids from underage gambling. Which raises an obvious question: Why would one of the most trusted voices in parenting seemingly endorse such a company?

When asked about the appearance, Oster told me that she was “happy to clear it up.”

“Kalshi hosted the breakfast and paid me a speaking fee to moderate a conversation with Luana Lopes Lara,” she said in an email. “This was a single event. They asked me because I’m an economist with an understanding of prediction markets, and the audience was parents.”

“As for how it fits with my work,” she continued, “these platforms are on a lot of teenagers’ and young adults’ phones, parents ask me about them, and I believe helping parents understand how these platforms work is part of how they have productive conversations with their children, as well as understand how teens under 18 are kept off the platform. I asked those questions on stage.”

The explanation might seem sufficient to some. Oster had presided over a corporate conversation, and that corporation paid her to do it. Maybe that isn’t so loathsome in the age of celebrity-packed “Airbnb Balls?” But squint closer and Oster’s effort to cast herself as a mere conduit for parenting questions—not a Harvard-educated academic whose appearance would surely be seen as extending great authority to a platform parents view with increasing alarm—limps on arrival. (Kalshi did not respond to a request for comment on Oster’s appearance.)

Perhaps even more curious was Oster’s emphasis that the breakfast was a one-off occurrence, as if the event’s premise, as Jessica Grose wrote, to explore “how data, forecasting and probabilities can sharpen [parenting] choices” didn’t fit squarely into the data-driven parenting approach Oster has effectively led over the last decade. In fact, The Family Firm, Oster’s third book, takes pride in its application of business school teachings to modern parenting, as if childrearing is something that can be hacked and perfected, with a maximum return on investment.

It’s a similar approach that informs the fleet of parenting products that promise to lighten the burdens of raising a child, particularly among wealthy families: chiefs of staff for the home, AI-guided storytelling, sleep gadgets. But at what point do these offerings transcend their goals of ease to collapse what it even means to parent a kid in the first place?

Consider Marissa Mayer, the former Google and Yahoo executive, who told the New York Times that she struggled to think of three qualities that made her daughter special without the use of an AI tool. When she asked the question to Dazzle, a new AI assistant from Mayer’s start-up, “it came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative, and an animal lover,” she told the Times, apparently unable to see how such an anecdote was fundamentally depressing.

Dazzle bills itself as an AI app that offers answers to tasks traditionally seen as belonging to a mother—booking birthday parties, calendar organizing, buying new shoes for the kids—responsibilities that can, from time to time, seem like drudgery. But they are also joys, the small cornerstones of raising a kid. Even if technically possible, do we really want to live without the minutiae of shaping and filling out a kid’s life? Is that what we mean when we say parenting in America has gotten too challenging?

The reality is that Mayer and her billionaire ilk, who are out to sell us the fiction that parenting—with enough products and data-driven decisions—can be optimized down to the seconds, already have the resources to fund the things that countless families actually need: child care, health care, paid leave. It’s not the app helping them hack parenting. It’s the nannies, concierge services, and sponsored days off.

A similar illusion animates the actress Jennifer Lawrence’s suggestion that her new haircare line, Mes, might help tired moms look hot. “I want to be a sexy mom,” Lawrence told The Cut in an interview tied to Mes’ launch. “At drop-off, I want to look like a woman that has her shit together even when I’ve just woken up and don’t have my shit together.” The same interview mentioned Lawrence’s “boob job” and desire to get a facelift, two cosmetic procedures that she, as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors, can easily afford.

Celebrity-backed beauty brands, of course, are not the same as a Kalshi or a Dazzle. But it’s worth interrogating which technologies and products aimed at struggling parents are being laundered and sold, as Oster may have done for Kalshi, and to what extent we actually need these things. Because we’ll still be tired and overworked, our school drop-offs anything but sexy, even after handing these companies our money.

As Amanda Hess, author of Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, told me last year, for so many of these offerings, “once you scratch beyond the surface and examine the products that are sold as helpful to parents, you start to notice that these services aren’t helpful at all.”