Raising Boys

Richard Reeves:

Well, I think the honest answer is because nobody else was, really. People knew that there were lots of gaps, particularly in education, where really it was boys and men who were lagging behind, but it was always like an afterthought or a secondary thought to another paper. So someone would do a paper on something and they’d say, “Oh, look, well, there’s a big gender gap” and then move on. It also felt that some of those issues, if they were getting attention, they were either getting fleeting attention or the wrong kind of attention. In other words, they’re picked up in online circles or perhaps by people with more reactionary intent. I think you know a thing or two about people taking data and using it for the wrong purposes as well as the right purposes.

Emily Oster:

I do know a bit about that, yes.

Richard:

I just kept hitting these data points, like the college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men than women when the pandemic hit. Almost one in four boys have been diagnosed with a developmental disability in K through 12, twice the rate for girls. Men were dying from COVID in much bigger numbers.

Emily:

I think that the way many parents would talk to me about this is “My boy doesn’t seem ready for school” or “Circles are being run around him by the girls who are the same age.” There are a bunch of different reactions to that: holding boys back, thinking about changing schools. There’s many ways one can come into this. Do you want to talk a little bit about why this happens? What is going on, to the extent we understand it, and maybe when in school this is most salient?

Richard:

So, I know the wonderful thing about this podcast, Emily, is that I don’t need to talk about overlapping distributions and averages all the time, right?

Emily:

No, the wonderful thing about the podcast is you can talk about overlapping distributions.

Richard:

I can just say, no one thinks that the statement “men are taller than women” means that all men are taller than all women. That’s true for everything that we’re going to talk about. So, we don’t have to say “on average” every time, but the gender gaps are there all the way through K through 12. Then that shows up in higher education, where we’ve now got a bigger gender gap than in the early ’70s when we passed Title IX, but the other way around. You see big gaps in school readiness at 4 and 5 and then big gaps at the end.

Emily:

One way to see that is to think about the timing of puberty and the magnitude of the effective age gap in frontal lobe development. I think another way to frame that is to ask, What are we asking of people in schools at that time? That is a time in which we start asking way more of executive function and of organization than we did in the third grade, where if you don’t bring in your homework, nothing happens. Then we hit seventh, eighth grade, and we start expecting you to bring your homework every day and bring in your schoolbook, and not play a game where you smash the Chromebook on each other’s hands until it breaks. We’re expecting more, and then we start seeing those differences.

Richard:

That is a good game.

Emily:

It’s a good game. It has some potential negative outcomes, but until you get to the negative outcomes, it’s pretty awesome. So, I guess I’m asking about how much the structure of schools [is relevant]?

Richard:

Well, they’re obviously interdependent. One of the criticisms of this developmental story that we’re talking about here is, oh, so you’re blaming the boys. You’re saying, “Oh, well, they’re immature.” Actually, it’s the opposite. My view is that the education system has inadvertently defaulted to more of the female standard. There’s a “Why aren’t you more like your sister?” flavor to, I think, our entire education system, and it’s actually one of the reasons I worry so much about the cratering share of male teachers. We’re down to 23% now. That’s a 10 percentage point drop in the last 20 years and the share of male teachers.

Emily Oster:

My first born child is a girl. When I was pregnant with my second and I found out that he was going to be a boy, people said a lot of things. Some people said, “Oh, it’s so nice, you’ll have one of each.” But one person told me, “Oh, you just wait. Boys are really slow. You’re going to think your son is really stupid.” I want to say I have never thought my son is stupid, but this echoes the way I hear a lot of parents talk about their concerns about their boys.

Emily Oster:

Richard Reeves, I’m absolutely delighted to welcome you to ParentData.

Richard Reeves:

I’m really happy to be here.

Emily Oster:

I would love for you to start by introducing yourself a little bit to the audience.

Richard Reeves:

So my job is President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which is the first and only thinktank that does research and policy development, specifically focused on boys and men. I’ve been a policy wonk and in and out of government most of my career. I just recently did 10 years at the Brookings Institution where I focused mostly on inequality issues. Before that, I was in the UK government, doing some kind of policy stuff there. I have three sons all in their 20s now, so I’m through that bit of the parenting journey.

Emily Oster:

On the other side.

Richard Reeves:

Yes, the other side. I mean it never really ends, but it’s a different side or a different phase for sure. That did motivate some of my work around boys and men, which led to a book, which led to the Institute.

Emily Oster:

So I’d love you to talk a little bit about why this focus, because you’ve thought about a lot of things. You’ve done a lot of different kinds of policy and you’ve ended up in a place where you’re thinking about quite specifically about boys and men. Why have you turned your considerable expertise and talents to this particular issue?

Richard Reeves:

Well, I think the honest answer is because nobody else was really. It wasn’t really discovery. People knew that there were lots of gaps, particularly in education, which I’m sure we’ll get to in others, where really it was kind of boys and men who were lagging behind, but it was always like an afterthought or a secondary thought to another paper. So, someone would do a paper on something and they’d say, “Oh, look, well, there’s a big gender gap” and then move on. It also felt that some of those issues just weren’t getting…

Emily Oster:

I do.

Richard Reeves:

Do you know what that’s like?

Emily Oster:

I do know a bit about that, yes.

Richard Reeves:

Okay. I just kept hitting these data points like the college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men than women when the pandemic hit. Almost one in four boys have been diagnosed with a developmental disability in K-12, twice the rate for girls. Men were dying from COVID in much bigger numbers and stuff. As someone that’s had, I would say, a pretty robust commitment to gender equality, actually, I just noticed that people were uncomfortable really shining a light on those. That discomfort really in the end is what drew me to the work because I realized that because of that discomfort, it wasn’t being done or it wasn’t being done well.

Emily Oster:

Yeah, there’s a fact that I’ve heard you say before about college enrollment. That is when we passed Title IX, 40% of college enrollment was women and now 40% is men and that somehow, the way that we’re talking about that is completely different in terms of whether it’s a problem than it was in the 1970s. Question of just putting those things together and asking, are we underconcerned about this or are we avoiding talking about it because it somehow feels like it’s not an okay thing to grapple with?

Richard Reeves:

That’s what you hear a lot from people, which is, yeah, either I see it in my own life or my own institution, but maybe it’s just me, just us. I get it and I see it more, but I just think it’s too risky to talk about. Those are the kind of responses that you get. The truth is that these are public issues. I mean, these are general issues. If you’re a parent and your boy is struggling in school, well, I’m not suggesting girls don’t struggle in school as well, but boys are struggling more, right? It’s not you and it’s not your boy. It could be at least partly something to do with the school and the education system. So, you’re not alone, I think, is an important part of the message.

Emily Oster:

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, and maybe we can come back to this, but for me, some of that comes from this realization that it’s still the case that men are in charge of a lot of things. So, it’s still the case that at the top end of the income distribution or at the top end of the employment distribution still, I notice a lot of men running companies, many more than women. So, somehow reconciling the places we still very much need to go in those areas or would like to go with the fact that in other parts of the economy and in education, we’re often seeing boys and men really struggle and make much slower gains or fall backwards relative to women.

Richard Reeves:

Yes. I think that’s part of the issue here is being able to see both of those things at once. You’re right that particularly not all but many of the gender gaps that we still have to be really concerned about as they impact women are in the labor market and especially in the higher reaches of the labor market in those kind of leadership roles where we continue to see significant underrepresentation of women and in politics, by the way. I mean the US is still really, really depressing outlier in terms of the lack of women in politics. So, venture capital is another area where we just don’t see… Access to capital is still a huge issue for women.

Emily Oster:

So I think this is a good place to pivot to kids because I think in those communities, the place that we do see this, and I think a lot of people resonate with some of this message is in the boys in school piece of this. To frame that fact, I think that the way many people, many parents would talk to me about this is just my boy doesn’t seem ready for school or circles are being run around him by the girls who are the same age. There are a bunch of different reactions to that, holding boys back, thinking about changing schools. There’s many ways one can come into this. Do you want to talk a little bit about why this happens? What is going on to the extent we understand it, and maybe when in school this is most salient?

Richard Reeves:

So the first thing to say is that on average-

Emily Oster:

On average.

Richard Reeves:

… the gender gaps. So, I know the wonderful thing about this podcast, Emily, is that I don’t need to talk about overlapping distributions and averages all the time, right?

Emily Oster:

No, the wonderful thing about the podcast is you can talk about overlapping distributions.

Richard Reeves:

Well, I can, but I don’t need to because-

Emily Oster:

Everyone knows.

Richard Reeves:

I can just say that and I can say, no one thinks that the statement men are taller than women means that all men are taller than all women. That’s true for everything that we’re going to talk about. So, we don’t have to say on average every time, but the gender gaps are there all the way through K-12. Then as you point out, that shows up in higher education where we’ve now got a big agenda gap than in the early ’70s when we passed Title IX but the other way around. That really does largely reflect what’s happening earlier than that. So, you see big gaps in school readiness at four and five and then big gaps at the end.

Emily Oster:

You would pick up that more than kindergarten where I think so much of the discourse that I hear about this is around what we call redshirting kids in kindergarten, that recognizing the gaps in kindergarten readiness and exactly what that means, we can talk about, but recognizing those gaps and saying, “Should I hold my kindergartener back? Because in the kindergarten classroom, they’re going to struggle.”

Richard Reeves:

Yeah. Well, actually, I mean there’s two things I’d say in response to that. One is you just alluded to the what’s captured by school readiness, but it also applies to the GPA thing too, which is that the gender gap is largely around non-cognitive skills, like softer skills, organizational skills, executive functions.

Emily Oster:

Executive function.

Richard Reeves:

Non-cognitive skills, right? Yeah. I mean the girls aren’t smarter than the boys. There’s no gender gap on SAT or ACT or most of the standardized tasks, or vice versa I should say, in case we still have to say that in 2024. It’s not the boys are smarter than girls, but GPA and school readiness measures, they’re really about things like ability to pay attention, your organizational skills, self-efficacy skills. That’s really where the gender gap shows up. Of course, it has huge implications for education, and I know why people talk about kindergarten. I have myself have proposed that it would be good to at least pilot having boys start somewhat later than the girls because they are younger.

Emily Oster:

Have you met any 13-year-old boys, just FYI, Richard?

Richard Reeves:

I’ve met at least three.

Emily Oster:

At least three.

Richard Reeves:

Margaret Mead had this great line where she said, “If you go into the average ninth grade classroom, you won’t just think that the boys and girls are of a different gender. You’ll think they’re of a different species.” That’s an overstatement for sure, but you know what she means if you have spent time in those age groups. So, developmentally, the girls are behind all the way through. So, I actually think it’s at least as much about adolescence as it is about the early years.

Emily Oster:

One interpretation, one way to see that is to think about the timing of puberty and the magnitude of the effective age gap frontal lobe development. I think another way to frame that is to ask, “What are we asking of people in schools at that time?” So I wonder if that overlap’s here that that is a time in which we start asking way more of executive function and of organization than we did in the third grade where if you don’t bring in your homework, nothing happens. Then we hit seventh, eighth grade, and we start expecting you to bring your homework every day and bring in your schoolbook and not play a game where you smash the Chromebook on each other’s hands until it breaks. We’re expecting more and then we start seeing those differences.

Richard Reeves:

That is a good game. That’s a great game.

Emily Oster:

It’s a good game. It has some potential negative outcomes, but until you get to the negative outcomes, it’s pretty awesome. So, I guess I wonder how much you think this is about the structure of, I’m asking about how much is the structure of schools?

Richard Reeves:

Yeah. Well, they’re obviously interdependent. So, one of the criticisms of this developmental story that we’re talking about here is, oh, so you’re blaming the boys. You’re saying, “Oh, well, they’re immature. You’re rolling your eyes.” Actually, it’s the opposite. My view is that the system, the education system has inadvertently defaulted to more of the female standard. There’s, “Why aren’t you more like your sister?” flavor to I think our entire education system, and it’s actually one of the reasons I worry so much about the cratering share of male teachers. We’re down to 23% now. That’s 10 percentage point drop in the last 20 years and the share of male teachers.

Emily Oster:

More ParentData, including what the shifts are that have favored girls over boys, what we lose when we eliminate standardized testing, if it’s even possible to teach our sons to have better executive function, and what Richard Reeves would do with $20 million, after the break.

Emily Oster:

I think it’s worth asking the question, what are the shifts that we’re seeing that are making this more female-friendly, less appropriate for boys, less male friendly?

Richard Reeves:

Yeah. So, I’d say the first thing is, I’ve already mentioned this, but the fact that the teaching profession, which has always skewed female, is just doing so very much more so than in the past. So, it’s just a much more female-dominated environment and that might have an influence on… There is some evidence that female teachers on average just react a little bit differently to male behavior. I’d actually love to know whether it would be true if female teachers have sons.

Emily Oster:

I always wonder that.

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, maybe we’ve talked about this before, but I just have to be super interesting study, if you could somehow compare the ones that have sons versus daughters and how they react to it. But nonetheless, there does seem to be something about just the culture and so on in the classroom and how that’s reacted to. I do think that some of the move away from recess and extracurricular and phys ed stuff has been bad period, but probably a little bit worse on average for boys. The move towards more continuous forms of assessment like GPA, et cetera, I think that’s had a different effect for boys and the move away from more vocational forms of training and more hands-on learning styles.

Emily Oster:

That is extremely interesting. I did not know that. Of course when you say it, it makes-

Richard Reeves:

It’s mechanical, isn’t it?

Emily Oster:

It’s mechanical.

Richard Reeves:

But it’s not the intention of the policy. I don’t think that that was why they were doing it. Now a lot of them are also worrying about the fact that they’re very, very female skewed. I always say, “Well, did you go test optional?” I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done that.

Emily Oster:

Did you think about it? Yeah. So, when we’re parenting boys, the other thing that comes up a lot is this diagnosis fact, which you mentioned briefly that a much larger share of boys than girls are diagnosed with ADHD or your related developmental issues. I’m not exactly interested in overdiagnosis, but just the question of how our interactions with our boys relate to just that fact of diagnosis.

Richard Reeves:

Yeah. Well, it speaks a little bit to the work that I’m so happy you did for us around competence as well because what does that signal? Well, there’s something wrong with you and it is twice as high. There isn’t good recent data on this, but even a while ago, it’s 23% of boys I mentioned who have a “developmental disability”. I think a couple of things. One is that should make us look hard at the structure. I think if we’ve learned anything from the disability lobby, it is that very often environments are disabling, rather than the people who are disabled, or at least you should think about both sides of that equation. Then I think also the second thing is if you’ve got a square peg that’s trying to get into a round hole, then the danger is what you do.

Emily Oster:

Agreed. So, I’m curious about teaching skills because I read some of this, particularly if we go back to some of the adolescent stuff and thinking about the gap growing there. Many of these things, they feel like non-cognitive skills, they feel to me like executive function. There’s a lot of organization where boys maybe take a longer time to development. They may or may not ever get… I don’t know if there are adult gender differences in that ability, but it does feel that one could teach that.

Richard Reeves:

Well, there are thousands of parents out there cheering on your idea of organizing a backpack.

Emily Oster:

Classes on backpack.

Richard Reeves:

Just like if you ever ran for office, then I just think that should be your main platform.

Emily Oster:

I would just run with pictures of my son’s backpack, which is just full of pieces of wood, small pieces of wood and crumpled papers. Where did they come from?

Richard Reeves:

It doesn’t matter. They’re awesome. They’re precious. They’re precious artifacts.

Emily Oster:

You have to throw them away when they can’t see.

Richard Reeves:

You have to be careful about that though.

Emily Oster:

You do have to be careful.

Richard Reeves:

You think it is just an old piece of wood. It’s not.

Emily Oster:

It’s not.

Richard Reeves:

It’s something very important.

Emily Oster:

It’s something very important.

Richard Reeves:

That’s why when I share this data on frontal cortex average, where there’s this huge gap, especially in adolescence, and I say, “Look, if you don’t believe me, go into a seventh or eighth grade classroom and just ask them to open up their backpacks.” Everyone gets that. Again, it’s like a well done moment. We don’t need social science to tell us, but if that’s true, I agree. So, there’s two things we could do. Well, maybe there’s three ways to approach this difference in non-cognitive skill. Number one is more intentionally do some skill training around this stuff and boys will benefit more from that. Of course, you wouldn’t only do it for boys, but that will be a way to address that and just be more intentional.

Emily Oster:

So my kids, there’s a thing they say, which is that you could sip your homework, which is stuff in planner because you’re supposed to put it in your binder. But many people, more boys than girls, will just sip their homework, just stuff it in their planner, and then it often doesn’t come back after it’s been sipped. So, they’re being told, “Don’t sip your homework. Put it in color coded…”

Richard Reeves:

Well, I’m well aware of the phenomenon, I just didn’t know it now acquired a label.

Emily Oster:

It has a label.

Richard Reeves:

So we could teach it. We could also compensate a bit more for it. I just say as a parent myself, it just took me way too long to just recognize that some of these skills were just being presumed on the part of the education system and they were not present. It wasn’t true to the same degree for all my sons, but it wasn’t there. So, the gap between what the school thought he had in terms of skills and what he actually had was one that I blamed him for. I said, “Well, clearly, the gap’s on you.” Actually, I now think, and I was slow to this, well, maybe some of the gap was on the school just assuming that. So, substituting for it is okay.

Emily Oster:

So I like one and three, the skilling up and the thinking holistically of that for everybody, having this be less of a thing. I worry about the compensation piece of this, and this is related to this something I wrote for you guys on what I call the competence gap. But I worry a little bit that when we compensate, we both leave boys or whoever we’re compensating for in a position where they haven’t learned those skills and then they don’t learn them even when they would be ready to learn them. I worry that it conveys a message that it’s okay to be incompetent like this and that this is just the way you are.

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, I think that’s fair. Scaffolding is a great term in this context, I think, because maybe the position you should take on this is that you’re not just only substituting. Although there may be a little bit of that sometimes, but it’s more you are simultaneously substituting and training. So, we’re going to clean your backpack out together and we’re going to figure out what that means. But we’re not just going to say, “Well, have you cleaned your backpack out?” With my kids, I’d be like, “Have you done your homework?” They’d say yes, and it took me a while to realize that that was not reliable data. So, it’s like I’m going to help you structure to get your homework with your backpack, but trying to skill up at the same time because of course you want to develop.

Emily Oster:

But people don’t think that.

Richard Reeves:

… my sons did. They don’t think that, right? Yeah, my sons absolutely did that. But I do think that people don’t think that, and they’re not wrong to just think it’s okay to let you sink or swim because eventually that will be how you learn to swim. So, how do we support you whilst training you up? So you’re right, there’s a middle ground.

Emily Oster:

I think there’s a very complicated thing in parenting this age, which is thinking about, “When is it okay to let them fail and learn from the failure? When is the failure going to either actually follow them or more feel like it follows them? When is the moment when you step in because they forgotten something and it’s very important that they actually do it and when is the moment that you say, “Well, you didn’t bring your shoes to school, and so now you have to play the soccer game with no cleats and that’s too bad. Next time let’s work on how you can remember that,” and just figuring out which failures should we allow? It can’t be none of them, but also when do we realize the failure is too big a failure that it’s going to affect them too much either in a real or a perceived way? So we have to fix it.

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, but that’s a great example because I think that one of the things that we’re talking about here is how proximate the consequences are. That makes a difference because one of the things that you get with the executive functioning in a frontal cortex is more of a future orientation. You get longer time horizon. So, actually, I’m just thinking about it like, yes, if they don’t take their lunch or they don’t take their cleats, well, they’re going to be hungry or they’re going to not be able to play soccer. Actually, that’s a consequence that really hits with a ninth grade boy. But I have to tell you from personal experience that getting a 1.7 GPA in your freshman year doesn’t really bother some of them because they haven’t figured out what the A means in GPA yet.

Emily Oster:

I mean, in some ways, I think there is like a lot of productive realizations in that because if you think they care a lot about the things that are immediate like lunch and soccer cleats and whatever things that actually don’t matter too much, but if they forget them, it will be a moment to be like, “Oh, how can I put in some place something that will make sure I remember that?” That’s a low stakes way to let them fail. That may matter quite a lot to them while you are scaffolding to make sure the homework does go in, which is something where they’re not as much going to care about remembering it, but it is very important. So, there’s almost an opportunity. There’s almost an opportunity.

Richard Reeves:

You’re building muscle.

Emily Oster:

Yes, exactly. You build muscle in places-

Richard Reeves:

You build muscle around that.

Emily Oster:

… that feels-

Richard Reeves:

Something they care about.

Emily Oster:

… important for them, but they don’t-

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, it feels immediate to them, which is incredibly important.

Emily Oster:

I feel like we fixed it. So, this was great.

Richard Reeves:

This is great. This is incredibly high value podcast. Anyone listening to this, we’re done. Presumably you can just wrap up now the podcast.

Emily Oster:

Okay. So, I actually wanted to ask you what you’re going to do with your $20 million that Melinda Gates just gave you?

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, that was a surprising email, I’ll be honest.

Emily Oster:

Can you give people a little more context?

Richard Reeves:

Yeah. So, it’s Melinda French Gates has just made a huge investment in gender equality and much of the money is going particularly around women’s empowerment and many of the issues we talked about earlier around access to capital, women in leadership positions, et cetera. She’s of course a world leader on this issue-

Emily Oster:

She’s amazing-

Richard Reeves:

… and is now using her philanthropy.

Emily Oster:

Just an absolutely lovely, amazing person.

Richard Reeves:

I now even more strongly agree with you that she’s a lovely person because she thought that $20 million of that money, in fact, $40 million because $20 million went into another fund that Gary Barker who runs an organization called Equimundo that does a lot of stuff on masculinities and reducing violence particularly. So, what happened was that 12 people were each asked to direct $20 million through a donor advised fund. I was one of those people that was fortunate enough to be chosen to do that. So, in support of gender equality, Melinda French Gates has decided that that should include investments in boys and men. I think that’s an important signal, an important moment.

Emily Oster:

Let me just say, I think it is very important for exactly that reason. I mentioned this to my husband when I was saying I was going to interview you. I was saying, I was going to ask you about this. He was like, “I thought Melinda Gates was supporting women.” I was like, “She’s supporting gender equality.” He was like, “Oh.” I guess it was like a moment where, oh, I guess that this is also an important piece of this.

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, and it’s interesting. I mean it’s still early days in this debate, but I’m seeing in other parts of the world and some other people that Surgeon General has also said, “We can do both.” So I think if you’ve been an advocate for gender equality for a long time, you’ve obviously fused that in your mind with the issues of women and girls. To be clear, in a lot of the world, that’s still true. In some places, it is still true. But the question now is, with these growing gaps facing boys and men as well, do you expand your idea of gender equality to include them or do you dig in and say, “No, no, no, gender equality can only ever be about women and girls”?

Emily Oster:

Well, I’m going to give you my pitch, which is not specific, but is about data that I would love you to think about how you’re going to evaluate the things that you fund when you do this. So, is there a way to do this such that we would learn about what works while you are also helping people?

Richard Reeves:

Yeah, but let me ask you a question in turn though, because it’s a very interesting debate right now, of course, between… I’ll characterize it horribly, but there’s RCT or bust. Everything has to be pure. I need a fantastic identification strategy and great power and all. Then there’s the other group that’s like, “Well, that’s just numbers. Actually, my lived experience is something very different. You’ve just got numbers. I’ve got experience.” So there’s a kind of lack of humility sometimes on both sides, but I’ve worried a bit even about myself in the past. I’ve maybe been a little bit too purist. Is that a danger?

Emily Oster:

I think it is a danger. I mean, I would’ve framed it a little bit differently, which is I think sometimes when we run RCTs, they are too divorced from on the ground reality.

Richard Reeves:

You don’t have to have everything be a randomized control trial.

Emily Oster:

You don’t have to have everything to be randomized.

Richard Reeves:

No, or it can be quasi-random or we could start talking about diff and diff in a minute.

Emily Oster:

Tomorrow, I feel that the producer-

Richard Reeves:

She’s going to do edit that out.

Emily Oster:

… Tamar is going to kill us.

Richard Reeves:

She’s going to edit all of this. She’s taking all this stuff out. There’s obviously a replication problem too. Actually, someone said to me the other day, they said, “You know what? The best measure of whether or not something’s working well is staff turnover,” actually the data. So, just measure turnover, the data on whether something’s doing good work in the world, actually just look at the real preference of the people working on it. If people aren’t sticking around, that probably means it’s not great. If people are sticking around for a long time, that probably means it’s great.

Emily Oster:

I also think there’s so much in so many of these programs, which really have to do with the person at the top and whether that person is running a shop people want to be engaged with and is thinking carefully about how the program goes. That’s really hard to measure. It gets back to, anyway, data cannot tell us everything. I can’t end with that. Data is very useful.

Richard Reeves:

Data’s beautiful.

Emily Oster:

Data’s beautiful. Richard, thank you so much for joining me. This was a delight.

Richard Reeves:

Oh, thank you for having me. I loved it.

Emily Oster:

ParentData is produced by Tamar Avishai with support from the ParentData team and PRX. If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram @ProfEmilyOster. If you want to support the show, become a subscriber to the ParentData Newsletter at parentdata.org, where I write weekly posts on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions. For example, earlier this year, ParentData published an article called, “Why Adolescent Boys Are Struggling”, which takes a close look at many of the issues that Richard raised in this episode and focuses specifically on what parents can do to support their sons, as well as a list of resources to explore. Check it out at parentdata.org.

Penelope:

Right, Mom.

Emily Oster:

We’ll see you next time.