No More Sidewalks: Parenting Today
Sep 3, 2026 · 35 min · 10 segments
There have been massive changes in children's health—both physical and mental—over the last generation. In this episode of *No More Sidewalks: Parenting Today*, CEO of ParentData and Brown University…
Abby McCloskeyHost
As a parent, the baseline you want for your child is good health, and yet that's become harder to come by.
Things I'm sure my own mother spent approximately two minutes thinking about in her whole life, like tap water or microplastics or Tylenol, now live in a never-ending doom scroll for parents.
Prominent social media feeds are filled with stories about pesticides on our fruits and vegetables, the food dyes in our children's favorite cereal, and cancer-causing chemicals in basically everything.
Overnight, it feels like it's become a full-time job in 21st century America for moms and dads to avoid seemingly poisoning our kids starting in pregnancy.
That's because kids are objectively less healthy today than they've been in previous generations on a large number of core metrics.
And this despite never spending more money on health care or having more information at our fingertips.
Are vaccines leading to an uptick of autism or autoimmune disorders and early puberty? Are kids over-medicalized, over-therapied, over-vaxxed? To discuss all of this with us is Emily Oster.
Emily is not a physician, but she is an esteemed doctor of economics at Brown University.
She's the founder of the immensely popular website, Parent Data, which I highly recommend, and a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, crib sheet among how many others are there now? Five? There are four.
And this is the conversation you've been waiting for to understand what has changed in children's health in our country.
And I know that millions of parents wish that they had you on speed dial as a friend and ask all of the questions that you're so good at answering.
But I think at the base of it is this fear that today's children are the sickest generation of children in American history.
Read the full transcript.
Create an account to read the whole episode, search across every transcript, and follow the shows you care about.
As a parent, the baseline you want for your child is good health, and yet that's become harder to come by.
Things I'm sure my own mother spent approximately two minutes thinking about in her whole life, like tap water or microplastics or Tylenol, now live in a never-ending doom scroll for parents.
Prominent social media feeds are filled with stories about pesticides on our fruits and vegetables, the food dyes in our children's favorite cereal, and cancer-causing chemicals in basically everything.
Overnight, it feels like it's become a full-time job in 21st century America for moms and dads to avoid seemingly poisoning our kids starting in pregnancy.
That's because kids are objectively less healthy today than they've been in previous generations on a large number of core metrics.
And this despite never spending more money on health care or having more information at our fingertips.
Are vaccines leading to an uptick of autism or autoimmune disorders and early puberty? Are kids over-medicalized, over-therapied, over-vaxxed? To discuss all of this with us is Emily Oster.
Emily is not a physician, but she is an esteemed doctor of economics at Brown University.
She's the founder of the immensely popular website, Parent Data, which I highly recommend, and a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, crib sheet among how many others are there now? Five? There are four.
And this is the conversation you've been waiting for to understand what has changed in children's health in our country.
And I know that millions of parents wish that they had you on speed dial as a friend and ask all of the questions that you're so good at answering.
But I think at the base of it is this fear that today's children are the sickest generation of children in American history.