The Family Firm

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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,

Emily Oster

A targeted mini-MBA program designed to help moms and dads establish best practices for day-to-day operations . . . Because this is an Oster book, there s data scattered everywhere on the development of reading skills by age, on the concussion risks of playing soccer, on the benefits of dipping Brussels sprouts in sweetened cream cheese. It s all presented in the breezy, skeptical style that s made Oster s work a must-read for parents who don t have the time to investigate Finnish studies about integrating extracurriculars into the school day. The Washington Post

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. Her books on pregnancy and toddlers skyrocketed her to parenting-world fame, and now she s back, crunching the numbers on topics that keep parents with school-age kids up at night. Good Morning America

Oster is a self-described data nerd, a delightful contrarian who dared question the status quo, shush the shamers and tell parents what made sense. The New York Times Book Review

Oster draws on her experience as a business school professor to suggest that economic reasoning the art of making decision-making given constraints can tell us a lot about how to make some of these hard decisions a little better. . . . Some careful, economics-inspired thinking can help reduce the anxiety, tension, and stress. . . . For that alone, The Family Firm is worth picking up. Charles Fain Lehman, The Washington Free Beacon

With Oster's help, rather than fear this next stage of parenting, readers can embrace (and even enjoy) the challenge.   Booklist

Oster offers a plethora of rational guidance for parents of kids between pre-K and middle school in this eminently practical guide. Publishers Weekly

A guide . . . to chart a child s path with less stress and more optimization for healthy