I'M THE VILLAIN

This is a revolutionary episode. What would the world look like if we parented in communal groups that supported each other instead of treating every single mom as an island of one? What if we gave kids the agency and freedom to be themselves instead of policing their every move? What if we taught them emotional regulation? How do we do that if we weren't even taught those things ourselves? We talk through these questions with Yolanda Williams, a single mom whose vision of parenting is predicated on the notion that what we've been doing is Clearly. Not. Working.

Yolanda believes that we should base our parenting on neuroscience, and research on what makes people happy. She wants to build a commune of single parents in Arkansas where her daughter can live debt-free without having to work. She wants us as a society to understand that how you parent your child is not a personal decision, because your kid is going to have to grow up in a world with my kid and they are going to influence each other. So yes, the way you parent is my business.

On top of all that, most conversations on parenting happen in spaces mostly created and populated by white women. And those spaces don't tend to talk about some of the most important questions for Black parents, such as "How do we rise above the belief that we have to beat our kids before the police do? How do the effects of slavery impact our parenting? How do we parent nonviolently when the stakes are so much higher for us and our kids have to work twice as hard to succeed?" That is what the work of decolonizing parenting is all about.

Bio: Yolanda Williams is a Certified Positive Discipline Coach and Host of the podcast Parenting Decolonized, a show that unpacks how colonization has impacted the black family and teaches parents how to raise liberated black children without breaking their spirits. When she’s not advocating for the safety and liberation of black children from white supremacy and parental oppression, she’s chasing her toddler around the house and trying to remain sane.

Links: 

Parenting Decolonized website: https://www.parentingdecolonized.com/

Yolanda's Social Media Handles:

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/parentingdecolonized/

Facebook group for Black parents: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CPTime/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/prntgdcolonized/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/prntgdcolonized

Ways to support Parenting Decolonized:

Give recurring support through Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/parentingdecolonized

Give a one-time donation through PayPal, Ca$h, or Venmo:

PayPal: paypal.me/parentingdecolonized

Venmo: @parentingdecolonized

Ca$h: $parentingdecolonized

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

With the vaccine out and both podcast hosts scheduled to get their first shot this month, hope looks to be on the horizon, so we decided to talk with a self-care expert about how to get through this last leg of the pandemic. We sit down with Re'Becca, aka Crowned ReRe, the host of the CrownTalk Podcast, about how she got into self-care after breaking up with her partner of 10 years, what self-care really means outside of the absurdly commercialized concept it has become, whether it is just an excuse for selfishness, and how pets can really help get you through.

This is an exciting time for investing after the recent Gamestonk! debacle has gotten more and more people interested in getting into finance themselves, and has flooded TikTok and Instagram with influencers explaining what "shorting" is via more accessible metaphors like buying shampoo from Sephora.

Since we all just celebrated Valentine's Day, we wanted to showcase a millennial who was going decidedly against the romantic grain by choosing to stay single. Edirin Edewor, who has lived in Nigeria her whole life but just moved to Dubai during the pandemic, has faced pressure from family and people in her community to find a partner her whole life but instead chose to focus on her career. She has published bestselling books, is an internationally acclaimed inspirational speaker, and teaches masterclasses on online publishing.

When you listen to the intro, it might not sound like the intro to a show about game development but don't worry, soon you will understand. In this episode, we are talking with Andy again, the same guest from the last episode, and we talk about the world of gaming: turns out a lot of the jobs you can do in real life, you can do for a gaming studio. You can go to school to be an economist and wind up being an economist for a game to design its in-game economy. You can design fashion for game characters. You can design in-game weather. But not only that, unlike in the real world, you can also get real-time feedback from the people who play your game. This can be a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, you might be pressured to follow the wrong signals, since obviously fans don't themselves have any experience creating a game most of the time, and on the other hand, it can be really useful to have that short of a feedback loop between you and your consumers.

Links:

As millennials we face a lot of tough choices with regards to what we should devote our career to doing. It's genuinely difficult to decide whether we should "follow our passion" and do the thing we actually want to do, or the thing that seems more practical.

This is where we process the shit that went down in the capitol building on January 6th with our friend Ronald. We wanted to take some time to process instead of giving a reaction right after the fact, but we delve into the implications of the insurrection on us as people on the left, if this is part of the "chaos" that is to come, as mentioned by Craig Blackmoore on our Futurism Episode, and the implications of Amazon shutting down their AWS hosting for Parler and how that is going to mean a whole can of worms for them in the future as more and more people call on them to act as a moral arbiter.

In a continuation of last week's episode with Justin (a psychiatrist) and Eddie (a therapist), this week we talk about how there is so much we still don't know about medicating mental health issues, and even the best treatments on the market for things like depression are only 70% effective. We cover the new treatments researchers are experimenting with, how to find a medication and a provider that is right for you, and the very charged issue of capitalism in health care, as as a bunch of other topics such as whether therapists or psychiatrists are likely to be automated anytime soon. If you missed last week's episode, make sure to check that one out before listening to this one!

Justin and Eddie's podcast, Millennial Mental Health Channel: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/millennial-mental-health-channel/id1487717298

We have been on a mental health kick after our Mental Health Stigma Episode with Shreye, especially given that this year doesn't appear to be going any easier than the last.

It has been a pretty intense year to process, and based on the events of January so far, so will 2021. We took this moment to look back on the timeline of 2020, reflect on what happened, and marvel at how dystopian our present world is. It really feels like every new milestone was a punch in the gut at the time when it happened, and now it really feels like absolutely nothing short of the literal collapse of society will surprise us anymore. Little did we know that on the day this podcast episode is being released, we may indeed see the foreshadowings of JUST THAT. So long, America as we knew it.