People often ask me why I care so much about parenting when I am not, myself, a parent. This question is always so weird to me — of course I care about parenting norms, because I’m surrounded by parents! The choices that parents make (in the voting booth, as consumers, as community members, as friends) have so many direct and indirect effects on my life and everyone’s lives. Plus I’m always interested in how people try and make sense of a ton of contradictory information and “best practices” about how to be in the world, and whew, that is contemporary parenting right now.

I’m so pleased that Melinda Wenner Moyer, author of Hello, Cruel World!, agreed to join us to unpack your questions about contemporary parenting trends — she is so good at balancing empathy (for why we gravitate towards certain strategies) with reassurance (less is almost always more). So if you want to talk about the weird ways gentle parenting rhetoric has seeped into the playground, the pressure to overschedule, and the deeply annoying professionalization of kids’ sports, whew is this the episode for you. And if you’re not a parent but affected by parenting practices: you’ll also find so much here. This week’s discussion is gonna be a good one.

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• Buy Melinda’s book, Hello, Cruel World!: Science-Based Strategies for Raising Kids in Terrifying Times

• Subscribe to Melinda’s wonderful parenting newsletter, Now What

• Any writing on a parenting practice draws a lot of ire but this New Yorker look at gentle parenting from 2022 both elucidated the roots and gave me a lot to think about

• My polemic against Kids Sports and my interview with Linda Flanagan re: whether or not they’re reformable

• We reference Virginia Sole-Smith’s classic post on The Grandmothers Are Not Okay

• The Culture Study discussion from a few months ago re: “What Are We Actually Talking About When We Talk About Intensive Parenting”?

• Melinda references The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy

• Evangelical Summer Camp, past and present

• The intersection of technology and parenting (especially how mothers are surveilled)

• REGIONAL ACCENTS!!!! (We have a accent/dialect expert as co-host!)

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!

• As always, you can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here