Model Minority Moms

A lot of listeners have asked us about our mental health journeys - what prompted us to seek mental therapy, how we dealt with the stigma of seeking therapy, how we found a therapist that was a good fit. In this next episode of FOR REAL THO, we answer one listener's question about our mental health journeys, how we think it's helped us and our thoughts on finding the right one for you.

We are SO excited to introduce a new series of episodes called FOR REAL THO where we discuss questions and topics that our listeners have submitted to us through our website. We will periodically release these short episodes where we give you our straight-talk about what we think about your question. Have a question of your own? Submit it through our website modelminoritymoms.com.

Our first FOR REAL THO episode, we talk through a submission by Carol, a first-gen Vietnamese-American who experienced body shaming by her mother growing up, and who is seeing her mom say similarly damaging comments to her young daughters. Argh, sadly we could relate on too many levels. Listen in as we commiserate and share our own thoughts on what's helped navigate similar experiences.

There's a lot of talk today amongst millennials about cutting ties with the people who hurt you, bring you down, disagree with you - our show wades into that territory quite often as well. And while that route might be the wiser one at times, the fact is that we will have disagreements at some point with almost everyone in our lives and we can't cut ties with all of them. Not only will that hurt us and our families, but arguably it has contributed significantly to the deep political dysfunction we see in the US today. We talk to our guest Mónica Guzmán who is a mom, journalist, author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, and a Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels which is the largest nonprofit in the US tackling political polarization at the grassroots level.

It will happen to almost everyone. One day, you will react to your kids' behavior in a way that you aren't proud of. What does that look like and how do you handle the aftermath? Well, it probably is heavily influenced by how your parents dealt with (or didn't deal with) the ruptures in your relationship with them. We started this episode intending to just have a frank conversation about dealing with challenging behavior from our children, and how we try to repair the relationship if we responded in a way we wished we didn't. But... we started talking about how our parents did/didn't deal with rupture with us as children and that got really real. 

Fighting over toys/parental attention/who gets to talk/who picks the next song or TV show. Crying over mean words and hurts, real and perceived. Competition with your sibling to be the smarter/cuter/funnier/stronger/more interesting one. On the other hand, we melt when our offspring get along with each other. Welcome to the world of parenting siblings!!! 

When you have your first kid, your discretionary time goes from 100 pre-kid to 50. When you have a second, it goes from 50 to 5 (but it feels like -50). When the options go from "do you want to take our kid or go for a run?" to "do you want to take our 2 year old to sing-along or watch our infant?", the challenges of life (and sanity) management increase to a whole new level. Join Kate, Susan and Jeanette as we share how we try to manage life after having the second child, and of course, all the emotional/cultural/mental hang-ups that make a challenging situation even harder.

We're only half-kidding. There's no actual PhD in infant feeding that you can get (that we are aware of). But after having learned about the intricacies of latches, lip ties, tongue ties, lipase, craniosacral therapy, breast milk banks, pumps, flanges, let-down, expression, just to name a few topics in infant feeding... don't you think we deserve at least a master's degree? :) Send this episode to an expecting friend or someone who recently gave birth just so that they don't feel alone in this strange and confusing universe of infant feeding.

'Nap when your baby is napping' they say to exhausted moms... but what if this is your second baby and you have a toddler running around 24x7? What if your baby is sleeping fine but your toddler is suddenly experiencing a sleep 'regression'? Or God help you if both of your children are waking up multiple times a night.  With Kate five months into being a mom of two, we re-visit the sleep question... do we still believe in sleep training? What if our child was sleep trained but is now un-trained? Did we damage our kids for life by sleep training them? Will Susan ever have a decent night of sleep ever again? Join us as we try to answer these questions and more with clarity and hilarity that only comes from being sleep deprived for months.

Thinking about having a second kid? Or already have more than one? (or you have none but just curious?) A newly minted mom-of-two, Kate shares how her experience with her second baby has been so different from the first... and how a lot of common advice for transitioning to life with two children just hasn't worked thus far :( Take it as inspiration, birth control, commiseration -- these stories are the unvarnished, hard and hilarious truths about becoming a mom of two.

In the final episode of our food series, we try to get to the bottom of this question: Why does 'fusion' food make us so mad? Is it because it's bad? Is it because it's ignorant? Not authentic? Not respectful? Is it ever good? Isn't all food fusion anyway?? Susan, Kate and Jeanette have a frank conversation about why 'fusion' food provokes so many strong feelings.