Model Minority Moms

What do you get your kids, nieces and nephews who might already have a ton of stuff? Are you stressed by everyone else’s Instagram-perfect holiday decorations that appear like magic right after Thanksgiving, when you’re still lying around with your pants unbuttoned? On this episode, we discuss our real thoughts about and experience of the winter holidays, and provide our own survival tips. Hint: at least one of us is a grinch and at least one of us loves Christmas.

Having kids brings a whole slew of questions, stresses, and joys around the end of year holidays. What do you actually believe in (Santa, Jesus, Buddha, any others???) and want to tell your kids? What kind of holiday memories do you want to make with them? How do you handle potentially triggering family gatherings? In this episode, we discuss Susan’s urgent parent dilemma: what do you tell your almost-two-year-old about Santa? Do you say he's real? If you say he exists, is that a lie? Do you take him to see an Asian Santa? Is that a healthy alternative to the mainstream white Santas or is that like, as Jeanette puts it, serving up a bulgogi sandwich?

Our families of origin are often the source of the deepest love and the deepest hurt. Even in our mid-thirties, we struggle to break the cycle of hurtful interactions with those closest to us. With kids, figuring out some way to do it better seems even more urgent. We're told to set boundaries by our therapists, but how do you do that with an older generation that doesn't know what boundaries mean? Spoiler: We haven't found any magic bullets but we share some ideas that have helped us better manage our relationships with family.

As young girls, we all struggled with body image issues or eating disorders, so how did pregnancy and postpartum affect how we see our physical self? How have conflicting messages about beauty and body image from our Asian elders and the influence of pop culture influenced how our self-confidence? And how can we develop a more grounded sense of our own beauty and pass that on to our mixed-race kids?

Hate it or love it, "tiger parenting" has become a byword for Asian-American moms in the last decade. We share our opinions on what we think tiger parenting actually is, and how it differs from other parenting philosophies, like "free-range parenting". We dig into how racial and socio-economic dynamics impact people's perceptions of parenting philosophies, and how we struggle to define what it means for our children to "succeed".

Link to the resources mentioned in this episode are here: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-6-free-range-tiger-parenting-is-our-thing/

Confessional time - we go into the deep recesses of our childhood to evaluate how safe we felt with our parents, and whether we were emotionally attached to our parents in a healthy way. We talk about attachment theory, which says that our childhood relationships with our parents impact our whole lives. Does being poorly attached as a child ourselves doom us to a poor attachment relationship with our kids?

Link to resources we mention in the episode: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-5-so-whats-your-attachment-style/

Motherhood can be really hard. Like tired-to-the-bone/cry-in-the-bathroom/scream-into-my-pillow hard. So, why have kids at all? It wasn't our dream-since-forever to have kids, and yet, now that we're moms, we can't imagine not having our children. We share stories about how parenting our kids teaches us to live fully in the present, gives us moments of matchless delight, pushes us to grow, and allows us to experience a love we've never known - cliche but absolutely true. 

Fertility can be kind of a paradox - sometimes it seems like getting pregnant is so easy (it even happens by accident!) but sometimes despite our very best efforts, it can take a ton of time, money, and our emotional and physical energy with no guarantee of a baby. With more and more women choosing to delay motherhood to make time for careers and other interests, complex fertility journeys are becoming more common. We share our own fertility journeys and talk to Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of M.M.LaFleur, a company she founded in 2013 to help women take the work out of dressing for work. Sarah previously talked to Marie Claire's Editor-in-Chief Sally Holmes about her multi-year fertility journey and discusses it with us on this episode.

Our striving for achievement keeps us functioning most of the time but we've all experienced times when we've approached meltdowns. In this episode, we talk about our breaking points that led us to therapy, the stigma of meds, and the critical role our partners play in our well-being. We share ways we get unstuck, fears of how our kids will perceive our low periods, and ways to befriend the inner critic when it all seems too much. We may never *not* feel overwhelmed and anxious, but we have come up with small steps that help get us moving again.

We reference a lot of books and other tools that we've found helpful - we've provided more details here: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-3-mental-health-im-fine-until-im-not-fine/

The obsession about putting our kids in the "right" school so they can have the "best" outcomes can put us in dangerous territory real fast (with a nerve-wracking spreadsheet!). Our immigrant parents wanted better for us so is it wrong to want better for our kids? And what is the end game in all of this? Early childhood education can heavily influence a kid's future so the pressure is on to choose the "best" school.

In this episode, we share what we're thinking about as our kiddos start formal schooling in a few years. What environment will make them the most resilient, secure in their non-white identities, and not be hypocritical of our social justice values? How do we decide what is "good" for our child without too much navel gazing and expensive tuition? And perhaps most difficult and most important, how do we balance being supportive parents without pushing them to the edge?