Some of us may have heard about the au pair program, considered it or even participated as a host family. Is it a Mary-Poppins-dream-come-true or is the reality having a foreign teenager live in your house, driving your car and not being of much help? Susan, Jeanette and Kate bring our honest perspectives of participating in the au pair program as well as channeling some of the anonymous au pair stories we've received on the DL over the years.

Elimination communication. Child-led toileting. Pullups. Incentives. Potty training books. Pee everywhere. Poop smeared on walls. Kid and parent meltdown. What are the visions floating around in your head when you think of potty training? As Susan approaches potty training time, Jeanette and Kate talk through their experiences (the good and the fails) and give a real-life perspective on potty training your child in the modern age.

What our parents expect of us in their retirement is one thing. What we expect of our kids in our own retirement is another... or is it? In the second part of this episode, we ponder what we expect of our kids in our own retirement. Financial help? Emotional companionship? Occasional Popeye chicken drop-off at an aging hippie commune? (ok that last part only applies to Susan). Join us as we take a moment to look farther out into the future and share how we think our kids might play a role in our golden years.

It's one of the main markers of Asian filial piety - supporting your parents in their old age. Except historically, women shouldered most of that burden and were also shut out from working outside the home. Except historically, very few people lived for years and decades with severe chronic illnesses. Except historically, no one had much of a choice. And except historically, we were expected to expect it from our old children. 

In this episode of our FOR REAL THO series, we ponder a listener's question about supporting parents in their old age. What would it actually look like? If your parents have enough or not enough savings to retire? If your relationship with your parents is/ isn't complicated? In the usual MMM fashion, we get into it.

This was our Episode #18 from Christmas last year that was a surprise hit. We recorded it on a lark and it ended up being one of the most popular episodes of 2021. Reposting it for the enjoyment of fans new and old!

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?

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!!!