Scratch That: Parenting & ReParenting Off Script

Will these charming Brits be able to withstand Rebekah's gushing?? If you don't yet know who Lucy and James Catchpole are, tune into our episode from last week, "Catchpoles + Andy J Pizza Love Fest." Two disabled parents who run a children's literary agency and write picture books, Lucy and James talk to us about their early experiences with disability, the ways disability shapes their parenting, and how their creative work reframes disability as ordinary, in sharp contrast to the cultural narratives of awe and pity.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

❤️ Restriction as a liberating starting point.

🪶 James's early memory of swapping the goal of normalcy for the joy of moving his body freely.

👑 Lucy's rare experience as a non-disabled child seeing disability represented as dignified and regal.

🌀 Lucy's origin story of learning to parent without guilt.

❓Common non-disabled narratives of disability that laud asking and kindness.

🤝 Belonging to a disability legacy and culture that we can pass on to younger generations.

Mentioned In Today's Episode:

Pre-Order the forthcoming YA collection of first-person essays, Owning It: Tales From Our Disabled Childhoods, edited by Jen Campbell, Lucy and James Catchpole, and illustrated by Sophie Kamlish. (You can read an essay by Rebekah in this collection, too!) (All orders from Blackwell include free shipping to the US!)

Check out all three of James and Lucy's picture books – 

• What Happened to You?
• You're So Amazing!
• Mama Car!

Watch Lucy and James sing their own pandemic lockdown version of "Oh my darling, Clementine" with their daughter. (Highly recommend. Easily the sweetest thing you'll watch/listen to this week.)

As Always:

Check out Caitlin and Rebekah's Book Shop! Here you can find every book mentioned in our episodes, as well as a few additional faves.

Use this link to get a 25% discount on a PokPok subcription! And if you haven't listened yet, check out our interview with PokPok creators, Esther and Melissa.

We would love to hear from you! Who are the creators lighting up your world these days? Let fill up the comments with a big ol' show and tell!

On today's Show-and-Tell episode, we gush about some of our favorite creators: Lucy and James Catchpole (disabled parents and children's book authors, with "more children than working legs") and Andy J Pizza (New York Times bestselling author / illustrator / podcaster). And we want to hear from you, too! Who are the creators lighting up your world these days?

Tune in to hear us talk about:

🛝 Being a disabled kid on the playground.

📝 Subversive representation that flips the script of disability storytelling.

🧰 Children's books that give our kids agency

🎨 ADHD + art + parenting

Mentioned In Today's Episode:

Pre-Order the forthcoming collection Owning It: Tales From Our Disabled Childhoods, edited by Jen Campbell, Lucy and James Catchpole, and illustrated by Sophie Kamlish. (You can read an essay by Rebekah in this collection, too!) (All orders from Blackwell include free shipping to the US!)

As Always:

Check out Caitlin and Rebekah's Book Shop! Here you can find every book mentioned in our episodes, as well as a few additional faves.

Use this link to get a 25% discount on a PokPok subcription! And if you haven't listened yet, check out our interview with PokPok creators, Esther and Melissa.

We would love to hear from you! Who are the creators lighting up your world these days? Let fill up the comments with a big ol' show and tell!

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

On today's episode, we talk with the one-and-only, our beloved editor, Amelia Hruby! You've heard her name at the end of every episode and today we bring you her voice. Founder of the feminist podcast studio, Softer Sounds, and host of her own podcast, Off the Grid, Amelia is a prominent and grounding voice in the increasingly anxious world of social media (especially for those of us with our careers tied to that space).

In today's episode, we also share about the hard decision to pause our work with Amelia as we try to figure out sustainability and finances for keeping Scratch That afloat. (Thanks upon thank you for every person who has and continues to support us on Patreon! We are so grateful for you!!)

Tune in to hear us talk about:

📲 The sneaky ways social media creates the problems it claims to solve.

🧮 Naming the problems we are really trying to solve and how an app can (and can't) meet that need.

👯‍♂️ Ways to make friends without social media.

📈 The difference between casually using social media and building a business on social media.

🛼 Fashion as another (older) way to signal to others what you value.

🏘️ Getting back to the small and local.

🎨 The differences between being an artist versus being a content creator.

We would love to hear from you! How are you navigating social media these days? How does it feel to be there? Or have you already left? Have you found ways to use the tool in a way that feels good and helpful? Have you found alternate paths to solving problems where you used to only use an app?

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

Check out Caitlin and Rebekah's Book Shop! Here you can find every book mentioned in our episodes, as well as a few additional faves.

Use this link to get a 25% discount on a PokPok subcription! And if you haven't listened yet, check out our interview with PokPok creators, Esther and Melissa.

On today's episode, we get to chat with the creative powerhouses, Esther Huybreghts and Melissa Cash. Driven by the need for good alternatives to overwhelming, addictive children's apps saturating the market, they set out to create an experience that parents could feel good about handing to their kids. They made the thing they needed, and Pok Pok was born — the Apple Design Award-winning preschool app. We are obsessed.

If you are also obsessed after listening to Esther and Melissa talk about Pok Pok, use this link to get a 25% discount for a subscription: https://my.playpokpok.com/checkout?promocode=25SCRATCHTHAT

Tune in to hear us talk about:

🌀 Esther's and Melissa's early experiences with play and creativity.

🛝 The origins of Pok Pok - making the thing you want to see in the world.

❤️ Creativity as a tool for surviving post-partum depression.

🔎 Naming the concerns and stigmas around screen time.

🐣👵 The importance of play from infancy to adulthood.

🥱 The value of boredom.

🪄 Striving for access and inclusion in design.

🪀 The difference between a toy and a game.

📱 Escaping the dopamine cycle we get from screens.

We would love to hear from you! What are your screen time woes and triumphs? How has play evolved for you over the course of your life?

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

Check out Caitlin and Rebekah's Book Shop! Here you can find every book mentioned in our episodes, as well as a few additional faves.

This week on SCRATCH THAT, we grapple with some of our inner Boomer-parenting instincts. What if our kids don't "have it as hard as we did"? How do we make sure we raise them to have scrappy, resilient, creative, trickster energy for the inevitable struggles ahead?

Tune in to hear us:

⛈️ Name our particular parenting triggers.

🧳 Unpack the actual legacy of some of our early childhood struggles.

💪 Uncover the deep, troubling belief that struggling makes you real and valid.

🧶 Describe the difficulty in watching our kids struggle without intervening.

⚙️ Imagine building resilience in ordinary moments of friction and frustration.

🪡 Recognizing the moments we feel triggered as places that need tending within us.

We would love to hear from you! What are the stories you tell yourself about your own difficult childhoods? How does that story shape the way you show up to the world/your own children now? What ways do you find the most effective for building resilience/scrappiness now?

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

We cannot wait for you to hear our conversation with Maria Bowler. Maria's life has followed a delightfully winding path from magazine editor to an MA in religious studies, from years studying with nuns to creative coach. She is also who Caitlin wants to be when they grow up and, most recently, an author of the recently released book, Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity. At the heart of it, Maria generously offers us tools for getting off the conveyor belt of production and into a life of being/making – a creative life that keeps us connected to reality. Our conversation came at exactly the right time.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

👤How Maria Bowler became Maria Bowler (hint: it involves "failing" a lot).

🛝 Looking at schedules as supports and goals as playgrounds (not structures we need to fit our beings into).

🍼 Early parenting emotions (and the shame that comes when we judge them).

✨ The fruitful relationship between reality and imagined futures.

🌱 Valuing the tiny when the world's suffering is enormous.

📱Our shifting relationships with social media.

🔥 Trusting what is alive in us and expanding our creative edges.

⛪ Maria's time with the Benedictine nuns and how that shaped her understanding of creativity.

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

A growing goal for SCRATCH THAT is to find ways for this community to know and connect with each other, so this week, we have a special invitation for our listeners. What is a song that has held you — as a parent and/or a person? A song that has brought you back to the ground/yourself/your values. A song that gave you the thing you needed when you needed it? Would you drop it in the comments below? We'll turn all our songs into a group playlist — a way to feel each other's presence as we go about this windy journey of peopling and parenting.

And we'll go first! On this episode, we each share about a song that has meant something big to us over the course of our lives.

Last week, we swirled around the impossible questions of paradigms – What stories did we inherit? What stories are we passing on (intentionally & unintentionally)? Enter – Abbie VanMeter. Abbie is the executive director of the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, the host of the Stories Lived. Stories Told. podcast, the host of the CosmoParenting Podcast, and an incredibly insightful and curious communicator. On this episode, Abbie meets us in the chaotic center of our swirls and offers us new frameworks and tools for the messy work of re/building paradigms as parents and people. We hope you enjoy our sprawling, juicy conversation!

Tune in to hear us talk about:

💭 What it looks like to embody a communications perspective (hint: communication is more than what is being said).

🧰 Instead of a script or map, building a toolbox we/our kids can carry into the unknown future.

🛠️ Good tools for the box, like resilience, curiosity, improvisation, and repair.

🌱 Taking good care of ourselves as good parenting (and the scripts that make us feel selfish for doing it).

❓ Questioning the common phrase "My parents did their best."

🌀 Leaning in, not pulling away from, complexity.

📚 Building paradigms that leave room for multiple stories.

📝 Empowering ourselves/our kids to be meaning makers in our worlds.

We would love to hear from you! What tools do you have in your toolbox? What tools are you trying to pass along?

This week on SCRATCH THAT, we process the great and ambiguous responsibility of creating paradigms for our kids — the context for what they will understand as "normal" — the scripts/stories they have about themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. Holding our curiosity in the forefront and never tying any tidy bows, we swirl around our own inheritances and the ones we're passing along. And if you would like some actual tools for navigating this wobbly territory, we can't wait to share next week's very special interview with you!

Tune in to hear us talk about:

🧳 The "cargo bay of baggage" we're bringing into this conversation.

☃️ The great allure & potential harms of creating cozy-snow-globe paradigms.

🌿 The desire to build flexible/stretchy paradigms that grow & evolve with us.

🎢 The uncomfy lack of control we have over the paradigms our kids are forming.

📆 The unspoken values we are teaching our kids through our deeply engrained daily actions.

🎞️ Trusting the process of long-arc relationships & human development.

🤸 Playing with new frameworks for paradigm building (e.g. Relationship over rules, or curiosity & openness over mandates & prescriptions. ) 

🌱 The importance of tending to our own deep beliefs and lasting paradigms.

We would love to hear from you! How are paradigms manifesting for you in your parenting and/or re-parenting experiences? What kind of paradigms are you wanting to build? What ones were built for you? How are you reshaping them?

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

💔 Why is it hard to feel hopeful right now?

✨ Point to something that makes us feel hopeful — tell a story?

🌱 Hope as a verb — name a seed we are going to plant?

✏️ Caitlin leaves us with three practices they're using to imagine a hopeful future