MAHA (or “Make America Healthy Again”) motherhood is a bit of a mindf*uck. What, one asks oneself, unites “crunchy” hippie-leaning momfluencers (like Rudy Jude & her wannabes) of the world with someone as spray-tanned Marjorie Taylor Green? One looks like a sentient carcinogen, and one looks like she's never even heard of food dye! So how do we understand their alliance under the umbrella of Making American Healthy Again?

For many of us, there are some points of connection with these MAHA moms, which where this conversation gets juicy and frankly a little disconcerting. As Sara Petersen wrote, most moms probably would agree with the MAHA moms in that we prefer that our kids’ treats came without red dye #6, a food dye associated with behavioral side effects. But, unlike a MAHA mom, we’re proud to be up-to-date on our Covid boosters instead of guzzling raw milk and curing our own cancer with red light therapy (or something, tbh we couldn’t bear to go too deep into that one).

At the same time that motherhood taps us into our need to give and receive care, the conditions of modern millennial motherhood seem to have stoked a fear-driven and anxiety-ridden individualism. It’s a confusing time, and it’s getting more baffling by the minute. If MAHA mothers care so much about banning food additives like red dye, why have they aligned themselves with an administration that has effectively gutted the FDA? How did we get to a place where expertise is up for grabs and there is so much mistrust in our public health systems? Can we recover?

OG motherhood writer and New York Times opinion columnist Jessica Grose joins us to talk through all this and more.

LINKS:

* Jessica Grose, The Kind of Moms Who Fall for ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (New York Times, Oct 2024)

* Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose

* Sara Petersen: “MAHA Moms Are Wrong About Wellness”

* Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst

* Ariana Hendrix

* Katie Beck On Child-Friendly City Design

* Eloise Rickman on Children’s Rights

* Sprawl Is A Parenting Problem by Erin Sagan

* Noah Wylie being hot again on The Pitt

* John Early bit

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

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Some people have told us that this podcast is for “literary mom nerds” and we’re into that! So, today for our beloved die-hard paid subscribers we’re leaning into that! (Please consider becoming one of those, if you aren’t already!) We decided to make an episode about what we’re reading and loving right now, and what’s in our TBR piles. We’re still in t…

New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess joins us to talk about the convergence of parenthood and technology. We dig in to everything from freebirthers to prenatal testing, and from “complicated” pregnancies to the many anxieties (and joys, too) of raising a child in a world where a $1600 Snoo has become a newborn must-have and corporations know about our pregnancies before our immediate families do. Hess’s much anticipated memoir, Second Life: Having A Child In The Digital Age (which we both LOVED), is out May 6th.

Links:

* Prenatal Testing Offers Pregnant Women More Information Than Ever — But No Support To Deal With It (Romper)

* Unfit Parent by Jessica Slice

* Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

* Happiest Baby On The Block

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes and if you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)

We reunite with author and parent Jessica's Slice ahead of the release of her tremendous book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, to learn how her life with a second child has taught her to throw out the milestones and ask for help (even when it involves a dead possum!). Then, you get to listen to Sarah’s initial interview with Jessica, which remains one of our all time favorites and touches on parenting perfectionism, disability justice, and parenting neurodivergent kids.

Links:

* Order Unfit Parent

* Jessica’s website and Substack newsletter:

Jessica Slice writes about disability, poems, and waterfowl

* Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong

* Lucy Webster’s The View From Down Here

* Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

* We've Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents, edited by Eliza Hull

Debbie Reber, the host of the Tilt Parenting podcast, talks to us about what she’s learned from having hundreds of conversations on raising differently-wired kids. We discuss independence versus self-determination, low-demand parenting, how to find your parenting integrity, and whether even having these conversations is a parenting privilege.

Links:

* Miranda is So Busy So Bored

* The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories by Vandana Singh

* Our new Bookshop storefront!

* Tilt Parenting Podcast

* Differently Wired: A Parent's Guide to Raising an Atypical Child with Confidence and Hope

* I Who Have Never Known Men

* Jessica Slice’s Unfit Parent

* I Will Die on This Hill

* Ross Greene’s Explosive Child

* Low-Demand Parenting

* The Declarative Language Handbook

* Dr. Gina Riley on Self-Determination Theory

Culture recs:

* The Traitors

* Bather’s Library Oakland

* Lego Masters

* How to Talk to Kids When The World Feels Like a Scary Place

* Dr. Megan Anna Neff Neurodivergent Insights

“I remember the bizarre feeling of my baby kicking inside me while taking care of patients dying of COVID in the hospital.”

Brett was a doctor in a small town when the pandemic hit, with a toddler at home and a baby on the way. In this episode, she and Miranda (who are childhood friends) talk through her experience as a parent, spouse, and physician during those intense years, and the way they continue to impact her and her family five years later. Also, we agree that a cold juice box actually does cure a lot of things, it’s just a fact.

Links:

* Our pandemic parenting survey (you can still take it if you want to)

* The first episode of our pandemic parenting survey

If you love (or honestly even just like) the work that Sarah & Miranda do here on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You support this work (thank you) and will get access to super special content like subscriber-only episodes and even very awesome tote bags for founding members.

“Coming into parenthood for the second time, I knew a lot. And I think I had this vision of what I would do differently, and I was going to plug into the local mom's groups, or plug into the play dates and take the yoga classes with the kids and things like that. And it became not that. It became just very, very isolating.”

Sarah talks to Marta, who had a fresh professional and parenting start planned, only to be hit with the pandemic. We discuss her desires to tend to her self now that her kids are a bit older, and to find the community she had wanted to build when shut-down struck.

Links:

* Our pandemic parenting survey (you can still take it if you want to)

* The first episode of our pandemic parenting survey

If you love (or honestly even just like) the work that Sarah & Miranda do here on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You support this work (thank you) and will get access to super special content like subscriber-only episodes and even very awesome tote bags for founding members.

Sarah speaks with Arianne, who gave birth just days into the pandemic lockdown. They discuss how birth trauma and isolation led Arianne to doubt her attachment to her daughter, tricky family relationships, and how she’s healed and found what they call “heart family.”

Links:

* Our pandemic parenting survey (you can still take it if you want to)

* The first episode of our pandemic parenting survey

If you love (or honestly even just like) the work that Sarah & Miranda do here on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You support this work (thank you) and will get access to super special content like subscriber-only episodes and even very awesome tote bags for founding members.

One of The Cut’s parenting columnists and official friend-of-the-pod, Amil Niazi, joins us to talk about her recent essay on weaning her kids off YouTube. We’ve covered screen time, but this time we’re talking about algorithmic content. Is the algorithm as unavoidable as it feels to many of us? Or is it worth it for parents to push back — even when it makes for some awkward moments with other families — and try to hold out as long as they can? If your kids are already hooked on YouTube, like Amil’s were, is there a way to reign it in without a dreaded, endless household meltdown? And if you do manage to kick the algo out of your home, and come out as a non-YouTube family, is the grass really greener?

Plus, Sarah and Miranda on “life’s hack” (life’s ONE hack), the very corporeal fascinations of switching to menstrual cups, first periods, and what it feels like to finally be deeply learning about our menstrual cycles in our 40s.

* My Family’s YouTube Ban by Amil Niazi (The Cut)

* The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

* If Books Could Kill review of The Anxious Generation

* The Fun Cup

* My Son’s Favorite Toy Is A Tampon by Sarah (Scary Mommy)

* Babeland

* Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy

* 28-ish Days Later BBC Podcast

* Second Life by Amanda Hess (episode coming soon!)

* Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023 (Pew Research Report). “Roughly nine-in-ten teens say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform measured in our survey.”

* Meta (Facebook & Instagram & WhatsApp parent company) is not going to moderate content anymore.

If you like the work that we do here on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You support this work (thank you!) and will get access to super special content like subscriber-only episodes and even very awesome tote bags for founding members.