The Parent Rap

Summary

The Parent Rap is back, and our first new episode (live in your feed now!!) is with Olivia Scobie, a clinical social worker in Toronto and author of the upcoming book 'Impossible Parenting: Creating a New Culture of Mental Health for Parents'.⁠ We’ve linked to Olivia’s online presence, her book, and her work in the resources below.

We talk about the culture surrounding parenting, who gets to think of themselves as a good parent and what that means for us as we go about living in the world, and touch on some of the trials we've faced as we try to navigate the whole new challenge of making choices through the pandemic lens.

Food is the worst. Helping our kids not have weird issues with food is really complicated and difficult and frustrating.

Things that have helped:

Having a quality “safe food” alongside the “challenge foods”

Trying to make sure the foods we have available are foods we’re comfortable with;

Giving the kids as much control as we can over which things they choose to eat. from the selection we provide;

Trying to model exposures: touching, smelling, tasting, biting things we’re not sure we’re ready to eat.

Most members of our cohort of parents are constantly battling with their anger. Being a parent is frustrating, and kids push every one of our buttons and drag up all of our baggage, even the stuff we thought we’d handled a long time ago. Adding the close quarters and extra anxiety of our current moment only exacerbates the problem, and we all need a little bit of touching up on our anger management muscles.

Friend and naturalist Bethany Ricks talks to us about fostering and maintaining our connection with nature near and far, even if we can't go far from our living rooms.

Well, things have gone pretty sideways, huh? All the systems for our lives that we've built over the years are out the window as we adjust to #QuarantineLife. This episode is theoretically about gender roles, but also about *gestures wildly at everything*.

We're all freaking out, obviously, whether it's because we're worried about ourselves or our loved ones getting sick, or because we're trying desperately to figure out how to manage our working lives alongside self-isolation protocols, or because our working lives are on hold as part of those protocols.

We can't fix it, but we're here for you.

This episode was recorded on March 10 and the situation has changed rapidly since then. We apologize for any outdated information.

Beans and Chips are both growing up in TV-friendly households, and as such, negotiating comfortable boundaries and exploration on screentime have been important parenting questions. Here's where we come down.

Anna and Sara talk about the decision to raise only children from both personal and social perspectives. Plus: abortion and family planning access, who overwhelmingly has the most abortions, and how we think about the question of choice.

This week: overscheduling (holidays, ahhh!) and teaching kids about living together in a society.

This episode, we’re talking about potty training and bodily autonomy for our littlest kids, and how we remind ourselves that this is one of those times where, no matter how much this feels like it’s happening to us, our kids are separate from us and maybe we ought to be a little bit careful about how much we share with people not directly involved in the process.