December 28, 2025 • 45 mins
This summer we've curated your Help I Have A Teenager playlist with a healthy dose of culture-savvy conversation parents actually want - Parenting Out Loud.
Welcome to Parenting Out Loud where if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about it.
On the show today, Jessie Stephens, Amelia Lester and Stacey Hicks sit down to tackle;
- Glam retreats: a cultural necessity for post-partum mums?
- Why bedtime stories are being put to bed themselves.
- How some dads forget their kids names, refuse to change a nappy or fail to RSVP — and why some women let them.
- And, sleep divorces. Is this where intimacy gets put to rest, or a secret hack that's been misjudged?
Plus, in this week’s reccos:
🐣 Amelia is a fan of these Baby Origami wraps.
📚 Jessie solves a gift issue with a personalised book from Lucy and Co.
🧸 Stacey shares her obsession with magnetic tiles.
Support independent women's media
Want more Parenting Out Loud? Click here.
What to read:
- Um. Couples are getting 'sleep divorces' and it sounds... brutal.
- 'I was reading bedtime stories with a glass of wine. A question from my son stopped me in my tracks.'
- 'My toddler’s bedtime is always chaotic. Here's a recap of the new routine we tried for a week.'
- We asked dads what one thing makes them feel the most parenting guilt. It's not what you'd expect.
- "Reading bedtime stories." 30 parents share the one thing they really hate doing with their kids.
- 'My mum encouraged me to go to a place where "mothers are mothered". It cost $5,000.'
- ‘Why I spent 40 days at home after giving birth.’
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mumma Mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded this
podcast on the Gatagoul people of the Eor Nation. We
pay our respects to their elders past and present, and
extend that respect to all Aboriginal and torres strained Islander cultures.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
I'm Stacy Hicks. I'm the editor of Mamma Mia, and
I'm also the host of our new parenting podcast, Parenting
Out Loud. And this summer, we're curating your listening with
a healthy dose of culture savvy conversations that parents actually want.
This holiday season, we're bringing you unmissible episodes right here
into your podcast playlist. It's your summer listening sorted. And
if you're looking for more to listen to, every Mumma
(01:03):
Mea podcast is curating some are listening right across the network,
from pop culture to beauty to powerful interviews. There's something
for everyone. There's a link in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Hello and welcome to Parenting out Loud. I am Jesse Stevens,
and I am joined by Amelia Lester. Hi. Jesse, Hello,
and mother and me is Deputy editor Stacy Here. Hello
to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week,
because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about
it on today's show. Sleep separation could be the secret
(01:41):
to a better quality of life. And one of us
is a very early adopter. Plus, why don't men RSVP
to party invitations? It's time to get into the hopeless
dad's debate? And good night to the bedtime story. What
happens when parents stop reading to kids? We're starting to see.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
But first, in case you missed it, postpartum just got
a glow up. Perhaps you're like me and you remember
that time as a difficult one. Mesh undies, laundry piles,
occasional abouts of crying on the bathroom or kitchen floor.
Anymorey will, Yes, hand is up. But no, no, no.
There are these things called postpartum retreats popping up. They
(02:19):
are for mothers to be mothered and for those who
can afford them. A writer for US Vogue wrote about
one at a Waldorf astoria in California. She spent two
nights there two weeks after giving birth, and she enjoyed
all sorts of marvelous things, round the clock baby care
with duelers on demand. She seriously just had an iPad
and she could just be like, I need someone right now. Facials,
(02:41):
fresh meals, massages, no crying on the kitchen floor. There
are others across the United States, and they're now also
in Australia. There's one in Sydney's Double Bay and there
is one in Melbourne. These don't come cheap, however, the
one in Melbourne is fifty two hundred dollars for four nights.
Oh now, we should say that the postpart of retreat
is not a new idea. There are many cultures around
(03:02):
the world that do recognize the importance of giving women
a break after childbirth. So, for instance, in South Korea,
the tradition is called sanw Jewelry one and it refers
to care centers where new mothers check in and then
they get these nourishing broths and they get really taken
care of for weeks, often even months after birth. And
(03:23):
there's actually a similar tradition in China where a postpart
and parent rests for a month in a kind of
confinement and family members attend to the housework and to
the older kids. I wish the Western take on this idea,
which is brilliant, was accessible to more people. I mean,
I'm sure in Scandinavia they probably have some kind of
government funded program where everyone gets it. And I think
(03:46):
it's really important these days because you and new mums
are able to live near family members, and for me
in particular, it's a really important corrective to a trend
that I have experienced firsthand in the US. So my
first baby I gave birth to in a so called
baby friendly hospital. This is a new trail meant to
(04:07):
think in hospitals across America. What this basically amounts to
is there's no crash, there's no formula, you have to breastfeed,
and there's no assistance at night because the baby has
to sleep with you the whole time. So it's baby friendly,
but it is not mother friendly. And I'm here for
the focus on mothers a little more. Jesse. Would you
want to go to one of these?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I don't know. I'm not sure if I would. I
have read a lot about these. I read one article
that kind of said, is it. I really like all
the supportant terms of food and you know, evenlactation consultants
and that kind of stuff is great.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
But the broth, the broth broth.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But one kind of criticism was saying women don't need
a baby robe embroidered with initials, like we've just there
are some things that are probably a little too far.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Yeah, that's what the Vogue rater got at the Waldorf
Hotel in California. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So what this essentially is, as you alluded to, is
what Trevor Noah has has talked about this among you know,
lots of researchers, which is we all like lost our
community and now we have to pay to get them
back exactly. And so in an ideal world, you wouldn't
have to pay for this kind of service, would just
(05:21):
be on offer. And as someone in I have such
privilege when it comes to family and support, and so
I think I felt like I sort of got this,
like I was able to rely on people who could
bring meals and if I needed someone to hold the baby,
I could ask them. But I do worry about the
disparity here and what class has access to this type
(05:43):
of thing, because postpartum depression has so much to do
with the environment following birth. And I worry that if
it's like, oh, you pay for this, you pay for this,
you pay for this, it means that our standard of
basic care kind of goes, oh, well, that's all outsourced.
Like ideally hospitals would do a little bit more of this, maybe.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Yeah, as opposed to a kick in the pants and
some mesh. Ondis exactly right, I see what about you.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I don't know if it's a result of having a
baby who was in special care. So I was in
hospital for longer than a lot of new mums are.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
How long were you in hospital?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I was in for three weeks before I had my daughter,
and then about ten days after she was born.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
That is a long it's a long time.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
I knew the meal rotation of that hospital like the
back of my line.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
I got to have am all month's.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Worth of me, but I basically had to be dragged
out of that place. Like I felt very anxious when
I was away from the nurses and the heart rate
monitors and all of the things. And so I think
if something like this had been within my financial reach,
I absolutely would have taken it, because it felt like
whipplash to go home and to have almost no one
around because I'd been in hospital for so long. My
(06:51):
husband had to go back to work a couple of
weeks after I got home, and it did feel very
much like you're alone, and so I and I think
there's a certain level of guilt. Not everyone feels this,
but I felt very bad if I asked anyone to
help me with anything, even if you know, and I
think a lot of women feel that they don't want
to be a burden. They're like, why am I finding
(07:11):
this harder than the average person? So you don't want
to reach out. And it almost feels like if you
could pay for this, obviously not that amount of money,
because that's not achievable for most of us, but if
you could pay, it almost takes the guilt away from that,
like it's a service, it's transactional. You're helping me and
I'm getting something from that.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, I remember thinking that if I asked, there were
instances where I probably would have liked to help, but
I didn't want to look like I thought, your narrative
goes so funny, you go, they'll think I don't want
to spend time with my baby exactly like they'll think
they'll think I had this, that there would be judgment
towards me more than an imposition on them. But I
want to table one criticism that I heard from a
(07:51):
midwife about this kind of thing, and it's that with
too much help. I don't know if I agree with this,
but I was interviewing her about these kind of providers,
and she was saying, when you're in a situation where
you are overwhelmed with expertise, whether that be this is
how you swaddle, this is nappy, this is breastfeeding, it
can undermine the instincts of the parents a little bit.
(08:16):
And I know that a lot of people poo pooh
the idea of instincts. I think that a lot of
us actually just need to learn how to do things.
But she said, you shouldn't feel as though you need
a university degree before you leave the hospital with a baby. Like,
we've got to make sure that we're not telling parents
that this is so hard and so complicated that you
need to do twelve classes a day in order to cope.
(08:38):
Going and working it out is kind of part of
the experience.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah, and that's it.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
I feel like we are so overly prepared now, like
we do courses. People here who are pregnant, we kind
of are saying to them, well, you've got two jobs now,
because you've got to keep up with all of the
appointments and the lessons and all of the things. So
maybe it does get in the way of your instincts
and just well, I've just got to get through this
rough patch and then we'll be fine. An article about
the benefits of getting a sleep divorce caught my eye
(09:03):
this week, and I need everyone to know about it.
Writing for The Conversation, Monash University's psychology fellow, Alex Malaw
explored the many reasons otherwise perfectly happy couples might choose
to sleep separately and how it can actually lead to
a better night's sleep. She said, well, many people say
they prefer to sleep or sleep better next to their
partner when scientists measure sleep objectively, such as through an
(09:26):
electro in cephalogram, And yes, I did practice saying that
ten times before we hit record. When they use the
EGS to assess brain waves, the data actually showed poor
asleep quality when co sleeping. So some reasons obviously that
people might choose to be in separate beds is conflicting
sleep schedules. One person snores or has sleep apnea or insomnia,
(09:47):
sleep talking.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
The list goes on.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
But the other main catalyst for a sleep divorce can
be when kids come into the mix, and suddenly sleep
is the most precious but often hard to achieve commodity
in your life. And now I have something to confess.
I have been happily sleep divorced for five years, not
actually divorced, five years nearly, which is right around the
time I started getting pregnancy insomnia, and I'm just never
(10:12):
going back. So would either of you consider this? I'm
so interested.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I have questions for you. Please go way pregnancy and
so mania starts. Yes, I was in exactly the same position,
and I would go I was like, I can't be
up and down. I can't worry about you.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Yes, I had it to.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Separate myself often when the baby comes. If you're going
to go, all right, let's take shifts so that we're
both not losing sleep. Tell me about the next stage
where you're going. You know what I actually like having
my own space with a Now, how old your daughter for?
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah? Four five?
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You taught to me about that. Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
It was survival mode at the start, was it was
I needed to sleep, he needed to sleep, and so
we would take turns with the monitor. Someone would take
a shift, and then it was kind of like, look
at this bed with the nice linen and I've put
on it, and look how dark I can have the
room when you like to wake up with the sun
And look at how no one stole my quilt in
the middle of the night and it just snowballs to
(11:10):
the point where we both were sleeping so much better
by sleeping separately that we both went I think we
just have to do that all the time now.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And the most urgent question, I mean, how many bloody
bedrooms do you have?
Speaker 4 (11:24):
This is the thing. This is a big privilege to
be able to do this.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, so we
are very lucky to have three bedrooms. But this is
why we can only have one child. There's no more
bedrooms A well, I'm not willing to give mine up.
I need to keep it so those kids would be sharing.
But it's just worked out so much better. And I
have to say, like, I love my husband, but I
love him a lot more when I can't hear his
(11:47):
snoring or experience the wwe like body slams that he
manages to do every time he turns over.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
So this is definitely a good solution. If you're experiencing that. Okay,
I went deep on this after you mentioned it. I
was really curious about when the double beded custom came about,
because when you watch old movies and TV shows, the
married couples do go to sleep into single beds. So
it turns out that it's very recently that we decided
(12:16):
that couples have to sleep in the same bed, and
we're talking the sixties. Before then, it was actually seen
as healthier and more modern for a married couple or
a partnered couple to sleep in separate beds. And I
love this detail, which is that Victorian doctors said that
the weaker sleeper would draining all the vitality from the
stronger person.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
And so it's a very recent thing, and it kind
of reminds me. I find it a bit confronting. I
won't lie when you told me about it. There is
a kind of instinctive idea of like, is there something
wrong with their relationship because we are it's so ingrained
in us that married couples sleep in the same bed.
But then I got thinking about it, and I remember
that Esther Peirell's big thing is that we keep expecting
(13:02):
one person to be everything, to fulfill all functions, including
to be sleep compatible, and this is just taking a
little bit of the pressure off. Now that said, I
do not have an extra bedroom for people in my situation.
I would recommend mouth tape and maybe everyone better.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
We have a like a day bed in Luna's room,
so it's like if you sleep separately, yeap, you go
and you sleep and it's tiny, like you roll off
and break an arm. But we did that for the
first six months. Luke has slept in the nursery on
the day bed and Luna and I were in the
big room with the big bed. But it was interesting
the moment we decided to come back and I was like,
(13:40):
I don't get to sprawl, I don't get a blanket
like this is so.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Did you consider ever keeping.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
You see, other bed was more comfortable. I have time
for it. And then I was having a think about
what the stigma.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Is, right, and there is a stigma.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
There is stigma, and it's to do with intimacy. And
I also think that it's a suggestion that it will
absolutely kill your sex life, right, because come on, you've
got to sleep the same bed.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Absolutely that is the number one question I get asked,
we won't ask you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
What's funny about that, right, is that it's like how
many people are rolling over at two am and being like,
now that I can feel you there, we should have
spontaneous two am sex and that keeps our relationship strong. Like, no,
you wake up at two am, you hit the other
person in the face. I do it all the time.
To Lukaut exactly, he mumbles, sleep talk, we fight, and
then in the morning we're shitty at each other, Like
(14:31):
any sort of intimacy is not happening.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
No, I think you are much more likely to want
to be intimate with your partner if you don't want
to kill them all.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
And some of the studies she cited in this piece
spoke about how clients reported that sleeping alone can alleviate
some of the anxiety they have around sleep because if
they're the person who's disturbing the other person, if they're
the snorer, then they're having less quality sleep because they're
worried about waking the other person. So they've actually found
that people sleeping separately means that there's not that stress
(15:03):
as they're going to sleep themselves.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I also find that when I've gone through periods of insomnia,
having someone beside you who's asleep is really distressing. Yeah,
it's like it's real because you go wish, Oh, you're furious,
You're absolutely angry. And it also means I've a partner
who goes to better a lot earlier than me, and
that's the time I'm in our house, so I have
to go to bed, and if I fall into the
habit of then scrolling on my phone for the two
(15:26):
hours where he's asleep and I'm not ready to go
to sleep yet, terrible for your brain. So it's like
I've had to start to do like the Kindle or whatever.
You can't you can't read a print book, can you pack?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
This also reminded me of I used to live in Japan,
and when you travel around Japan you go to traditional inns,
they often have a tatarmi matte arrangement where whole families
will sleep in one room on tatarmi. So it just
was a reminder that the thing that we think is
the default is not the default for a lot of
(16:00):
people around the world and through human history.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Is it a really big space where the family will sleep.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
Not especially big. But it feels like it's a very
different way of sleeping because instead of being given this
prescribed rectangle to sleep on, there's a sense of like
you've got more latitude to move around because you're all
just sleeping however you like and in whatever shape you
like in this room. So cool. I want to talk
(16:30):
about a particular type of person who I think we
all know, who we may even have in our lives.
Right now, let me back up and say why I
started thinking about this. A Shanty, the singer A Shanty,
and the rapper Nelly recently had a baby together, which
is lovely and Nellie seems very happy about it. But
(16:51):
in a recent interview, a joint interview, he was sitting
beside a Shanty and he said to her baby, I'll
give you the world, but I just ain't changing no diaper,
and as Shanty responded, the only way women for millennia
have responded to such a statement, which was with an eyeroll.
A similar display of this was evident in an interview
that Nick Cannon did recently, the singer who you may know,
(17:14):
has twelve children, and the interview. For some reason, this
interview was taking place on pilates mats, but I I
don't know why that is. But the interviewer asked Nick
to run through his twelve children's names, and let's just
listen to what happened next. What are their names? You want?
Speaker 2 (17:30):
You want all twelve twelve names?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
This is where I usually get in trouble.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Why because you don't know all of that. I know
all of them.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
But like our label last we see, let's keep me,
keep me honest.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
There's rock Roll, Golden, Powerful, rise Onyx, Legendary, Zion, zillion Zin.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
And just see this as where I, uh, you're missing too,
I'm missing two. Yeah, it's a little awful. That's where
I So look, these two men seem like nice people,
but they are what I would call hopeless dads. And
(18:15):
these are dads. They're not deeply problematic in any way,
but they're just kind of hopeless when it to the
task of raising children. So, now that I've named this
phenomenon and described this type of person, I suspect you're
going to have a lot of examples for me. And
the newsletter writer Melinda Wehnemoya, who has a great parent
in newsletter, had one recently. She asked, do dads know
(18:36):
how to RSVP. She wrote, I'd love to know what
goes through dad's minds when they receive kid party invitations.
I don't mean this in a snarky way. I am
truly curious and want to understand. Do they think not
my department or eh, my partner must be on this
invite and they'll take care of it. So I can
really relate to that. I just was planning a kid's
birthday party, and as a little social experiment, I did
(19:00):
send half the invitations to the dads on the parent
contact list and half the invitations to the mums.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And what did you find.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Well, it was a little predictable. The women responded and
the men did not. So I just started sending the
men extremely passive, aggressive, polite messages saying, Hey, any chance
that you know whether you can make it to this
kid's birthday party. Some of them just never responded to
me and then showed up at the party. So at
(19:31):
this point I need to make clear that this is
obviously not all men. I'm not doing that eye rolling
at all men comedy routine that's almost become a cliche
at this point. But the question I want to ask
you both is do we deal with the hopeless dads
just by kind of shrugging our shoulders and figuring that's
how men are. Or are these hopeless dads actually creating
(19:54):
very real domestic labor imbalances and kind of getting away
with it under the guys of being hopeless.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
They are, And part of it is weaponized in competence
in terms of it just gets too hard to have
them do the task. So you know, women step in
and that leads to serious inequality and I think resentment
within a relationship. But there was such a fantastic point
in this newsletter that I think highlighted why some dad's
(20:23):
about a rsvping, and it's that if you have never
organized a kid's birthday party, you don't understand how important
rsvping is. And so the reality is that mostly it's
mother's doing it. Having done it, they're going, I should
let them know asap so that they can book it,
whereas dads are going, what does it matter if I
show up or I don't.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
And the reason why it matters is because if you
do not have enough goodie bags, yeah, all hell will break.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Loose, exactly right, and I'll be your kid crying. And
women know that not because it is innate to women,
but because it has been so practiced.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
And they don't teach us that the POSTPARTU and retreat
the importance of having enough goodie bags.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
We just have to learn that we learn. And I
think that's an important mantra, right because even cooking, I
didn't cook before and I still can't cook. But guess what,
there has to be something on a plate, right, So
you set up systems, you set up processes, you do
trial and error, you work it out. And the idea
that you've got to let dads fail a bit and
(21:24):
work it out and make mistakes, I think is just
a really important one. Like if it's that they don't
RSVP and then they show up, and.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Are you able to do that and step back? And
I also a related question to this is I think
correct me if I'm wrong. You have used the fair
Play playing cards? Can you explain what those are and
what your experience was with them? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
The fair Play cards. I just so recommend them to
everyone and they have every have you heard of them? Stacy?
Speaker 4 (21:49):
Yes? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
So it has everything that happens in a household, from
like who sorts out the house internet to who does
dental kids, dental to who does clothes, all that kind
of stuff, and we sorted it out and most of
the lunar stuff was on me. And I laugh with
friends that it's like there's never a discussion that clothes
(22:12):
are on you, but when you go away, packing is
on you. Yet somehow it is, and you know, Luca
does take it. Turns out there are a few things
he's doing, like crims or whatever, which I would say, yes,
sometimes I'm quite happy with that. I will also say
this is still a massive issue, and I think those
(22:33):
examples highlight that. But I reckon that we're watching a
shift in real time. Like I was thinking about the
nineties and your Homo Simpson and your Ray Romano, and
like the stereotypical bumbling fool dad who didn't know how
to do anything and just set a funny joke every
now and then, you're going to work right in front
of me, or I can keep an eye on you.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
You got that?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Any who do you think you're dealing with?
Speaker 4 (23:00):
You?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I may seem stupid, but that's just to get your
mother to not ask me to do stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
And then I was looking into this research that said
that in the nineteen eighties, forty three percent of fathers
said they'd never changed a nappy. Is this in the US,
forty three percent of fathers had never changed Now that
number has dropped to just three persons. That's enormous. And
so even like from in an Australian context, you've got
(23:29):
How Other Dad's Dad, like Hamish Blake's podcast, you've got
two doting dads with Maddie j dadding, and fatherhood is
becoming a verb in a way that motherhood.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
Okay, it has been, but I need to confess something. Yeah,
I get annoyed at the dad's dadding as well. Tell me,
tell me it's just like it? Am I just setting
that up to fail because I'm annoyed at the hopeless dads.
And then when the dads start talking about dadding, I'm
sort of annoyed at them too.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I see, I really like it. I really welcome it.
And I listened to a series of How Other Dad's
Dad when I was pregnant and it actually gave me
so many tips and insights into parenting from fathers. And
I think that making those communities, like we're talking about
the postpartum retreats, right, you then go into a mother's group,
(24:15):
and there is all this shared knowledge and wisdom that
goes between women. And in defense of some of those fathers,
they have no equivalent. There's no kind of fathers all
sitting down and working out how they're going.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
To do this.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I think there is some isolations.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
I lost that idea for them. So here's how you
replied to what's that message is at a party exactly.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
But there are some things that they have just probably
never done in their entire life, particularly when it's a
father with the daughter. Like realize that my husband has
never tied a hair elastic in his entire life because
why would he.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
So that was a steep linker that he needed to
go on and.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Practice on my hair, So he wasn't doing it on
a moving target to know how to do that. And
I think there are some things like that that yeah,
will have just never come across their desk. But there
are other things like rsvping tool party that aren't really.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Forgivable and they should know.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And it is good to see that the pendulums swinging
back the other way.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
I also think that when it comes to talking about
hopeless dads, what we're really saying is it okay to
let them. Like back to that idea. So, for instance,
a dad I know, who shall remain nameless, is not
great at matching the kid's clothes to the weather.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
A hypothetical is that dad good at matching his own
clothes to the weather, because I know a lot of
men who are not, for example, my own father would
be in short.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
A great point. It's a really great point. And the
question becomes do I let them? Meaning do I let
the children go out without jumpers on and let this
hypothetical father allow that to happen, or do I intervene
and say this is going to lead to misery and
(26:06):
can we not just put the jumper on before we
leave the house? And that can set the heart of
a lot of these questions because it's like, do I
just let them? Do I just let them go?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
I'm team let them because you know what'll happen. They'll
get to the park or they'll get outside and they'll
start change and they'll say, I'm very cold, and then
probably you'll get a call saying, yes, can you clean jumper?
Speaker 3 (26:29):
But you know what the other thing is too, which
is really annoying. Sometimes it works out for them, and
that's even more irritating, because you'll fret about something like
that about your child going out without their jumper, and
then they'll come back incident free. Nothing's been said, and
so really the dads are just working smarter, not harder,
and worrying less about things.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Things and getting away with it. So maybe we need
to take a leaf out of their bore.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Good Night to the bedtime story. Lauren Ironmonger wrote for
the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend that the number of
parents reading aloud to their children is at an all
time low. This research comes from HarperCollins UK, which found
that less than half of parents of kids under thirteen
said reading aloud to children was fun for me. And
(27:14):
can I just say on this, I think it's a
very different question saying do you read to your kids?
Do you think it's one for me?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Those two things are not the same.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I think reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fifteenth time,
I wouldn't describe it as fun. I'd describe it as something,
but fun would not be in Australian data found that
many parents can't fit in daily reading with their kids,
and just quickly this article goes into why it's even important. First,
it's massive for literacy skills, but it also strengthens the
(27:42):
parent child bond. It sends a message to your child that,
at the end of the day, they are the most
important thing. Amelia. Do you think culturally we started to
see reading as something that a child does at preschool
or school, and therefore it doesn't have to be done
at home. We've outsourced it.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I think that's such a good question, and I think
very sadly, the answer is pretty clearly yes. And it
dawned on me recently that I am very much part
of the problem here. I take my kids to swimming
practice on a Sunday and I sit there and I
doom scoll on my phone and feel my anxiety spiral
(28:23):
and instead I should be reading a book. So last
week I took along Stephen King's Misery, which I've never read.
I was like, this, Stephen King, it's.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Good author, He's actually writing something.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
And then I realized I was role modeling for my children,
who I'm always sort of flinging books at and telling
them to read that reading can be fun.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
That's so true. And did you was it a paper copy,
like a yeah, paperback.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
With a really like spooky looking cover that my kids
were obsessed with, because, by the way, physical books are
kind of intriguing, you remember that idea, like, yeah, a
cover of a book is meant to entice you into it.
And so when I was reading this book, they're like, misery,
what's that book about? And it was just it occasioned
a great conversation that said, I, this is a work
in progress for me too. I am exhausted at the
(29:12):
end of the day and sometimes it is easier for
me to throw on an audiobook on the bluetooth speaker
and then I can go and stack the dish washer
while they're falling asleep. And I haven't felt too guilty
about that, because literacy experts do say that listening to
an audiobook can build all sorts of really important literacy skills,
such as comprehension and vocabulary, and they're often read by
(29:34):
fantastic actors, and so they're getting this really entertaining story
read to them probably better. It's better read by Emma
Thompson than it is by me, for instance, because we
were reading Matilda on audiobook. So yeah, I haven't felt
too guilty about that. But that was until I read
this article, and it made that really important point that
you reference Jesse, that you're not just reading to them
(29:56):
to teach them how to read. You're reading to them
to show them that actually the dishwasher is less important
than us spending some time together. And you know, okay,
I'm just adding that to another list of things I'm.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
But that's the thing as well, is that usually now
there's in a lot of households, it's two working parents.
You're getting home later sometimes. I mean I get home
at six thirty seven o'clock from work to their try
an organize dinner, eat together, which we're also doing wrong
that we're never eating together now, and get your kids
to sleep. Something has to give, and so I think
we are probably guilty of just replacing that, as you say,
(30:32):
with I always use.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Sleep stories, audiobooks.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
We've got like the Yoto player with the little cards
that my daughter can listen to. And so yeah, we're
just kind of unwittingly putting our kids at a disadvantage
by not sitting down and doing reading with them in
the interest of cutting a bit of time.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I wonder if the story here is more about adults
aren't reading. Because this research came out as well, that
the book industry broadly adults aren't going and buying books.
That's absolutely tanked. And as you say, Amelia, if we're
not modeling it, and therefore it does seem like a
(31:08):
biggest step. I always find this with reading, that there's
a big block if you haven't done it for a while,
and you can feel like it's harder, and then it's
a muscle, like reading is genuinely a muscle that gets weak.
And so I was reading about this because it's something
I really really worry about. Us during this event with
this academic whose name is Sophie g And she was
(31:29):
saying that not reading is worse for you than vaping,
that for the brain, like it is so important for
everything from memory to empathy to just all these cognitive
skills and the ability especially to read deeply. That's not
innate and we have not evolved to read. Every single
(31:50):
generation has to learn how to read. And in order
to learn how to read, it takes like years of
deep focus. Reading is one of you cannot do it
while you're doing anything else.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
No, and some people never get that. Travis Kelsey recently
came out and you can't really read.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
So That's what I was reading about. Even the Naplan
results came out recently and they said that Ozzie kids
have sunk to an all time low in terms of
reading and writing skills, and low literacy is an issue
among a lot of adults. And low literacy I found
this interesting. It was saying that actually being able to go,
I know what the words on the page mean is
(32:26):
one thing, but the step that seems to be missing
is then understanding what those words mean, and also the ability.
Do you see the article in the Atlantic recently about
college students who had never read a book. It was
so the ability to sit down and read a book
beginning to end is also a skill that you can lose,
and so deep reading is being able to sit with
something for a long time, follow it, like go to
(32:48):
work the next day, kind of remember where you were,
and even though it feels so hard, it's like, you know,
we've spoken about pikiitas and stuff on this show, and
you know how they always say, like on the plate,
they're not going to eat the broccoli, but you've got
to have broccoli on the plate. Yeah, yeah, you've got
It's got to be an option. It's like having the
books in the house. See before I speaking about kindle, right,
(33:09):
because I've gone to that because I'm trying to at
night not have a lamp or anything on. But now
I think you should.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Get a sleep divorced, then you don't have to worry
because lights on everywhere where.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Luna might be coloring in or something, and I don't
want her to see me constantly on my phone, so
I'll go and read. But it looks like I'm on
an iPad or a screen or a device, and I
think it's more important she sees me term page, and.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
It's also less interesting for her. She doesn't understand why
you're engaged with this kindle as opposed to Stephen King's misery.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, she even goes into my room sometimes and when
I've got books next to my bed, like she loves
to flick through them and like look at the pages.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Yeah, my daughter often now pretend she's the librarian now
that they're doing that in school of and then I
have to go and borrow books from her. And it
is just such a yeah, like it's a tangible thing.
It's not the same as having it on a device.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
This is it. This is a humble brag, but Luna
was going through our bookcase in our study recently and
got a book down and it was one of my books,
and she went to the back and another picture of
me and she went mummy to explain that is and
I mum's an English teacher, so like this is a
(34:17):
special interest area. But like I grew up and there
was always a book and the way that you would
just go on and they're.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
So intriguing when you're a kid.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
As well, you'd always find a naughty one, yeah, and
you'd go, I will be reading that privately. Great, absolutely great,
you're putting words together. That's wonderful. Or like names that
I would see or covers.
Speaker 4 (34:37):
I still remember when my parents love books and reading
and they have bookshelves all around the house and there
was a Joan Diddian book called The White Album. I
just had a completely white cover, and this blew my mind.
How can you have a cover that has nothing on it?
Speaker 2 (34:53):
It's so true the physicality of books. And apparently as well,
they're finding that the print book is a totally different
experience to read it.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
It's just the object of the print book is so special,
and in a world where we have so few objects
that are special because even our photos are on our
phone and we don't have DVDs anymore or videos. I
think that's a portal into reading, yes, is to give
kids the opportunity to be mystified by a book with
(35:20):
a white cover and the smell.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
The smell of a book, Yeah, I love the producer
Ruth was telling us that the reason we love the
smell of old books so much is because they smell
as the ink and the paper and everything break down,
it smells like vanilla, which is such a homely warm like.
I'm thinking, there are a few things to me more
comforting than that smell. And you can get like fragrances
or candles or whatever in your house to make it
(35:44):
smell like that, which I'm like, I just want to
fill my whole house with that smell of like an old,
old book.
Speaker 4 (35:49):
And I also want to know that producer Ruth is
the best smelling person at Mum.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
And Men, which is talking about I wonder if it's
also that we're a bit more sensitive about what we're
reading now and what we're reading to our children now.
The other week, my daughter brings home a library book
every week from pre K and she loves it. It's
like a big event to bring it home in the bag,
which is great. But this week she brought home The
Ugly Duckling and I found myself as I was reading
(36:14):
it to her, feeling weird about even using the word ugly.
And I think that's something that's coming up a lot
now with books like even Roll Dahl's books a couple
of years ago were rewritten to remove the words ugly
and fat. And so I think maybe we're not reading
as many of the stories that we loved as kids,
worried that they'll be inappropriate, and so we're not enjoying it,
therefore we're.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Doing it true. I have two examples of that from recently.
We have a copy of Role Dal's Revolting Rhymes, which
I remember loving. It's actually my copy, and I was
reading it one day to the kids and I just
suddenly my eyes lit upon the next word, and the
next word was slut. Oh that's a really hard word
(36:54):
to explain meaning to kids, I find. And then the
second example was had a really nice time reading the
line the Witch and the Wardrobe with one of my kids,
But gosh, that's a weird book, is it. There's a
lot going on in there. It's essentially a Christian allegory,
which is fine. I don't mean to say that's weird,
(37:15):
but it does raise a lot of questions about what
the book is at actually trying to say, and what
the wardrobe is a metaphor for. And you just find
yourself going down some garden paths that maybe you didn't
expect that you'd be going down at bedtime.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, there are some. My mum brings a lot of
classics over. Did you ever read there's a Hippopotamus on
my roof edding cake? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so we're big.
We read that fifty Well, I'm sorry, but that there's
one that's like Mummy's on a diet. She has salad
cheese and I read that every day and I'm like.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
This is this is a bit weird diet.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
But those ones, right are brilliant. They're nonsensical, they're wonderful.
I watch Luna just look at the roof and I'm like,
just thinks that the hippotamus in there, and I made it.
But Mum always says that a lot of the newer
ones are quite sanitized, and they're trying out there trying
to hit you over the.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
Head girls doing stem.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yes, exactly right, And it's like school has done this
a little bit too. They made reading into hard work
in terms of reading for knowledge or like reading for
moral like lesson instead of just reading for pleasure. And like,
I see the pleasure that Luna gets from Hippopotamus, and
(38:33):
I'm like, let's just let's learn our colors later, and
let's just go to hippopotamus eating kay. On the ugly
darkling thing, when I was a kid, I asked my
nan if I was pretty. She lived with us and
I was like five or six, and I said, Nan,
am I pretty? And she said, you're an ugly darkling? Oh?
She died before I grew up, And so I still wonder.
I'm like, did I ever turn into the one? Nan?
Speaker 4 (38:53):
You're you're a Swan.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
It's time for our recommendations of the week. So Jesse,
do you want to go first?
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (39:02):
On the topic of books, I remembered. Don't you find
that it's really hard to buy gifts for like grandparents,
and like Mother's Day comes around and you're like, oh,
it's my mom and speaking of hopeless dads, it's their mom.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
Whatever, give me a hand cream? Can you you can't know.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
And what am I like? I'm not going to get
her like an ice blouse. She's going to be like,
this is disgusting.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
I always used to get my nana every Christmas a
jar of oil of olay, and that smell still takes
me back talking I won't want that.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
She won't want that. So what I got was I
went on Etsy and there are heaps of examples of this,
but I went on Etsy and found this company that
makes personalized children's books. So this one is about going
to Nana's house. And you can say, like when I
go to Nana's house, there's a blah, and like you
can put in all the little detail and they've even
(39:56):
got like put in three words to describe your nana.
And I'm like, crazy, weird, annoying, just to troll me,
But it's all about a day at nana's house. So
it's it's and I made one for me and I
made one for my mum and they're just the cutest,
most personalized. It has their names, it has whatever they
call their grandmother on the front, and they're just so sweet.
(40:19):
So this was on Etsy from Lucy and Co. We
have a link in our show notes, but there are
heaps and heaps online and they are just a lovely,
thoughtful little gift.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
My recommendation is something that I have not used in
quite a few years, but which I still like to
gift to new parents, and it is a fabulous product
that there's a little bit of a story behind. So
I used to do a show on MAM and Mia
many years ago with Mia called tell Me It's going
to be Okay. It was a show which we conceived
(40:48):
of and started doing after Donald Trump was elected, and
I think the title kind of summarizes where I had
spaces that it literally came to a screeching halt about
two years in when we realized that we could no
longer tell each other it was going to be okay.
So and it's never come back? Has it come back?
(41:10):
But it was a fun experience and we had a
small but devoted cadre of listeners and one of them
was a lovely lady who lived in Neutral Bay in Sydney,
and she sent me an invention of hers called the
Baby Oragami Rap. Now this saved my life when I
(41:32):
had my first baby, because you know how the world
is divided into people who are good at oragami and
people who aren't. Yeah, I'm one of the people who's
not me or anything.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I think it takes like patience and grace, think.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
Either of those things exactly. So this is called the
baby Oragami Rap because if you've never mastered swaddling, it
makes it literally impossible not to correctly swattle the baby.
So I think Nick Cannon could do with one of these,
and I think that Nelly could do with yown. And
I really got a lot of use out of it. Basically,
(42:09):
it's numbered. It's a sort of a step by step
numbered way to swaddle your baby, and it's.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Super tight, like it does.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Everything's tight, and it's made of beautiful one hundred percent cotton.
It's really easy wash and I just love gifting them
to people because swaddling is just so hard, so hard.
I just never got it. I never got it. So
it's called the baby o Agami Rap and it is
from an Australian company and a friend of the pod.
(42:38):
So thanks for saving my life.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
How about you, Stacy? What's your reco Okay?
Speaker 3 (42:42):
So I am rubbish at imaginative play. I'm just not good.
But the one toy I bought for my daughter. I
bought it nearly three years ago now, and we still
play with these every single week, usually multiple times a week.
And they're those colored magnetic tiles. So I haven't seen these, okay,
So they're just different colors. You can get like esthetically
(43:02):
pleasing pastel ones. You can get the bright primary colors,
whatever you want. They come in different packs. You might
get like eighty pieces or one hundred pieces, and they're
just magnetic squares and triangles and they all kind of
you'll get a guide of different things. You can build
with them, or your kid can just stack them up
in a row like whatever stage.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Kind of like Lego, but it doesn't exactly.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
They are flat easy to clean up because like Lego,
they're not like.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Little bits, so it all sticks together. So they're very handy.
We take them a lot to cafes or pubs or
anything because there's no mess, like if you worried about
them drawing on a table at a cafe.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Even when you don't.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Take your kids to the point, yes, I actually find
I get quite territorial, and I like move my creation
away from my daughter, like, don't mess with my color
pattern that I've made. But you can get like you
can get cheap versions of them at kmart. The ones
I got were on Amazon. I got them from Steam
Studios is one set, and then we got another set
from an Aussie startup called Kinetics with an X on
(43:59):
the end, and they're just so great.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
You can even.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Create puzzles for your kids, trace around the outside and
then remove the magnets, stick it up on the fridge
and then they have to fit in the shapes to
the pattern you've given them, and it takes some ages,
really good distraction.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
What age would you say you could start? So Luna's
just two?
Speaker 4 (44:19):
Yeh?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Is this something she could play?
Speaker 3 (44:20):
I bought them for her second birthday and she absolutely
loves them.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Still they can't do them every week. I'm going to
hijack the recommendation and say I wholeheartedly agree. And recently
I picked up the sort of like original brand of
the Magnetic Squares has now got a travel tin, which
is brilliant because they are sort of big, like you
wouldn't want to pack them in a suitcase. But now
with this travel tin with the miniature ones, they're so
(44:47):
cute and you can now travel with them too.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I knew I was losing the plot a bit this
morning when I was thinking about my recommendation, and Luna
this morning heard the garbage truck man and we went
outside and saw that they all waved at her. And
I was like, I should recommend garbage truck and came aside,
Luna's not well, like she's had a running nose and stuff.
And I found on YouTube garbage truck man. Oh, and
(45:13):
it's just people emptying bins right, and I had it
up on YouTube and it was so meditative. I was
for me. I was like, I'm not bored, I'm actually
really it was so satisfying and I was like, what
a great job to just go and clean stuff up
every day, engage with the community. I was like, this
is great. We should just be watching and I could truck.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Your chip cancer. Instinctively drawn to like some of the
best people in our community, people who pick up the rubbish,
the postman, the postman, firefighters, paleontologists. I don't know what's up.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
They know where it's at. They know the actual hierarchy
of society.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I explained to my daughter that those are jobs like
about a yoga because I think I realized because my
husband and I both writers, that She just thinks like
work is keyboard and that's a job you could go.
You don't have to be like us, You can do that.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
That is all we have time for on parenting out
loud until next time. Bye,
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mumma Mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded this
podcast on the Gatagoul people of the Eor Nation. We
pay our respects to their elders past and present, and
extend that respect to all Aboriginal and torres strained Islander cultures.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
I'm Stacy Hicks. I'm the editor of Mamma Mia, and
I'm also the host of our new parenting podcast, Parenting
Out Loud. And this summer, we're curating your listening with
a healthy dose of culture savvy conversations that parents actually want.
This holiday season, we're bringing you unmissible episodes right here
into your podcast playlist. It's your summer listening sorted. And
if you're looking for more to listen to, every Mumma
(01:03):
Mea podcast is curating some are listening right across the network,
from pop culture to beauty to powerful interviews. There's something
for everyone. There's a link in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Hello and welcome to Parenting out Loud. I am Jesse Stevens,
and I am joined by Amelia Lester. Hi. Jesse, Hello,
and mother and me is Deputy editor Stacy Here. Hello
to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week,
because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about
it on today's show. Sleep separation could be the secret
(01:41):
to a better quality of life. And one of us
is a very early adopter. Plus, why don't men RSVP
to party invitations? It's time to get into the hopeless
dad's debate? And good night to the bedtime story. What
happens when parents stop reading to kids? We're starting to see.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
But first, in case you missed it, postpartum just got
a glow up. Perhaps you're like me and you remember
that time as a difficult one. Mesh undies, laundry piles,
occasional abouts of crying on the bathroom or kitchen floor.
Anymorey will, Yes, hand is up. But no, no, no.
There are these things called postpartum retreats popping up. They
(02:19):
are for mothers to be mothered and for those who
can afford them. A writer for US Vogue wrote about
one at a Waldorf astoria in California. She spent two
nights there two weeks after giving birth, and she enjoyed
all sorts of marvelous things, round the clock baby care
with duelers on demand. She seriously just had an iPad
and she could just be like, I need someone right now. Facials,
(02:41):
fresh meals, massages, no crying on the kitchen floor. There
are others across the United States, and they're now also
in Australia. There's one in Sydney's Double Bay and there
is one in Melbourne. These don't come cheap, however, the
one in Melbourne is fifty two hundred dollars for four nights.
Oh now, we should say that the postpart of retreat
is not a new idea. There are many cultures around
(03:02):
the world that do recognize the importance of giving women
a break after childbirth. So, for instance, in South Korea,
the tradition is called sanw Jewelry one and it refers
to care centers where new mothers check in and then
they get these nourishing broths and they get really taken
care of for weeks, often even months after birth. And
(03:23):
there's actually a similar tradition in China where a postpart
and parent rests for a month in a kind of
confinement and family members attend to the housework and to
the older kids. I wish the Western take on this idea,
which is brilliant, was accessible to more people. I mean,
I'm sure in Scandinavia they probably have some kind of
government funded program where everyone gets it. And I think
(03:46):
it's really important these days because you and new mums
are able to live near family members, and for me
in particular, it's a really important corrective to a trend
that I have experienced firsthand in the US. So my
first baby I gave birth to in a so called
baby friendly hospital. This is a new trail meant to
(04:07):
think in hospitals across America. What this basically amounts to
is there's no crash, there's no formula, you have to breastfeed,
and there's no assistance at night because the baby has
to sleep with you the whole time. So it's baby friendly,
but it is not mother friendly. And I'm here for
the focus on mothers a little more. Jesse. Would you
want to go to one of these?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I don't know. I'm not sure if I would. I
have read a lot about these. I read one article
that kind of said, is it. I really like all
the supportant terms of food and you know, evenlactation consultants
and that kind of stuff is great.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
But the broth, the broth broth.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But one kind of criticism was saying women don't need
a baby robe embroidered with initials, like we've just there
are some things that are probably a little too far.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Yeah, that's what the Vogue rater got at the Waldorf
Hotel in California. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So what this essentially is, as you alluded to, is
what Trevor Noah has has talked about this among you know,
lots of researchers, which is we all like lost our
community and now we have to pay to get them
back exactly. And so in an ideal world, you wouldn't
have to pay for this kind of service, would just
(05:21):
be on offer. And as someone in I have such
privilege when it comes to family and support, and so
I think I felt like I sort of got this,
like I was able to rely on people who could
bring meals and if I needed someone to hold the baby,
I could ask them. But I do worry about the
disparity here and what class has access to this type
(05:43):
of thing, because postpartum depression has so much to do
with the environment following birth. And I worry that if
it's like, oh, you pay for this, you pay for this,
you pay for this, it means that our standard of
basic care kind of goes, oh, well, that's all outsourced.
Like ideally hospitals would do a little bit more of this, maybe.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Yeah, as opposed to a kick in the pants and
some mesh. Ondis exactly right, I see what about you.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I don't know if it's a result of having a
baby who was in special care. So I was in
hospital for longer than a lot of new mums are.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
How long were you in hospital?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I was in for three weeks before I had my daughter,
and then about ten days after she was born.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
That is a long it's a long time.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
I knew the meal rotation of that hospital like the
back of my line.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
I got to have am all month's.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Worth of me, but I basically had to be dragged
out of that place. Like I felt very anxious when
I was away from the nurses and the heart rate
monitors and all of the things. And so I think
if something like this had been within my financial reach,
I absolutely would have taken it, because it felt like
whipplash to go home and to have almost no one
around because I'd been in hospital for so long. My
(06:51):
husband had to go back to work a couple of
weeks after I got home, and it did feel very
much like you're alone, and so I and I think
there's a certain level of guilt. Not everyone feels this,
but I felt very bad if I asked anyone to
help me with anything, even if you know, and I
think a lot of women feel that they don't want
to be a burden. They're like, why am I finding
(07:11):
this harder than the average person? So you don't want
to reach out. And it almost feels like if you
could pay for this, obviously not that amount of money,
because that's not achievable for most of us, but if
you could pay, it almost takes the guilt away from that,
like it's a service, it's transactional. You're helping me and
I'm getting something from that.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, I remember thinking that if I asked, there were
instances where I probably would have liked to help, but
I didn't want to look like I thought, your narrative
goes so funny, you go, they'll think I don't want
to spend time with my baby exactly like they'll think
they'll think I had this, that there would be judgment
towards me more than an imposition on them. But I
want to table one criticism that I heard from a
(07:51):
midwife about this kind of thing, and it's that with
too much help. I don't know if I agree with this,
but I was interviewing her about these kind of providers,
and she was saying, when you're in a situation where
you are overwhelmed with expertise, whether that be this is
how you swaddle, this is nappy, this is breastfeeding, it
can undermine the instincts of the parents a little bit.
(08:16):
And I know that a lot of people poo pooh
the idea of instincts. I think that a lot of
us actually just need to learn how to do things.
But she said, you shouldn't feel as though you need
a university degree before you leave the hospital with a baby. Like,
we've got to make sure that we're not telling parents
that this is so hard and so complicated that you
need to do twelve classes a day in order to cope.
(08:38):
Going and working it out is kind of part of
the experience.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah, and that's it.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
I feel like we are so overly prepared now, like
we do courses. People here who are pregnant, we kind
of are saying to them, well, you've got two jobs now,
because you've got to keep up with all of the
appointments and the lessons and all of the things. So
maybe it does get in the way of your instincts
and just well, I've just got to get through this
rough patch and then we'll be fine. An article about
the benefits of getting a sleep divorce caught my eye
(09:03):
this week, and I need everyone to know about it.
Writing for The Conversation, Monash University's psychology fellow, Alex Malaw
explored the many reasons otherwise perfectly happy couples might choose
to sleep separately and how it can actually lead to
a better night's sleep. She said, well, many people say
they prefer to sleep or sleep better next to their
partner when scientists measure sleep objectively, such as through an
(09:26):
electro in cephalogram, And yes, I did practice saying that
ten times before we hit record. When they use the
EGS to assess brain waves, the data actually showed poor
asleep quality when co sleeping. So some reasons obviously that
people might choose to be in separate beds is conflicting
sleep schedules. One person snores or has sleep apnea or insomnia,
(09:47):
sleep talking.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
The list goes on.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
But the other main catalyst for a sleep divorce can
be when kids come into the mix, and suddenly sleep
is the most precious but often hard to achieve commodity
in your life. And now I have something to confess.
I have been happily sleep divorced for five years, not
actually divorced, five years nearly, which is right around the
time I started getting pregnancy insomnia, and I'm just never
(10:12):
going back. So would either of you consider this? I'm
so interested.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I have questions for you. Please go way pregnancy and
so mania starts. Yes, I was in exactly the same position,
and I would go I was like, I can't be
up and down. I can't worry about you.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Yes, I had it to.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Separate myself often when the baby comes. If you're going
to go, all right, let's take shifts so that we're
both not losing sleep. Tell me about the next stage
where you're going. You know what I actually like having
my own space with a Now, how old your daughter for?
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah? Four five?
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You taught to me about that. Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
It was survival mode at the start, was it was
I needed to sleep, he needed to sleep, and so
we would take turns with the monitor. Someone would take
a shift, and then it was kind of like, look
at this bed with the nice linen and I've put
on it, and look how dark I can have the
room when you like to wake up with the sun
And look at how no one stole my quilt in
the middle of the night and it just snowballs to
(11:10):
the point where we both were sleeping so much better
by sleeping separately that we both went I think we
just have to do that all the time now.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And the most urgent question, I mean, how many bloody
bedrooms do you have?
Speaker 4 (11:24):
This is the thing. This is a big privilege to
be able to do this.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, so we
are very lucky to have three bedrooms. But this is
why we can only have one child. There's no more
bedrooms A well, I'm not willing to give mine up.
I need to keep it so those kids would be sharing.
But it's just worked out so much better. And I
have to say, like, I love my husband, but I
love him a lot more when I can't hear his
(11:47):
snoring or experience the wwe like body slams that he
manages to do every time he turns over.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
So this is definitely a good solution. If you're experiencing that. Okay,
I went deep on this after you mentioned it. I
was really curious about when the double beded custom came about,
because when you watch old movies and TV shows, the
married couples do go to sleep into single beds. So
it turns out that it's very recently that we decided
(12:16):
that couples have to sleep in the same bed, and
we're talking the sixties. Before then, it was actually seen
as healthier and more modern for a married couple or
a partnered couple to sleep in separate beds. And I
love this detail, which is that Victorian doctors said that
the weaker sleeper would draining all the vitality from the
stronger person.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
And so it's a very recent thing, and it kind
of reminds me. I find it a bit confronting. I
won't lie when you told me about it. There is
a kind of instinctive idea of like, is there something
wrong with their relationship because we are it's so ingrained
in us that married couples sleep in the same bed.
But then I got thinking about it, and I remember
that Esther Peirell's big thing is that we keep expecting
(13:02):
one person to be everything, to fulfill all functions, including
to be sleep compatible, and this is just taking a
little bit of the pressure off. Now that said, I
do not have an extra bedroom for people in my situation.
I would recommend mouth tape and maybe everyone better.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
We have a like a day bed in Luna's room,
so it's like if you sleep separately, yeap, you go
and you sleep and it's tiny, like you roll off
and break an arm. But we did that for the
first six months. Luke has slept in the nursery on
the day bed and Luna and I were in the
big room with the big bed. But it was interesting
the moment we decided to come back and I was like,
(13:40):
I don't get to sprawl, I don't get a blanket
like this is so.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Did you consider ever keeping.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
You see, other bed was more comfortable. I have time
for it. And then I was having a think about
what the stigma.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Is, right, and there is a stigma.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
There is stigma, and it's to do with intimacy. And
I also think that it's a suggestion that it will
absolutely kill your sex life, right, because come on, you've
got to sleep the same bed.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Absolutely that is the number one question I get asked,
we won't ask you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
What's funny about that, right, is that it's like how
many people are rolling over at two am and being like,
now that I can feel you there, we should have
spontaneous two am sex and that keeps our relationship strong. Like, no,
you wake up at two am, you hit the other
person in the face. I do it all the time.
To Lukaut exactly, he mumbles, sleep talk, we fight, and
then in the morning we're shitty at each other, Like
(14:31):
any sort of intimacy is not happening.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
No, I think you are much more likely to want
to be intimate with your partner if you don't want
to kill them all.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
And some of the studies she cited in this piece
spoke about how clients reported that sleeping alone can alleviate
some of the anxiety they have around sleep because if
they're the person who's disturbing the other person, if they're
the snorer, then they're having less quality sleep because they're
worried about waking the other person. So they've actually found
that people sleeping separately means that there's not that stress
(15:03):
as they're going to sleep themselves.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I also find that when I've gone through periods of insomnia,
having someone beside you who's asleep is really distressing. Yeah,
it's like it's real because you go wish, Oh, you're furious,
You're absolutely angry. And it also means I've a partner
who goes to better a lot earlier than me, and
that's the time I'm in our house, so I have
to go to bed, and if I fall into the
habit of then scrolling on my phone for the two
(15:26):
hours where he's asleep and I'm not ready to go
to sleep yet, terrible for your brain. So it's like
I've had to start to do like the Kindle or whatever.
You can't you can't read a print book, can you pack?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
This also reminded me of I used to live in Japan,
and when you travel around Japan you go to traditional inns,
they often have a tatarmi matte arrangement where whole families
will sleep in one room on tatarmi. So it just
was a reminder that the thing that we think is
the default is not the default for a lot of
(16:00):
people around the world and through human history.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Is it a really big space where the family will sleep.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
Not especially big. But it feels like it's a very
different way of sleeping because instead of being given this
prescribed rectangle to sleep on, there's a sense of like
you've got more latitude to move around because you're all
just sleeping however you like and in whatever shape you
like in this room. So cool. I want to talk
(16:30):
about a particular type of person who I think we
all know, who we may even have in our lives.
Right now, let me back up and say why I
started thinking about this. A Shanty, the singer A Shanty,
and the rapper Nelly recently had a baby together, which
is lovely and Nellie seems very happy about it. But
(16:51):
in a recent interview, a joint interview, he was sitting
beside a Shanty and he said to her baby, I'll
give you the world, but I just ain't changing no diaper,
and as Shanty responded, the only way women for millennia
have responded to such a statement, which was with an eyeroll.
A similar display of this was evident in an interview
that Nick Cannon did recently, the singer who you may know,
(17:14):
has twelve children, and the interview. For some reason, this
interview was taking place on pilates mats, but I I
don't know why that is. But the interviewer asked Nick
to run through his twelve children's names, and let's just
listen to what happened next. What are their names? You want?
Speaker 2 (17:30):
You want all twelve twelve names?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
This is where I usually get in trouble.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Why because you don't know all of that. I know
all of them.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
But like our label last we see, let's keep me,
keep me honest.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
There's rock Roll, Golden, Powerful, rise Onyx, Legendary, Zion, zillion Zin.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
And just see this as where I, uh, you're missing too,
I'm missing two. Yeah, it's a little awful. That's where
I So look, these two men seem like nice people,
but they are what I would call hopeless dads. And
(18:15):
these are dads. They're not deeply problematic in any way,
but they're just kind of hopeless when it to the
task of raising children. So, now that I've named this
phenomenon and described this type of person, I suspect you're
going to have a lot of examples for me. And
the newsletter writer Melinda Wehnemoya, who has a great parent
in newsletter, had one recently. She asked, do dads know
(18:36):
how to RSVP. She wrote, I'd love to know what
goes through dad's minds when they receive kid party invitations.
I don't mean this in a snarky way. I am
truly curious and want to understand. Do they think not
my department or eh, my partner must be on this
invite and they'll take care of it. So I can
really relate to that. I just was planning a kid's
birthday party, and as a little social experiment, I did
(19:00):
send half the invitations to the dads on the parent
contact list and half the invitations to the mums.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And what did you find.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Well, it was a little predictable. The women responded and
the men did not. So I just started sending the
men extremely passive, aggressive, polite messages saying, Hey, any chance
that you know whether you can make it to this
kid's birthday party. Some of them just never responded to
me and then showed up at the party. So at
(19:31):
this point I need to make clear that this is
obviously not all men. I'm not doing that eye rolling
at all men comedy routine that's almost become a cliche
at this point. But the question I want to ask
you both is do we deal with the hopeless dads
just by kind of shrugging our shoulders and figuring that's
how men are. Or are these hopeless dads actually creating
(19:54):
very real domestic labor imbalances and kind of getting away
with it under the guys of being hopeless.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
They are, And part of it is weaponized in competence
in terms of it just gets too hard to have
them do the task. So you know, women step in
and that leads to serious inequality and I think resentment
within a relationship. But there was such a fantastic point
in this newsletter that I think highlighted why some dad's
(20:23):
about a rsvping, and it's that if you have never
organized a kid's birthday party, you don't understand how important
rsvping is. And so the reality is that mostly it's
mother's doing it. Having done it, they're going, I should
let them know asap so that they can book it,
whereas dads are going, what does it matter if I
show up or I don't.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
And the reason why it matters is because if you
do not have enough goodie bags, yeah, all hell will break.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Loose, exactly right, and I'll be your kid crying. And
women know that not because it is innate to women,
but because it has been so practiced.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
And they don't teach us that the POSTPARTU and retreat
the importance of having enough goodie bags.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
We just have to learn that we learn. And I
think that's an important mantra, right because even cooking, I
didn't cook before and I still can't cook. But guess what,
there has to be something on a plate, right, So
you set up systems, you set up processes, you do
trial and error, you work it out. And the idea
that you've got to let dads fail a bit and
(21:24):
work it out and make mistakes, I think is just
a really important one. Like if it's that they don't
RSVP and then they show up, and.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Are you able to do that and step back? And
I also a related question to this is I think
correct me if I'm wrong. You have used the fair
Play playing cards? Can you explain what those are and
what your experience was with them? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
The fair Play cards. I just so recommend them to
everyone and they have every have you heard of them? Stacy?
Speaker 4 (21:49):
Yes? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
So it has everything that happens in a household, from
like who sorts out the house internet to who does
dental kids, dental to who does clothes, all that kind
of stuff, and we sorted it out and most of
the lunar stuff was on me. And I laugh with
friends that it's like there's never a discussion that clothes
(22:12):
are on you, but when you go away, packing is
on you. Yet somehow it is, and you know, Luca
does take it. Turns out there are a few things
he's doing, like crims or whatever, which I would say, yes,
sometimes I'm quite happy with that. I will also say
this is still a massive issue, and I think those
(22:33):
examples highlight that. But I reckon that we're watching a
shift in real time. Like I was thinking about the
nineties and your Homo Simpson and your Ray Romano, and
like the stereotypical bumbling fool dad who didn't know how
to do anything and just set a funny joke every
now and then, you're going to work right in front
of me, or I can keep an eye on you.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
You got that?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Any who do you think you're dealing with?
Speaker 4 (23:00):
You?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I may seem stupid, but that's just to get your
mother to not ask me to do stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
And then I was looking into this research that said
that in the nineteen eighties, forty three percent of fathers
said they'd never changed a nappy. Is this in the US,
forty three percent of fathers had never changed Now that
number has dropped to just three persons. That's enormous. And
so even like from in an Australian context, you've got
(23:29):
How Other Dad's Dad, like Hamish Blake's podcast, you've got
two doting dads with Maddie j dadding, and fatherhood is
becoming a verb in a way that motherhood.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
Okay, it has been, but I need to confess something. Yeah,
I get annoyed at the dad's dadding as well. Tell me,
tell me it's just like it? Am I just setting
that up to fail because I'm annoyed at the hopeless dads.
And then when the dads start talking about dadding, I'm
sort of annoyed at them too.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I see, I really like it. I really welcome it.
And I listened to a series of How Other Dad's
Dad when I was pregnant and it actually gave me
so many tips and insights into parenting from fathers. And
I think that making those communities, like we're talking about
the postpartum retreats, right, you then go into a mother's group,
(24:15):
and there is all this shared knowledge and wisdom that
goes between women. And in defense of some of those fathers,
they have no equivalent. There's no kind of fathers all
sitting down and working out how they're going.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
To do this.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I think there is some isolations.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
I lost that idea for them. So here's how you
replied to what's that message is at a party exactly.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
But there are some things that they have just probably
never done in their entire life, particularly when it's a
father with the daughter. Like realize that my husband has
never tied a hair elastic in his entire life because
why would he.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
So that was a steep linker that he needed to
go on and.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Practice on my hair, So he wasn't doing it on
a moving target to know how to do that. And
I think there are some things like that that yeah,
will have just never come across their desk. But there
are other things like rsvping tool party that aren't really.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Forgivable and they should know.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And it is good to see that the pendulums swinging
back the other way.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
I also think that when it comes to talking about
hopeless dads, what we're really saying is it okay to
let them. Like back to that idea. So, for instance,
a dad I know, who shall remain nameless, is not
great at matching the kid's clothes to the weather.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
A hypothetical is that dad good at matching his own
clothes to the weather, because I know a lot of
men who are not, for example, my own father would
be in short.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
A great point. It's a really great point. And the
question becomes do I let them? Meaning do I let
the children go out without jumpers on and let this
hypothetical father allow that to happen, or do I intervene
and say this is going to lead to misery and
(26:06):
can we not just put the jumper on before we
leave the house? And that can set the heart of
a lot of these questions because it's like, do I
just let them? Do I just let them go?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
I'm team let them because you know what'll happen. They'll
get to the park or they'll get outside and they'll
start change and they'll say, I'm very cold, and then
probably you'll get a call saying, yes, can you clean jumper?
Speaker 3 (26:29):
But you know what the other thing is too, which
is really annoying. Sometimes it works out for them, and
that's even more irritating, because you'll fret about something like
that about your child going out without their jumper, and
then they'll come back incident free. Nothing's been said, and
so really the dads are just working smarter, not harder,
and worrying less about things.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Things and getting away with it. So maybe we need
to take a leaf out of their bore.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Good Night to the bedtime story. Lauren Ironmonger wrote for
the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend that the number of
parents reading aloud to their children is at an all
time low. This research comes from HarperCollins UK, which found
that less than half of parents of kids under thirteen
said reading aloud to children was fun for me. And
(27:14):
can I just say on this, I think it's a
very different question saying do you read to your kids?
Do you think it's one for me?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Those two things are not the same.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I think reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fifteenth time,
I wouldn't describe it as fun. I'd describe it as something,
but fun would not be in Australian data found that
many parents can't fit in daily reading with their kids,
and just quickly this article goes into why it's even important. First,
it's massive for literacy skills, but it also strengthens the
(27:42):
parent child bond. It sends a message to your child that,
at the end of the day, they are the most
important thing. Amelia. Do you think culturally we started to
see reading as something that a child does at preschool
or school, and therefore it doesn't have to be done
at home. We've outsourced it.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I think that's such a good question, and I think
very sadly, the answer is pretty clearly yes. And it
dawned on me recently that I am very much part
of the problem here. I take my kids to swimming
practice on a Sunday and I sit there and I
doom scoll on my phone and feel my anxiety spiral
(28:23):
and instead I should be reading a book. So last
week I took along Stephen King's Misery, which I've never read.
I was like, this, Stephen King, it's.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Good author, He's actually writing something.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
And then I realized I was role modeling for my children,
who I'm always sort of flinging books at and telling
them to read that reading can be fun.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
That's so true. And did you was it a paper copy,
like a yeah, paperback.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
With a really like spooky looking cover that my kids
were obsessed with, because, by the way, physical books are
kind of intriguing, you remember that idea, like, yeah, a
cover of a book is meant to entice you into it.
And so when I was reading this book, they're like, misery,
what's that book about? And it was just it occasioned
a great conversation that said, I, this is a work
in progress for me too. I am exhausted at the
(29:12):
end of the day and sometimes it is easier for
me to throw on an audiobook on the bluetooth speaker
and then I can go and stack the dish washer
while they're falling asleep. And I haven't felt too guilty
about that, because literacy experts do say that listening to
an audiobook can build all sorts of really important literacy skills,
such as comprehension and vocabulary, and they're often read by
(29:34):
fantastic actors, and so they're getting this really entertaining story
read to them probably better. It's better read by Emma
Thompson than it is by me, for instance, because we
were reading Matilda on audiobook. So yeah, I haven't felt
too guilty about that. But that was until I read
this article, and it made that really important point that
you reference Jesse, that you're not just reading to them
(29:56):
to teach them how to read. You're reading to them
to show them that actually the dishwasher is less important
than us spending some time together. And you know, okay,
I'm just adding that to another list of things I'm.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
But that's the thing as well, is that usually now
there's in a lot of households, it's two working parents.
You're getting home later sometimes. I mean I get home
at six thirty seven o'clock from work to their try
an organize dinner, eat together, which we're also doing wrong
that we're never eating together now, and get your kids
to sleep. Something has to give, and so I think
we are probably guilty of just replacing that, as you say,
(30:32):
with I always use.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Sleep stories, audiobooks.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
We've got like the Yoto player with the little cards
that my daughter can listen to. And so yeah, we're
just kind of unwittingly putting our kids at a disadvantage
by not sitting down and doing reading with them in
the interest of cutting a bit of time.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I wonder if the story here is more about adults
aren't reading. Because this research came out as well, that
the book industry broadly adults aren't going and buying books.
That's absolutely tanked. And as you say, Amelia, if we're
not modeling it, and therefore it does seem like a
(31:08):
biggest step. I always find this with reading, that there's
a big block if you haven't done it for a while,
and you can feel like it's harder, and then it's
a muscle, like reading is genuinely a muscle that gets weak.
And so I was reading about this because it's something
I really really worry about. Us during this event with
this academic whose name is Sophie g And she was
(31:29):
saying that not reading is worse for you than vaping,
that for the brain, like it is so important for
everything from memory to empathy to just all these cognitive
skills and the ability especially to read deeply. That's not
innate and we have not evolved to read. Every single
(31:50):
generation has to learn how to read. And in order
to learn how to read, it takes like years of
deep focus. Reading is one of you cannot do it
while you're doing anything else.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
No, and some people never get that. Travis Kelsey recently
came out and you can't really read.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
So That's what I was reading about. Even the Naplan
results came out recently and they said that Ozzie kids
have sunk to an all time low in terms of
reading and writing skills, and low literacy is an issue
among a lot of adults. And low literacy I found
this interesting. It was saying that actually being able to go,
I know what the words on the page mean is
(32:26):
one thing, but the step that seems to be missing
is then understanding what those words mean, and also the ability.
Do you see the article in the Atlantic recently about
college students who had never read a book. It was
so the ability to sit down and read a book
beginning to end is also a skill that you can lose,
and so deep reading is being able to sit with
something for a long time, follow it, like go to
(32:48):
work the next day, kind of remember where you were,
and even though it feels so hard, it's like, you know,
we've spoken about pikiitas and stuff on this show, and
you know how they always say, like on the plate,
they're not going to eat the broccoli, but you've got
to have broccoli on the plate. Yeah, yeah, you've got
It's got to be an option. It's like having the
books in the house. See before I speaking about kindle, right,
(33:09):
because I've gone to that because I'm trying to at
night not have a lamp or anything on. But now
I think you should.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Get a sleep divorced, then you don't have to worry
because lights on everywhere where.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Luna might be coloring in or something, and I don't
want her to see me constantly on my phone, so
I'll go and read. But it looks like I'm on
an iPad or a screen or a device, and I
think it's more important she sees me term page, and.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
It's also less interesting for her. She doesn't understand why
you're engaged with this kindle as opposed to Stephen King's misery.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, she even goes into my room sometimes and when
I've got books next to my bed, like she loves
to flick through them and like look at the pages.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Yeah, my daughter often now pretend she's the librarian now
that they're doing that in school of and then I
have to go and borrow books from her. And it
is just such a yeah, like it's a tangible thing.
It's not the same as having it on a device.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
This is it. This is a humble brag, but Luna
was going through our bookcase in our study recently and
got a book down and it was one of my books,
and she went to the back and another picture of
me and she went mummy to explain that is and
I mum's an English teacher, so like this is a
(34:17):
special interest area. But like I grew up and there
was always a book and the way that you would
just go on and they're.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
So intriguing when you're a kid.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
As well, you'd always find a naughty one, yeah, and
you'd go, I will be reading that privately. Great, absolutely great,
you're putting words together. That's wonderful. Or like names that
I would see or covers.
Speaker 4 (34:37):
I still remember when my parents love books and reading
and they have bookshelves all around the house and there
was a Joan Diddian book called The White Album. I
just had a completely white cover, and this blew my mind.
How can you have a cover that has nothing on it?
Speaker 2 (34:53):
It's so true the physicality of books. And apparently as well,
they're finding that the print book is a totally different
experience to read it.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
It's just the object of the print book is so special,
and in a world where we have so few objects
that are special because even our photos are on our
phone and we don't have DVDs anymore or videos. I
think that's a portal into reading, yes, is to give
kids the opportunity to be mystified by a book with
(35:20):
a white cover and the smell.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
The smell of a book, Yeah, I love the producer
Ruth was telling us that the reason we love the
smell of old books so much is because they smell
as the ink and the paper and everything break down,
it smells like vanilla, which is such a homely warm like.
I'm thinking, there are a few things to me more
comforting than that smell. And you can get like fragrances
or candles or whatever in your house to make it
(35:44):
smell like that, which I'm like, I just want to
fill my whole house with that smell of like an old,
old book.
Speaker 4 (35:49):
And I also want to know that producer Ruth is
the best smelling person at Mum.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
And Men, which is talking about I wonder if it's
also that we're a bit more sensitive about what we're
reading now and what we're reading to our children now.
The other week, my daughter brings home a library book
every week from pre K and she loves it. It's
like a big event to bring it home in the bag,
which is great. But this week she brought home The
Ugly Duckling and I found myself as I was reading
(36:14):
it to her, feeling weird about even using the word ugly.
And I think that's something that's coming up a lot
now with books like even Roll Dahl's books a couple
of years ago were rewritten to remove the words ugly
and fat. And so I think maybe we're not reading
as many of the stories that we loved as kids,
worried that they'll be inappropriate, and so we're not enjoying it,
therefore we're.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Doing it true. I have two examples of that from recently.
We have a copy of Role Dal's Revolting Rhymes, which
I remember loving. It's actually my copy, and I was
reading it one day to the kids and I just
suddenly my eyes lit upon the next word, and the
next word was slut. Oh that's a really hard word
(36:54):
to explain meaning to kids, I find. And then the
second example was had a really nice time reading the
line the Witch and the Wardrobe with one of my kids,
But gosh, that's a weird book, is it. There's a
lot going on in there. It's essentially a Christian allegory,
which is fine. I don't mean to say that's weird,
(37:15):
but it does raise a lot of questions about what
the book is at actually trying to say, and what
the wardrobe is a metaphor for. And you just find
yourself going down some garden paths that maybe you didn't
expect that you'd be going down at bedtime.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, there are some. My mum brings a lot of
classics over. Did you ever read there's a Hippopotamus on
my roof edding cake? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so we're big.
We read that fifty Well, I'm sorry, but that there's
one that's like Mummy's on a diet. She has salad
cheese and I read that every day and I'm like.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
This is this is a bit weird diet.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
But those ones, right are brilliant. They're nonsensical, they're wonderful.
I watch Luna just look at the roof and I'm like,
just thinks that the hippotamus in there, and I made it.
But Mum always says that a lot of the newer
ones are quite sanitized, and they're trying out there trying
to hit you over the.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
Head girls doing stem.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yes, exactly right, And it's like school has done this
a little bit too. They made reading into hard work
in terms of reading for knowledge or like reading for
moral like lesson instead of just reading for pleasure. And like,
I see the pleasure that Luna gets from Hippopotamus, and
(38:33):
I'm like, let's just let's learn our colors later, and
let's just go to hippopotamus eating kay. On the ugly
darkling thing, when I was a kid, I asked my
nan if I was pretty. She lived with us and
I was like five or six, and I said, Nan,
am I pretty? And she said, you're an ugly darkling? Oh?
She died before I grew up, And so I still wonder.
I'm like, did I ever turn into the one? Nan?
Speaker 4 (38:53):
You're you're a Swan.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
It's time for our recommendations of the week. So Jesse,
do you want to go first?
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (39:02):
On the topic of books, I remembered. Don't you find
that it's really hard to buy gifts for like grandparents,
and like Mother's Day comes around and you're like, oh,
it's my mom and speaking of hopeless dads, it's their mom.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
Whatever, give me a hand cream? Can you you can't know.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
And what am I like? I'm not going to get
her like an ice blouse. She's going to be like,
this is disgusting.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
I always used to get my nana every Christmas a
jar of oil of olay, and that smell still takes
me back talking I won't want that.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
She won't want that. So what I got was I
went on Etsy and there are heaps of examples of this,
but I went on Etsy and found this company that
makes personalized children's books. So this one is about going
to Nana's house. And you can say, like when I
go to Nana's house, there's a blah, and like you
can put in all the little detail and they've even
(39:56):
got like put in three words to describe your nana.
And I'm like, crazy, weird, annoying, just to troll me,
But it's all about a day at nana's house. So
it's it's and I made one for me and I
made one for my mum and they're just the cutest,
most personalized. It has their names, it has whatever they
call their grandmother on the front, and they're just so sweet.
(40:19):
So this was on Etsy from Lucy and Co. We
have a link in our show notes, but there are
heaps and heaps online and they are just a lovely,
thoughtful little gift.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
My recommendation is something that I have not used in
quite a few years, but which I still like to
gift to new parents, and it is a fabulous product
that there's a little bit of a story behind. So
I used to do a show on MAM and Mia
many years ago with Mia called tell Me It's going
to be Okay. It was a show which we conceived
(40:48):
of and started doing after Donald Trump was elected, and
I think the title kind of summarizes where I had
spaces that it literally came to a screeching halt about
two years in when we realized that we could no
longer tell each other it was going to be okay.
So and it's never come back? Has it come back?
(41:10):
But it was a fun experience and we had a
small but devoted cadre of listeners and one of them
was a lovely lady who lived in Neutral Bay in Sydney,
and she sent me an invention of hers called the
Baby Oragami Rap. Now this saved my life when I
(41:32):
had my first baby, because you know how the world
is divided into people who are good at oragami and
people who aren't. Yeah, I'm one of the people who's
not me or anything.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I think it takes like patience and grace, think.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
Either of those things exactly. So this is called the
baby Oragami Rap because if you've never mastered swaddling, it
makes it literally impossible not to correctly swattle the baby.
So I think Nick Cannon could do with one of these,
and I think that Nelly could do with yown. And
I really got a lot of use out of it. Basically,
(42:09):
it's numbered. It's a sort of a step by step
numbered way to swaddle your baby, and it's.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Super tight, like it does.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Everything's tight, and it's made of beautiful one hundred percent cotton.
It's really easy wash and I just love gifting them
to people because swaddling is just so hard, so hard.
I just never got it. I never got it. So
it's called the baby o Agami Rap and it is
from an Australian company and a friend of the pod.
(42:38):
So thanks for saving my life.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
How about you, Stacy? What's your reco Okay?
Speaker 3 (42:42):
So I am rubbish at imaginative play. I'm just not good.
But the one toy I bought for my daughter. I
bought it nearly three years ago now, and we still
play with these every single week, usually multiple times a week.
And they're those colored magnetic tiles. So I haven't seen these, okay,
So they're just different colors. You can get like esthetically
(43:02):
pleasing pastel ones. You can get the bright primary colors,
whatever you want. They come in different packs. You might
get like eighty pieces or one hundred pieces, and they're
just magnetic squares and triangles and they all kind of
you'll get a guide of different things. You can build
with them, or your kid can just stack them up
in a row like whatever stage.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Kind of like Lego, but it doesn't exactly.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
They are flat easy to clean up because like Lego,
they're not like.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Little bits, so it all sticks together. So they're very handy.
We take them a lot to cafes or pubs or
anything because there's no mess, like if you worried about
them drawing on a table at a cafe.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Even when you don't.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Take your kids to the point, yes, I actually find
I get quite territorial, and I like move my creation
away from my daughter, like, don't mess with my color
pattern that I've made. But you can get like you
can get cheap versions of them at kmart. The ones
I got were on Amazon. I got them from Steam
Studios is one set, and then we got another set
from an Aussie startup called Kinetics with an X on
(43:59):
the end, and they're just so great.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
You can even.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Create puzzles for your kids, trace around the outside and
then remove the magnets, stick it up on the fridge
and then they have to fit in the shapes to
the pattern you've given them, and it takes some ages,
really good distraction.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
What age would you say you could start? So Luna's
just two?
Speaker 4 (44:19):
Yeh?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Is this something she could play?
Speaker 3 (44:20):
I bought them for her second birthday and she absolutely
loves them.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Still they can't do them every week. I'm going to
hijack the recommendation and say I wholeheartedly agree. And recently
I picked up the sort of like original brand of
the Magnetic Squares has now got a travel tin, which
is brilliant because they are sort of big, like you
wouldn't want to pack them in a suitcase. But now
with this travel tin with the miniature ones, they're so
(44:47):
cute and you can now travel with them too.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I knew I was losing the plot a bit this
morning when I was thinking about my recommendation, and Luna
this morning heard the garbage truck man and we went
outside and saw that they all waved at her. And
I was like, I should recommend garbage truck and came aside,
Luna's not well, like she's had a running nose and stuff.
And I found on YouTube garbage truck man. Oh, and
(45:13):
it's just people emptying bins right, and I had it
up on YouTube and it was so meditative. I was
for me. I was like, I'm not bored, I'm actually
really it was so satisfying and I was like, what
a great job to just go and clean stuff up
every day, engage with the community. I was like, this
is great. We should just be watching and I could truck.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Your chip cancer. Instinctively drawn to like some of the
best people in our community, people who pick up the rubbish,
the postman, the postman, firefighters, paleontologists. I don't know what's up.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
They know where it's at. They know the actual hierarchy
of society.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
I explained to my daughter that those are jobs like
about a yoga because I think I realized because my
husband and I both writers, that She just thinks like
work is keyboard and that's a job you could go.
You don't have to be like us, You can do that.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
That is all we have time for on parenting out
loud until next time. Bye,
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