September 19, 2025 • 42 mins
Welcome back to Parenting Out Loud where we've got a brand new episode to start your weekend off right.
On the show this week:
- The rise of the stealth mum. From Margot Robbie's press tour to your work colleague who's never mentioned having kids, we're exploring why hiding motherhood has become the new cultural currency.
- Plus, praising your child is a fraught business. Do you compliment their efforts, their appearance, their creations? Perhaps millennial parents are overthinking things... again. We discuss.
- And, there's a tiny internet feud happening on Facebook that we need to talk about.
Plus, our recommendations:
📺 Stacey wants you to watch Unknown Number: The High School Catfish on Netflix
🗞️ Amelia recommends getting back into reading an oldschool newspaper.
🍽️ And Monz has got a viral two ingredient recipe she needs you to try. Just some beef bolar blade (a cut of beef), some char siu sauce. Turn on the slow cooker and chuck it all in there-the entire jar and everything. Put the lid on, turn it on low for 8-10 hours and you've got a succulent Chinese meal.
Support independent women's media
What To Listen To Next:
- Don't miss an episode of Parenting Out Loud
- Unpacking The KPop Demon Hunters Obsession & A Tracking Tool Controversy
- The 'Normal' We Need To Interrogate & The Father's Day Rethink
- The Third Kid Dessert Analogy & FFS, Stop With The Texts
- Sleep Divorce, 'Hopeless' Dads & Goodnight To The Bedtime Story
- Dr Becky's DFK Theory & The Great Trampoline Debate
- MMOL: A Breast Pump, An Airport Lounge & The Detail You Probably Missed
- MMOL: Every Thought We Had After Watching Netflix's 'Unknown Number'
- Connect your subscription to Apple Podcasts
What to read:
- MADELEINE WEST: 'I speak to kids in schools every week. There's one thing they all keep from their parents.'
- Worried about what your kids see online? These 5 tips make digital parenting easier.
- ‘I thought I was protecting my daughter online. This was the day I was proven wrong.'
- Margot Robbie has welcomed her first baby with husband Tom Ackerley.
- Netflix's Catfish doco shocked the world. Here's where the Licari family are now.
- 'How could someone do that?': Why everyone's talking about Netflix's new doco, The
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the
traditional owners of the land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Parenting out Loud, the podcast for parents who
don't always listen to parenting podcasts. Here we are again,
another week of parenting culture, some hot takes, and this
time we're in our own podcast feed, which is nice.
So we let go of the mother ship of Mamma
Mia out Loud. We're off the teat.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
We now must learn to walk.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We got a lot of avocado. Yeah, and it.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Helps you to learn to walk.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Food.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Yeah. I'm Monic Bowley, I'm Amelia Lasto, and I am
Stacy Kicks Stacy. Before we begin, I'm just sensing a
vibe from you this week that you're very stressed out.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Is that correct? Yes, I'm very stressed this week. I've
had a bit of a week. I have cried multiple
times this week, just to make the listeners feel seen
if you've done the same, which culminated in me crying
because I couldn't do a Copenhagen plank.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Sorry, Jim, what is a Copenhagen plank? I thought Copenhagen
was just about like being stylish.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yes, so nice.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It was ice cream.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, it was like a torture device. I don't know why.
I had to have one leg suspended in the air
in a sideways plank and I couldn't do it, and
the trainer came to help me. I got very upset
and I said, it's not about the Copenhagen plank.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
It's never about the Copenhagen should be over the edge.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But I'm very happy to be with you guys, very
happy to be doing this. It's the highlight of my week.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Oh, Stacy, let's just ignore you crying in the corner.
Grab a tissue. This is what's coming up on today's show.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
The girl Boss is dead and them influencer is out,
and there's a new status symbol in pretending you just
don't have kids at all.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
I want to talk about how the raw book around
praise has changed, and whether compliments and how we compliment
people is just yet another topic around which millennials are overthinking.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I saw a tiny feud on Facebook and it's changed
the way I think about reading with my kids, and
I want to bring it to your attention.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Oh, I love a tiny few. There's a Reddit board
called niche scandals, and it's just all about like people
on crafting boards, like arguing with each other, and it's
the best to have a low stakes feud.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That sounds duey.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
This starts like a niche scandal, But then what I
discovered is it's actually a bigger thing.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's a bigger thing. I can't wait.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
But first, in case you missed it, I have to
talk to you about Roadblocks and why it's in the
news this week.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
What is a roadblock? And why am I buying my
friend's kids Roebucks gift cards every Christmas? And why am
I talking about it this week?
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Yeah? So Roadblocks is an online gaming platform and the
reason it's in the news this week it's been around
since two thousand and six, is because as we're all
preparing for the government's Social Media band to come into effect,
a loophole has been discovered. And the loophole is Roadbox.
Because while Roadblocks is ostensibly a place where you go
(03:15):
to play games online, it's actually a social media site
in disguise, and so it's not subject to this new
Under SIXTEENES ban, but a lot of people are saying
it should be. So Roadblocks has tried to preemp this
by saying, hey, here's this new suite of safety features
we have. But a lot of parents and experts say
(03:36):
this is not going far enough. That Roadblocks is actually
really dangerous for kids, and we have to think more
systematically about how to make it safer.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Roadblocks is cooked. Let's just put this on the table.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It is. But I say this was like the sims like,
is this not just like building little villag Yes.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
I think it started out like that, Stacy.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I think ten years ago when it came out, people
touted it as this great place for entrepreneurship and it
teaches kids how to code, because essentially what it is
is it's a platform where you can go on and
build a game and then people come and play your games.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
But what'spened is that now.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Because of the popularity of it, and it's something like
sixty eight million uses a day, forty million of them
are under the age of thirteen, it's just become this
kind of free fall and now it's a place that's
full of grooming, inappropriate content, bullying, racism, anti semitism. It's
banned in Qatar and Turkey. It's being sued by Louisiana.
(04:36):
But most importantly, this game uses addiction based mechanics for kids.
It addicts kids, it hooks them. It is a very
bad place.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
So I've been hearing about it a lot from my
seven year old and I sort of thought, oh, it
seems gentle. Like one of the most popular games on
there is a game where you essentially grow a garden,
and I thought, well, that sounds nice. It sort of
sounds like Beatrix Potter, how lovely, and it's free. Great,
So I go online to play it with him, and
(05:06):
very shortly he's in a game where he's playing an
ice a as in The Masked People, who scoop people
up off the streets in the US and take them
to immigration prison. And I suddenly realized that because it's
open source, you start with the garden game, you end
up playing an ice agent with a machine gun. Mon's
(05:27):
you have done some research around there? Since I'm curious
to know the answer. Has it always been like this,
like why do we think it's the acceptable face of gaming?
Like what happened?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I think it's victim of inshitification. Now, this is a term.
I don't know if you've heard of it. It's basically
for when things turn to shit. So it's the process
where online platforms start out really good and then they
deteriorate over time because they become sort of just about
shareholders at everyone's expense. So an example like being yes
(05:59):
or you know, when Instagram first started, it was just
your friends in the news feed, and now it's people
you don't know and a lot of ads. It's sort
of the same thing with Twitter. It's really gone down
the toilet. So I feel like.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Perhaps Roadblocks is victim of intititification.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
And that's why Australia's e Safety Commissioner has flagged Roadblocks
and has said that in addition to the Under sixteen
social media Band, we've got to talk about how to
protect kids on roadblocks and look to be fair to Roadblocks.
I should mention what they came out with this week.
They said that under sixteen's accounts will now be private
by default and they will be unable to chat with adults.
(06:36):
And the reason why they had to put that in
is because there was grooming happening on roadblocks. There have
been many people arrested. Two dozen is the number. Actually,
two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicion of abusing
or abducting victims that they groomed on roadblocks, So this
is very much a live issue. They reckon.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
The big problem with roadblocks is the chat feature.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
This is what a lot of people say, is that's
how predators come in. They chat with your kids, they
can groom your kids. But I don't quite believe it.
I think eliminating the chat function does not solve any
of the problems, because there's other ways that your kids
can see things. People can write things on buildings, people
can have a speech bubble coming out of them. I
know there's probably people listening whose kids play this. There
(07:17):
are other games that kids can play where they are
building things, learning things. I can't see any advantage for
kids being on.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Right, But I don't think it's as easy as that.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Mon's like speaking as someone who's having to negotiate this
right now. If I disconnect from roadblocks and I ban
it completely, the children will always find something else to play,
and keeping the line of communication open, I think is
the only solution rather than saying we're just not going
to play it all.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
The experts say there is no safe way for kids
to use this, and if they are not old enough
to see porn. They are not old enough to play
this game. I know you're rolling your eyes, but I
follow this quite daggy Instagram account called the family it Guy.
This guy's a cybersecurity expert and a dad, and he
registered on Roadblocks as an eight year old and he
(08:06):
joined a game. Within minutes, he joined a game called
puss Blick Bathroom Simulator, which was a simulator where you
can only imagine what was going on in there, stuff
that eight year olds should not be seeing. So I
don't think Roadblocks is going far enough with parental controls.
I think that also this e Safety Commissioner is not
(08:27):
going far enough with this fine. So the Australian government
is saying we're going to find Roadblocks forty five million
dollars for non compliance. But guys, this is a ninety
five billion dollar company. Forty five million to them, that's
like you walking down the street with one hundred thousand
dollars in your pocket and shelling out fifty bucks. It's nothing.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've seen stories. There was a case in Kansas where
an eight year old girl was sending inappropriate images to
a stranger that was sending her roebucks send her thousands
of Roebucks.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Yes, because the other element that we haven't even really
talked about here is the fact that while these games
start out as free very quickly, as I discovered when
I played, you were prompted to buy things in order
to level up to a more advanced stage of various games,
and those numbers add up really quickly.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, but you're doing the right thing by playing the games, Like,
I don't want everyone, especially people whose children are already
on this game, to feel like right, the solution is
that we need to just snatch the iPad off them
and they're not allowed on it anymore. Like we run
a story on the site this week written by Madeline West,
you know Neighbors actress Madeline West, like she's an icon,
but she works as an online safety advocate now for
(09:34):
Old Shift, and she was saying that the best thing
to do is never make your child afraid that if
they tell you something that you'll take their devices away.
That you need to, as much as it can feel
like pulling teeth, be involved and be playing whatever games
they're playing so that they do feel like when things
like this happen they can raise it with you.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Well. And the other broader problem is that as a parent,
you're always trying to stay ahead of what the kids
are interested in. It is a little bit like whack
a mole, because once you've established that one thing is
problematic in some way, they will move on to something else.
So that, as you say, the solution is not to
throw the baby out with the bathwater, but instead try
(10:11):
and find a way forward with the platforms that they
enjoy and stay connected to what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I guess so, I guess we're going to be planting
veggies on.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
This game on the weekend, not being ice agents.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
While women once loudly and proudly celebrated the era of
girl bosses and leaning in, we're now seeing women pretending
that they aren't even parents at all, so they're working
and looking like they're child free. There's a few examples
of this in the culture this week. Case in point
Margo Robbie. It would have been hard to ignore the
images of Margo Robbie around this week on her press tour.
(10:44):
Have you seen them? Yes, the naked dress. You've surely
seen her believable, Yeah, loved it, I fell hook line
and singer. I've seen her from every angle that you
could see her I thought she looked amazing. So she's
on the press tour for her movie, which is called
A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey, which feels like too many
words for a movie title, but we're going to skim
right over that. So what she's doing essentially, which a
(11:06):
lot of the celebrities do nowadays, is that they're getting
you to note their film, like we saw Zendea do
it with Challengers. We saw Margo do it when she
was on the Barbie press tour as well, like people
are paying attention because of their outfits. There's six words
I've heard on repeat when people are seeing these images
this week that I wanted to interrogate a little bit,
(11:27):
and those words are didn't she just have a baby?
So I feel like that's a reaction that everyone I.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Have said that.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I said that myself. Actually, do you know the headlines
around this rankled me a little bit. I know you're
going to get into some other stuff, but I just
want to put this on the table first. Every headline
that I read was.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Like, she's back, She's back.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
And I just felt like the undertone was, oh, thank God,
like she's bounced back, she's hot, and she's working again,
and it was just this subtext of a woman pretending
she never really had a baby in the first place
is what we want to see like glamorous hot. But
this is a discussion that they had in MoMA Mea
out Loud, So if you want to go into sort
of that, I would highly recommend you listen to Me
(12:10):
out Loud episode On that Mea Friedman goes.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Off, Yeah, we need to remember, like this is her
literal job, like her body and her appearance, let's be honest,
is her job. So of course that is what she's
going to be doing to be getting back to her role.
That's not the case for us, thank god. But people
are either saying, didn't she have a baby or they
totally forgot she had a baby at all. And I
think there's a little bit of a pattern that we're
(12:33):
seeing now with this, where women were once celebrating that
era of girl bosses and leaning in, and we're now
seeing women pretending that they're not even parents at all,
Like that seems like the new cool girl thing to do,
Like don't you think this feels like the new top
tier of Mummy.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
What I found fascinating about it is that our team
here established that Margo has talked about her baby exactly once.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Everyone who was sitting with me were, I mean the
music number, the musical number happens, And honestly, I'm so sorry,
great sound track, isn't that you can do?
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I'm sorry I had to start the interview for a set, yeah,
because like, aren't you isn't there a part of you?
There's like yes, I like time, that's it.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
And what I think is fascinating about this is it's
kind of the era of being a stealth mum. And
it's so different from ten years ago when celebrities would
talk endlessly, ad infinitum about how having children had changed
everything for them. I'm now picking roles that are more
compassionate and more deep, and now they're.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Just not talking about it at all. I feel like
you see that with your friends, like your normy friends
that have three hundred followers on Instagram, Like I know
a lot of people now they don't announce their pregnancy,
they don't announce the birth, Nope. They just start having
like little toes in the corner of their photo or
the back of a baby's head. Like it's very much
a thing now, like a cool girl thing. And I
(14:04):
guess Margot is the old pap or girl.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
It started with Kylie Jenna having a completely secret pregnancy.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Maybe that was it. Yeah, the stealth mom started with
Kylie like every other bloody trend on this planet.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, I so agree. This cultural shift is so interesting.
So first we had girl Boss, Rise and Grind. Then
it was sharanting like it was very much oversharing everything
about parenting everywhere like hashtag real. But now I agree
it is stealth mum where your kids are not your brand.
So Kylie Jenner, what about Hailey Bieber? She never talks
about her baby. Margot Robbie doesn't talk about her baby.
(14:38):
It's like a flex of Yeah, I have kids, but
I don't need to make them my brand.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
And I get it. Look, I used to have a
thing and I've spoken about it on this podcast where
I still kind of have it at my day job
where I just do not want to talk about having
kids at work. And if no one ever has to
hear about me going to a school concert, that my
sweet spot.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I kind of tried to do the same thing when
I started at Mum and Mea. I was like, you know,
it's a fresh start. I'm going to be really cool
and mysterious, and you know they'll be shocked, like a
year down the track when they find out a a kid,
because obviously I'm too young to have a child. And
then like I think, at about one pm on my
first day, I might have mentioned I got an update
photo of my daughter, so it all went out the window.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
But why do we think that way, and why is
it sort of now cool to not talk about your
children or to sort of act like you don't have children.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
It's almost like you've got to pick a brand for
your job, and if your child doesn't align with your brand,
then you know they have to be kept separate.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
I wonder if it's a generational thing. So millennials centered
their children at the center of the world. We are
intense parents, We are overparenting. I wonder if the next
generation alphas or z's are going the other way, where
they're centering themselves and they keep true to themselves and
what they're doing, and they don't make their kids their
entire personality. It's just probably a reflexive action. You know,
(15:58):
how we parent in the way in the opposite way
to our parents parented. Maybe the next generation is saying,
I don't want everything to be about my kids, still
about me. I'm still number one.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I've got a theory that I think it's a bit political.
I think the reason why we've seen the rise of
the stealth mum is because it reflects this newfound ambivalence
we have about the very idea of the working mother.
We all know that the tradwife wave happened, but those
trad wifs were already doing a job. They were performing
the job of being a trad wife. But now I
(16:28):
think there's this deep seated kind of nervousness about how
you have a kid in capitalism at all, and people
are just saying, of all political stripes, I don't want
to have to do that. The workplace was structured for men,
and it's impossible in some ways to fulfill both the
role of being a parent and the role of being
(16:49):
a good employee. And they're checking out of it, and
they're saying, I don't want to do that anymore. And
I think that's why it's almost become like daggy to
try and balance the two, because it's sort of seen
as like, well, you're clearly not doing a good job
on either of them.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And it's interesting when you use the term stealth mumming,
because I've seen that. This week there was a piece
in the Cut where they talked about Vogue's new editor.
Vogues knew she's called head of editorial Content so that
there's never another editor after Anna Wintall, which I love.
But Vogue's new head of editorial content Chloe mahl So.
The author Catherine jess and Morton admitted that her first
(17:23):
thought when she saw that Marl had been promoted to
this spot was how is she going to do that
with a four and a two year old? And she
was saying this, she said she felt like hard working,
ambitious mothers have gone into stealth mode in the last decade.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Min's we talked about how we've tried to stealth mom
unsuccessfully at work. Have you stealth mum? No?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
I haven't stealth mum. But my most recent boss was
a stealth mum. Where she was this unbelievably impressive woman
and I had been working with her for a few
weeks when she casually just dropped in something about having
a six month old baby, and I write two two
(18:07):
very small children. This is a woman, incredible, ambitious, a
very very large job that was my first example of
stealth mumming in real life.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And how did it make you feel?
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Did you feel a little like misled or was it
just I'm impressed?
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Is it wrong to say I was impressed? It was
my first example of the subtext being I'm not here
to talk about my kids. I'm not here to be
defined by them. I'm not going to be defined as
a harried, tired working mother. I'm here, I'm standing on
business and my kids are not my brand. And I
think that we have seen this cultural shift where probably
(18:48):
ten years ago it was all about sharinging. Well there
is still some of that, but a lot of millennial
parents were over sharing and over there was a raft
of like mummy blogs showing it this is what it's like,
this is the real me, very messy kind of parenting.
But now there is this shift into cool girl stealth
mums who don't make kids part of their brand and
(19:10):
who don't seemingly exist.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
But I worry about this though, because I'm like, why
should I pretend I didn't basically go to war before
I got to work, Like I've had to battle a
child into a uniform, get them out the door, get
myself ready within that deal with a tantrum, like it
is part of our brand, Like should we be denying
that part of our self exists?
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Do men make a part of their brand?
Speaker 1 (19:34):
No, because they're not doing that.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
And also I worry that it's just adding more pressure
onto us to keep this veneer of I'm not going
to say perfection, because I don't think anyone thinks I
have a veneer of perfection, but a veneer of just
kind of like impenetrability and like pretending like our kids
don't exist.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It just puts more pressure on us.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
It felt kind of boundaried to me. It felt like
that's my other life and this is my work life.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Like almost a relief. I guess that's why I do it.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
Actually, it is a relief to be able to go
to work and not think about my children while I'm there.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
The ang the greatest I've ever seen a man is
I went to a dinner where I was seated next
to a pediatric pomonologist and I was just making small
talk with him, and I knew that he had two
small children at home, and I said to him, Wow,
that must be a lot, because you got this kids
at home. And then you're talking to kids at work,
and he flew into a rage and started telling me
(20:32):
that his job isn't about talking to children. And I
was thinking about it afterwards and why he was so
angry at me, and I think there were two reasons.
So first is because men are accustomed to being stealth dads,
like that's the default to be a stealth dad, and
so to be told like there's some continuation between what
you do at home and what you do at work,
it was almost offensive to him. It was almost undermining
(20:53):
his professionalism in a way that a woman would never
take offense at that. She may not want to talk
about it once to your point, but she's not going
to take offense. And then I think the second reason
why he took offense was sort of specific to the
context of the conversation, which was that he thought that
I was saying that his job was requiring caregiving, it
was about looking after children, and for him it was
about solving a problem, not looking after them, not caregiving,
(21:16):
which is coded as feminine. But it's just interesting to
reflect on as an example of how for dads, stealth
dadding is what they've always done.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
It does feel like there's a motherhood penalty in the workplace,
there's a bias around if you say as a mother,
I'm a mother, it has connotations of you're not completely
focused on work, You're going to have to take time
off for sick kids. So I wonder if stealth mumming
is in response to that, trying to push back against
(21:45):
people's bias.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
It's kind of a necessity in order to be taken seriously. Potentially. Yeah,
I don't know if you've come across this, but there's
some new thinking around the idea of praise and compliments,
and this new thinking is that praise itself might be toxic.
Let me explain. Some studies actually compare excessive praise to
(22:07):
a dangerous chemical or at aol to manipulate people into
doing what we want.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Oh God, they were doing compliments wrong.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
And this came up for me because something happened to
my child at school recently which kind of upset me.
And it was around are You Oka Day, which is
always marked on the second day in September, And what
happened was that the students in my kids class were
creating compliment buckets and he and his classmates were encouraged
to fill these compliment buckets with compliments about other kids
(22:38):
in the class. Suffice to say, I'm sure you can
anticipate what ended up happening. There were a lot of
hurt feelings because kids were comparing how many compliments they
had compared with other kids, and it basically turned into
a popularity contest. And the other problem with it is
that what is a compliment for a child? What is
okay to compliment a child about? And I realized that
(22:59):
the whole thing is actually a bit of a minefield,
and it's really a new development. The first time I
thought about this was I noticed that gen X parents
around me were getting very mindful about how they were
praising their kid kids, and they'd say things like I
can see you tried so hard to draw this balloon,
rather than like, what a great picture of a balloon?
And I sort of inherited that when I had kids,
(23:20):
and I didn't compliment their appearances, even though sometimes they
were just wearing a great outfit. And I always talked
about effort rather than outcome. But don't children deserve the
same recognition as adults, Like I love a compliment, it
makes me feel good. Isn't a child simply asking for
our attention and our recognition and a pat on the
(23:41):
head for how beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
A picture is.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
And I'm just wondering, is this another example of millennials
overthinking everything to the nth degree?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yes, yes, it is, okay, this is what we do.
We overthink everything. And this feels like, now to give
a child a compliment, you've got to put it through
a mind map of like does it praise their appearance?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yes, like to get the compliment even out of your mouth,
Like I know that even people say, don't say good
boy or good girl, Like you're not meant to do that,
because that's incururaging them to be really compliant, Like you
should be saying well done or good effort. You're not
meant to say good boy or good girl. So it
feels like every time we think about praising our child,
then we're stopping ourselves and going, no, but their appearance
(24:24):
isn't the most beautiful thing about them. I need to
praise them for being strong or being kind. And it
just feels like we're exhausting ourselves by just trying to
be good and tell them that they're great, Like if
we're not going to tell them they're great, who's going
to do it.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Oh, I'm so exhausted by this, So now we can't
even praise correctly. But you're right, Amelia, overthinking is the
millennial brand of parenting, right.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It's not our fault.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Though we have parenting books, podcasts, newsletters, Instagram accounts all
telling us that there's a right way to say good job.
But our parents just had like a cigarette and didn't
think about it.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
So of course we're hyper aware. It's how we've been conditioned.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
And I also want to inject a note here that
praise it does make people we feel good. And on
the other hand, I know I mentioned that the new
thinking is that it's kind of like a toxic chemical,
but there's also studies that show that people who say
they were praised a lot by their parents are more
likely to be happy. And there's even a correlation between
(25:26):
income and how much praise people received as children, which
is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Because that's what I'm saying as well. There's this woman
I follow on TikTok, you know, when I'm meant to
be asleep and I just scroll for hours on end,
called doctor Chelsea and she said, you're meant to give
a hundred pieces of praise a day to a day,
each child, each child, each child, And she was saying
it's because if all you're doing is correction and direction,
like if all you're doing is saying no, don't do that, no,
(25:52):
get off that, put your shoes on, Like, all they're
hearing from our mouths is things that they need to
do or things that they need to not do. So
she was saying, you need to do really micro compliments
to them, so things like you put your shoes on,
well done, you came down for dinner, well done. No.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
I wonder how that translates into the workplace too, because
maybe it's like also a good management technique to be
praising everyone one hundred times a day.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
But can you imagine that would mean that we're saying
things like wow, that's an amazing font you used in
that deck, and wow you circled back when you said
you'd circle back and close the loop. Good on you. Yeah,
Like please.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I for one would like more praise in the workplace.
I don't think there's enough. There's a lot of stick
and not heaps of carrot in workplaces, and I think
it's a good cultural thing to tell people when they've
done a good job.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Which we mentioned Herem's that you look beautiful and you're
doing such a good job today, and you're so strong.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
My beauty. I praise the effort. I tried really hard today.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I did a lot of research, and I did research
on this, and I think the point we're missing is
over praise, excessive praise.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
This is the problem.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
And the research says that over praising kids can turn
them into external validation junkies, and it turns them into
doing things for extrinsic praise rather than like the intrinsic
motivation of working hard. It also diminishes rezilily. So if
kids have grown up with constantly wow, you ate your
vegetables so amazing, or everything you do is incredible, then
(27:19):
the first time they hit a real critic, or if
the first time they get feedback, the first time they
even just get sort of a neutral silence or not
someone pumping their ties, it can feel really crushing and
really derailing. And I think that we do see that
in the workplace. There is a generation here that can't
take feedback and can't handle it when you're not pumping
their tires every five minutes.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
Yeah, but Mon's I did my research for this segment too,
and deserve praise and recognition for that, And the studies
I found said the opposite. So now I think the
point is that that's why we're overthinking it, because there's
so much data on both sides. Do you praise them
one hundred times a day? Do you make sure that
you don't praise them too much? And then ultimately, maybe
what we previously might have thought was an instinctive act
(28:03):
to praise or not praise has instead turned into something
that we have to intellectualize.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah, I think we just need to tell people and
they look nice and move on. So now I've brought
you my favorite video from the internet this week, and
I want you to have a listen. It's a woman
named Chelsea who's just become my new hero. Here she is,
we don't do bath toys.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Over here, my baby does not do bath toys.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You want to know why? Too much bullshit?
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Okay, bad time is to get in, wash your ass,
get out. That's exactly what we do. We get in,
we wash our ass, we get out because there's two
minutes of a hassle with these toys. You load the
toys in, you get the toys out. You dry the
toys off, you hope the toys don't moved. Gotta keep
washing all the toys. I already gotta wash this toy.
I'm not adding a new group of toys that specifically
(28:50):
get wet and most of the time stay with that.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I also got to wash.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
That's extra work for what play with your toys when
you get out the bat.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I love Chelsea so much. I stepped on a bluey
toy and a dinosaur last night in my shower, so
she has now become my new icon. I'm doing less
toys in the shower and the bar.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
I love this from Chelsea.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
But for people that have neurodivergent kids who like deep pressure,
bathtime can be really important. And bath time is, as
you say, Amelia, the calming thing. You might be a
parent that has a kid that has multiple barths a
day because it's quite regulating for them.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
So yeah, that's just me being the fun police.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
And I know that Chelsea is not against bathtime per se.
She's pro bath, just anti bath toy.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, she's just saying just get them in there, get
them clean, and get out. I like it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
It's effiicient or business. But can I also give you
guys an amazing hack for bath time. So I fell
into this trap where both times went on and on
and on because I could never get them out. I
went to Bunnings and I bought pond lights like ten dollar.
They're a little disc and you have a remote that
comes with it and it turns them into different colors
and I put them on the bottom of the bath
(30:01):
and the kids are obsessed with them because it lights
up the bath. So you turn the lights off, you
put the pond lights on, and then when you've had enough,
you take your remote and you turn the pond light
to red and you say, oh far, time's finished. Like
the lights turned to red. That means we've got to
get out. Just works, They're just something in their brain goes,
oh shit, the light's red out.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
We get that's very good Monds, but that's another toy
for the bum. You're going against Chelsea's advice. I am
taking Chelsea's advice. I'm taking everything out and only adding bubbles,
and I guarantee it will be better. That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
There's a tiny internet feud on Facebook that I would
like to bring to your attention that I discovered this week.
So move over Hottest one hundred because the ABC are
running a competition for the Hottest one hundred books of
the twenty first century, and it listed Where Is the
Green Sheep?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
By Mem Fox a classic.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Total classic, but it left one thing off the illustrator
Judy horror Check. So this week she wrote on her Facebook, Hey, ABC,
you have Where is the Green Sheep listed as by
mem Fox alone? You know it's actually by Memfox and
me right, And then she goes on to say in
the comments, you know, the people that do the pictures
(31:16):
in picture books are frequently left off, like we're used
to it, but it also drives us nuts. So Judy
Horrichek has had just about enough of illustrators being overlooked,
and I just want to have a moment for the
illustrators of children's books.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Such a good point, I'm ashamed to say. I hadn't
even thought about this until I came across this item,
and then I started to think about how important illustrations
are in children's books and how they stir feeling in
children that they never forget, Like where would Roll Dhal
be without the Quentin Blake line drawings exactly?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Like the kids can't read the words. The thing that's
drawing them into the book is the illustrations. Like, I
feel so bad that I've never thought about this before.
Like I could not tell you the names of the
illustrators on my daughter's books, and yet we read them
every night. But I should. Now I'm going to pay
attention to this.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, I read this amazing piece in The Guardian about
illustrations and the history of illustrations and what was that
Illustrations are as memory evoking as smells or songs, So
you see things as a kid and it will stick
with you for life.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
That's so true, Stacy.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
If kids are visual learners, you know, we've spent all
this time trying to get them off of iPads.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
They're drawn to visuals all the time.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Our illustrators actually the real rock stars of our childhoods,
and we've just been ignoring them.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
They really are, Like we need to pour one out
for them now, Like they are the reason that our
kids even drawn to books in the first place. Like
I guarantee, if they were just black and white words
on the page, they're not going to sit there for
more than two seconds. So yeah, we need to pour
one out for the illustrators.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I reckon great illustrators, like as you said, Quentin Blake,
like Helen Oxbury, who did We're going on a bear Hunt?
They shape the stories as much as the writers do.
You know, We're going on a bear Hunt was originally
supposed to be about a line of kings and queens
going on a bear hunt, but Helen Oxenbury turned it
into like this regular family squelching through the mud, and
(33:07):
that's just where the beauty is. And this article also
said that kids love chaos in illustrations.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
They fixate on messy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Disruptive moments in books so peas spilling out or the
tiger that came to tea drinking all the water out
of the tap, and they find a lot of joy
in the disorder, and that these illustrations can also help
them deal with big feelings chaos, loneliness, loss or anger
all through the pictures much more than words can. The
(33:34):
upshot of this is that I went onto the ABC
Book's website. They have updated the entry for mem Fox.
They have included Judy horrorcheck. She gets my vote, Judy,
we love you. I also want to shout out to
Deborah n Island for drawing my favorite illustrations in Mulgarbill's bicycle.
And also she did that hippopotamus that goes on.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
That is brilliant hctics one of the bed illustrator right
such range.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
So thank you illustrators, thank you for bringing the magic.
To wrap up today's show, we're going to just share
the things that we are loving sick, so the stuff
you might text to your friends or put in the
Mums group, Chat Amelia, what's on your list.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
This is going to sound strange, but my recommendation this
week is getting the newspaper. Oh. I subscribed to my
local paper to have it delivered Monday through Sunday, and
it is bringing me such joy and delight. And I've
tried to think about why that is. I think it's
because when you read the news in the newspaper, it's
(34:37):
giving come closer, it's saying, come here, let's share this experience.
If you read the news on your phone and your
droom scrolling, that says go away. It says I don't
want to be disturbed. And there's something about the act
of scrolling where it doesn't invite people in in the
way that a big newspaper does, and a.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Newspaper's a novelty now to them, like they don't see that,
so how cool.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
There's so many nice things about it, like you can
practice numbers and talk about numbers on the world weather page.
You can do the word games together with a pen
and paper so fun.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
You can draw mustaches and all the world leaders.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
And I think it's modeling good information hygiene, which I
think is going to be increasingly a topic of conversation
going forward with AI and everything else that's going on.
And I just think overall, it makes me feel calmer
because when I read the newspaper, it's a finite experience.
I can get to the end of it and I
(35:34):
can feel like, Okay, I know what's going on. I
don't need to keep doom scrolling. I don't need to
read all the news in the world. This is the
news that I need to know today. So I think
it's been a really nice experience, not just for my kids,
but also for me.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I love that it's so intentional, and it's also you
can't skip around all over the place like you can
on a phone.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
It's just the one single tasking. Love it. What about you, Stacey?
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So mine this week is a docco that I cannot
stop thinking about. Have you guys watched Unknown Number The
Catfish Story on Netflix? Stacy obsessed? Yes, mons no?
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Is it a true crime?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yes? True crime documentary my favorite kind. So I promise
I'm not going to spoil it for you. I'll just
give you top line. But if you want to listen
to more and you have watched it, Mom and Me
are allowed did a subs episode on it this week.
So it's a thirteen year old girl, Lauren Lacari. She
lives in this tiny town in Michigan, like couple hundred people.
And Lauren starts stating a boy in her class named Owen,
(36:33):
and that's when the messages start. So she starts getting
up to forty to fifty abusive messages to her phone
a day from an unknown number, and so does Owen.
And then they start coming to different people, but they
are the main ones that start receiving these messages. This
goes on for fifteen months until they finally figure out
who it is. So it's satisfying in that you will
(36:54):
find out who it is, and it is infuriating when
you find out who it is. But I think the
most interesting part about watching it and I'm sure you'll agree, Amelia,
Like the question you have when you're watching it is
why didn't they take the phones off the kids? Like
why didn't they remove their And it's such an interesting
reflection on society today in that the other parents of
(37:16):
the kids at the school said, well, no, we don't
want our kids phones taken away because we want to
know where they are. We want to be able to
track them and to be able to contact them. And
that's actually something that we touched on in last week's
episode when we were talking about phone tracking. It very
much plays into that, like would you track your kids?
And why do we want to track our kids? So
this poor girl had to go to school every day
knowing these messages were going to come through, and it
(37:38):
was all because the other parents wouldn't get on board
and support it. It was a bit of an aha
moment for me because I've find that conversation around phones
and children it's often about well, the kids don't want
to give the phone up because they're addicted, and that
may or may not be true. But what this documentary
shows is that parents also feel ambivalent about taking their
phones away from their kids because it's a way to
(38:00):
keep in touch with their kids and keep in some
ways control over their kids. And it was a reminder
that that dynamic goes both ways. Yeah, and when the
reveal happens, it's so satisfying. Mons, Like there is videos
all over the internet. You will scream. You will scream
out loud when you find out who it is. It's
that satisfying. So please watch for principle, it's the teaching
(38:22):
a word. You'll have to watch.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
It's the teacher and it's an exercise in resilience. Everybody fails.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Mon's what's yours this week?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I have a viral two ingredient dinner for lazy people
who hate cooking to me ingredient.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Please give it to me.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
It's changed my life.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
I can't stop talking about this and telling everybody about this.
So I stole it from the Lee's and Sarah podcast,
which for transparency reasons, I work on this show. But
this recipe has gone viral in a way that we've
never seen anything do before.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
People are losing their minds. It's called the triple Bee.
All you need to do is get a beef bowler
blade from the supermarket. It's called a beef bowler blade.
A triple be.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
It's not like a cut of meat.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
It's a cut of meat. It's like a big roast.
It's called beef bowl blade.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Okay, got it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
And then a jar of Cha Sus sauce. It comes
in a red jar. What you do is you turn
on your slow cooker, you dump the triple be in it.
You pour over the entire jar of Chassius sauce, put
the lid on, put it on low for eight to
ten hours, and walk away.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
That is it.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
No browning, no nothing, two things, triple b Cha su,
walk away and at the end what you will have
is the most amazing, succulent, delicious pulley a party like
Chinese infused beef.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
What is the charge eating a meal a succulent Chinese me.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
That you could serve with rice. You could put it
on like a white roll with some kalslaur in it.
It's just amazing. It's become a weekly staple in this
house because it's so ridiculously easy.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
YEA.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Nothing insides. Rage in me is when you see a
slow cooker recipe and it says you've got a brown
in a pan fur, I might No, I'm not doing
that because I'll just book it in the pan. So
this is great, love it.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
That's all we have time for on Parenting out Loud
this week. We are so happy that you're here in
our new home in this feed, so thank you for
hitting the follow button. Actually, we do need a name
for our tribe of smart parents.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
What can we call them?
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Maybe poles call yeah the polyp Please pout louders like
parenting out Louders.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah, I like that?
Speaker 4 (40:40):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Well, before you go, we are so goddamn thirsty for
praise here. Maybe our parents did not praise us enough,
and frankly it shows. So if you've got any spare
praise rattling around that you're taking off your kids now,
we'd love to have it. So the way you can
do it is drop us a review on Apple Podcasts.
It actually helps other people find the show because the
Apple charts work in this way where it's this weird
(41:03):
alchemy of reviews and follows, so it's like the worst
game of roadblocks ever. So please write us a review.
But here's the challenge. Here's what I would love.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I would love if you could please write it in
gentle parenting speak, so very non praise speak. That would
really make me laugh.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
So none of this this is the best podcast in
the whole word world. Like that sort of reckless praise
will go straight to our heads. It's not good for us.
So I really want to see what people have got.
So here's an example. You worked really hard on this
episode and it shows keep going.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You're learning and growing every week. I'd like the way
you're speaking here. I bet one day you're gonna get it.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Please leave us one a little inside joke for all
of us, and I can't wait to read them. Big
Thanks to our team this week. Junior Content Producer is
Tessa Kotovich, produces Leaporgus and Sashatanic and the group ep
Is Roots de Vine.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Have a great week. Will be back in this feed
next Saturday morning. See ya, Bye, Yes
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the
traditional owners of the land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Parenting out Loud, the podcast for parents who
don't always listen to parenting podcasts. Here we are again,
another week of parenting culture, some hot takes, and this
time we're in our own podcast feed, which is nice.
So we let go of the mother ship of Mamma
Mia out Loud. We're off the teat.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
We now must learn to walk.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We got a lot of avocado. Yeah, and it.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Helps you to learn to walk.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Food.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Yeah. I'm Monic Bowley, I'm Amelia Lasto, and I am
Stacy Kicks Stacy. Before we begin, I'm just sensing a
vibe from you this week that you're very stressed out.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Is that correct? Yes, I'm very stressed this week. I've
had a bit of a week. I have cried multiple
times this week, just to make the listeners feel seen
if you've done the same, which culminated in me crying
because I couldn't do a Copenhagen plank.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Sorry, Jim, what is a Copenhagen plank? I thought Copenhagen
was just about like being stylish.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yes, so nice.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It was ice cream.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, it was like a torture device. I don't know why.
I had to have one leg suspended in the air
in a sideways plank and I couldn't do it, and
the trainer came to help me. I got very upset
and I said, it's not about the Copenhagen plank.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
It's never about the Copenhagen should be over the edge.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But I'm very happy to be with you guys, very
happy to be doing this. It's the highlight of my week.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Oh, Stacy, let's just ignore you crying in the corner.
Grab a tissue. This is what's coming up on today's show.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
The girl Boss is dead and them influencer is out,
and there's a new status symbol in pretending you just
don't have kids at all.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
I want to talk about how the raw book around
praise has changed, and whether compliments and how we compliment
people is just yet another topic around which millennials are overthinking.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I saw a tiny feud on Facebook and it's changed
the way I think about reading with my kids, and
I want to bring it to your attention.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Oh, I love a tiny few. There's a Reddit board
called niche scandals, and it's just all about like people
on crafting boards, like arguing with each other, and it's
the best to have a low stakes feud.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That sounds duey.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
This starts like a niche scandal, But then what I
discovered is it's actually a bigger thing.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's a bigger thing. I can't wait.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
But first, in case you missed it, I have to
talk to you about Roadblocks and why it's in the
news this week.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
What is a roadblock? And why am I buying my
friend's kids Roebucks gift cards every Christmas? And why am
I talking about it this week?
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Yeah? So Roadblocks is an online gaming platform and the
reason it's in the news this week it's been around
since two thousand and six, is because as we're all
preparing for the government's Social Media band to come into effect,
a loophole has been discovered. And the loophole is Roadbox.
Because while Roadblocks is ostensibly a place where you go
(03:15):
to play games online, it's actually a social media site
in disguise, and so it's not subject to this new
Under SIXTEENES ban, but a lot of people are saying
it should be. So Roadblocks has tried to preemp this
by saying, hey, here's this new suite of safety features
we have. But a lot of parents and experts say
(03:36):
this is not going far enough. That Roadblocks is actually
really dangerous for kids, and we have to think more
systematically about how to make it safer.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Roadblocks is cooked. Let's just put this on the table.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It is. But I say this was like the sims like,
is this not just like building little villag Yes.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
I think it started out like that, Stacy.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I think ten years ago when it came out, people
touted it as this great place for entrepreneurship and it
teaches kids how to code, because essentially what it is
is it's a platform where you can go on and
build a game and then people come and play your games.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
But what'spened is that now.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Because of the popularity of it, and it's something like
sixty eight million uses a day, forty million of them
are under the age of thirteen, it's just become this
kind of free fall and now it's a place that's
full of grooming, inappropriate content, bullying, racism, anti semitism. It's
banned in Qatar and Turkey. It's being sued by Louisiana.
(04:36):
But most importantly, this game uses addiction based mechanics for kids.
It addicts kids, it hooks them. It is a very
bad place.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
So I've been hearing about it a lot from my
seven year old and I sort of thought, oh, it
seems gentle. Like one of the most popular games on
there is a game where you essentially grow a garden,
and I thought, well, that sounds nice. It sort of
sounds like Beatrix Potter, how lovely, and it's free. Great,
So I go online to play it with him, and
(05:06):
very shortly he's in a game where he's playing an
ice a as in The Masked People, who scoop people
up off the streets in the US and take them
to immigration prison. And I suddenly realized that because it's
open source, you start with the garden game, you end
up playing an ice agent with a machine gun. Mon's
(05:27):
you have done some research around there? Since I'm curious
to know the answer. Has it always been like this,
like why do we think it's the acceptable face of gaming?
Like what happened?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I think it's victim of inshitification. Now, this is a term.
I don't know if you've heard of it. It's basically
for when things turn to shit. So it's the process
where online platforms start out really good and then they
deteriorate over time because they become sort of just about
shareholders at everyone's expense. So an example like being yes
(05:59):
or you know, when Instagram first started, it was just
your friends in the news feed, and now it's people
you don't know and a lot of ads. It's sort
of the same thing with Twitter. It's really gone down
the toilet. So I feel like.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Perhaps Roadblocks is victim of intititification.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
And that's why Australia's e Safety Commissioner has flagged Roadblocks
and has said that in addition to the Under sixteen
social media Band, we've got to talk about how to
protect kids on roadblocks and look to be fair to Roadblocks.
I should mention what they came out with this week.
They said that under sixteen's accounts will now be private
by default and they will be unable to chat with adults.
(06:36):
And the reason why they had to put that in
is because there was grooming happening on roadblocks. There have
been many people arrested. Two dozen is the number. Actually,
two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicion of abusing
or abducting victims that they groomed on roadblocks, So this
is very much a live issue. They reckon.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
The big problem with roadblocks is the chat feature.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
This is what a lot of people say, is that's
how predators come in. They chat with your kids, they
can groom your kids. But I don't quite believe it.
I think eliminating the chat function does not solve any
of the problems, because there's other ways that your kids
can see things. People can write things on buildings, people
can have a speech bubble coming out of them. I
know there's probably people listening whose kids play this. There
(07:17):
are other games that kids can play where they are
building things, learning things. I can't see any advantage for
kids being on.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Right, But I don't think it's as easy as that.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Mon's like speaking as someone who's having to negotiate this
right now. If I disconnect from roadblocks and I ban
it completely, the children will always find something else to play,
and keeping the line of communication open, I think is
the only solution rather than saying we're just not going
to play it all.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
The experts say there is no safe way for kids
to use this, and if they are not old enough
to see porn. They are not old enough to play
this game. I know you're rolling your eyes, but I
follow this quite daggy Instagram account called the family it Guy.
This guy's a cybersecurity expert and a dad, and he
registered on Roadblocks as an eight year old and he
(08:06):
joined a game. Within minutes, he joined a game called
puss Blick Bathroom Simulator, which was a simulator where you
can only imagine what was going on in there, stuff
that eight year olds should not be seeing. So I
don't think Roadblocks is going far enough with parental controls.
I think that also this e Safety Commissioner is not
(08:27):
going far enough with this fine. So the Australian government
is saying we're going to find Roadblocks forty five million
dollars for non compliance. But guys, this is a ninety
five billion dollar company. Forty five million to them, that's
like you walking down the street with one hundred thousand
dollars in your pocket and shelling out fifty bucks. It's nothing.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've seen stories. There was a case in Kansas where
an eight year old girl was sending inappropriate images to
a stranger that was sending her roebucks send her thousands
of Roebucks.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Yes, because the other element that we haven't even really
talked about here is the fact that while these games
start out as free very quickly, as I discovered when
I played, you were prompted to buy things in order
to level up to a more advanced stage of various games,
and those numbers add up really quickly.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, but you're doing the right thing by playing the games, Like,
I don't want everyone, especially people whose children are already
on this game, to feel like right, the solution is
that we need to just snatch the iPad off them
and they're not allowed on it anymore. Like we run
a story on the site this week written by Madeline West,
you know Neighbors actress Madeline West, like she's an icon,
but she works as an online safety advocate now for
(09:34):
Old Shift, and she was saying that the best thing
to do is never make your child afraid that if
they tell you something that you'll take their devices away.
That you need to, as much as it can feel
like pulling teeth, be involved and be playing whatever games
they're playing so that they do feel like when things
like this happen they can raise it with you.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Well. And the other broader problem is that as a parent,
you're always trying to stay ahead of what the kids
are interested in. It is a little bit like whack
a mole, because once you've established that one thing is
problematic in some way, they will move on to something else.
So that, as you say, the solution is not to
throw the baby out with the bathwater, but instead try
(10:11):
and find a way forward with the platforms that they
enjoy and stay connected to what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I guess so, I guess we're going to be planting
veggies on.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
This game on the weekend, not being ice agents.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
While women once loudly and proudly celebrated the era of
girl bosses and leaning in, we're now seeing women pretending
that they aren't even parents at all, so they're working
and looking like they're child free. There's a few examples
of this in the culture this week. Case in point
Margo Robbie. It would have been hard to ignore the
images of Margo Robbie around this week on her press tour.
(10:44):
Have you seen them? Yes, the naked dress. You've surely
seen her believable, Yeah, loved it, I fell hook line
and singer. I've seen her from every angle that you
could see her I thought she looked amazing. So she's
on the press tour for her movie, which is called
A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey, which feels like too many
words for a movie title, but we're going to skim
right over that. So what she's doing essentially, which a
(11:06):
lot of the celebrities do nowadays, is that they're getting
you to note their film, like we saw Zendea do
it with Challengers. We saw Margo do it when she
was on the Barbie press tour as well, like people
are paying attention because of their outfits. There's six words
I've heard on repeat when people are seeing these images
this week that I wanted to interrogate a little bit,
(11:27):
and those words are didn't she just have a baby?
So I feel like that's a reaction that everyone I.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Have said that.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I said that myself. Actually, do you know the headlines
around this rankled me a little bit. I know you're
going to get into some other stuff, but I just
want to put this on the table first. Every headline
that I read was.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Like, she's back, She's back.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
And I just felt like the undertone was, oh, thank God,
like she's bounced back, she's hot, and she's working again,
and it was just this subtext of a woman pretending
she never really had a baby in the first place
is what we want to see like glamorous hot. But
this is a discussion that they had in MoMA Mea
out Loud, So if you want to go into sort
of that, I would highly recommend you listen to Me
(12:10):
out Loud episode On that Mea Friedman goes.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Off, Yeah, we need to remember, like this is her
literal job, like her body and her appearance, let's be honest,
is her job. So of course that is what she's
going to be doing to be getting back to her role.
That's not the case for us, thank god. But people
are either saying, didn't she have a baby or they
totally forgot she had a baby at all. And I
think there's a little bit of a pattern that we're
(12:33):
seeing now with this, where women were once celebrating that
era of girl bosses and leaning in, and we're now
seeing women pretending that they're not even parents at all,
Like that seems like the new cool girl thing to do,
Like don't you think this feels like the new top
tier of Mummy.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
What I found fascinating about it is that our team
here established that Margo has talked about her baby exactly once.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Everyone who was sitting with me were, I mean the
music number, the musical number happens, And honestly, I'm so sorry,
great sound track, isn't that you can do?
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I'm sorry I had to start the interview for a set, yeah,
because like, aren't you isn't there a part of you?
There's like yes, I like time, that's it.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
And what I think is fascinating about this is it's
kind of the era of being a stealth mum. And
it's so different from ten years ago when celebrities would
talk endlessly, ad infinitum about how having children had changed
everything for them. I'm now picking roles that are more
compassionate and more deep, and now they're.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Just not talking about it at all. I feel like
you see that with your friends, like your normy friends
that have three hundred followers on Instagram, Like I know
a lot of people now they don't announce their pregnancy,
they don't announce the birth, Nope. They just start having
like little toes in the corner of their photo or
the back of a baby's head. Like it's very much
a thing now, like a cool girl thing. And I
(14:04):
guess Margot is the old pap or girl.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
It started with Kylie Jenna having a completely secret pregnancy.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Maybe that was it. Yeah, the stealth mom started with
Kylie like every other bloody trend on this planet.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, I so agree. This cultural shift is so interesting.
So first we had girl Boss, Rise and Grind. Then
it was sharanting like it was very much oversharing everything
about parenting everywhere like hashtag real. But now I agree
it is stealth mum where your kids are not your brand.
So Kylie Jenner, what about Hailey Bieber? She never talks
about her baby. Margot Robbie doesn't talk about her baby.
(14:38):
It's like a flex of Yeah, I have kids, but
I don't need to make them my brand.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
And I get it. Look, I used to have a
thing and I've spoken about it on this podcast where
I still kind of have it at my day job
where I just do not want to talk about having
kids at work. And if no one ever has to
hear about me going to a school concert, that my
sweet spot.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I kind of tried to do the same thing when
I started at Mum and Mea. I was like, you know,
it's a fresh start. I'm going to be really cool
and mysterious, and you know they'll be shocked, like a
year down the track when they find out a a kid,
because obviously I'm too young to have a child. And
then like I think, at about one pm on my
first day, I might have mentioned I got an update
photo of my daughter, so it all went out the window.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
But why do we think that way, and why is
it sort of now cool to not talk about your
children or to sort of act like you don't have children.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
It's almost like you've got to pick a brand for
your job, and if your child doesn't align with your brand,
then you know they have to be kept separate.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
I wonder if it's a generational thing. So millennials centered
their children at the center of the world. We are
intense parents, We are overparenting. I wonder if the next
generation alphas or z's are going the other way, where
they're centering themselves and they keep true to themselves and
what they're doing, and they don't make their kids their
entire personality. It's just probably a reflexive action. You know,
(15:58):
how we parent in the way in the opposite way
to our parents parented. Maybe the next generation is saying,
I don't want everything to be about my kids, still
about me. I'm still number one.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I've got a theory that I think it's a bit political.
I think the reason why we've seen the rise of
the stealth mum is because it reflects this newfound ambivalence
we have about the very idea of the working mother.
We all know that the tradwife wave happened, but those
trad wifs were already doing a job. They were performing
the job of being a trad wife. But now I
(16:28):
think there's this deep seated kind of nervousness about how
you have a kid in capitalism at all, and people
are just saying, of all political stripes, I don't want
to have to do that. The workplace was structured for men,
and it's impossible in some ways to fulfill both the
role of being a parent and the role of being
(16:49):
a good employee. And they're checking out of it, and
they're saying, I don't want to do that anymore. And
I think that's why it's almost become like daggy to
try and balance the two, because it's sort of seen
as like, well, you're clearly not doing a good job
on either of them.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And it's interesting when you use the term stealth mumming,
because I've seen that. This week there was a piece
in the Cut where they talked about Vogue's new editor.
Vogues knew she's called head of editorial Content so that
there's never another editor after Anna Wintall, which I love.
But Vogue's new head of editorial content Chloe mahl So.
The author Catherine jess and Morton admitted that her first
(17:23):
thought when she saw that Marl had been promoted to
this spot was how is she going to do that
with a four and a two year old? And she
was saying this, she said she felt like hard working,
ambitious mothers have gone into stealth mode in the last decade.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Min's we talked about how we've tried to stealth mom
unsuccessfully at work. Have you stealth mum? No?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
I haven't stealth mum. But my most recent boss was
a stealth mum. Where she was this unbelievably impressive woman
and I had been working with her for a few
weeks when she casually just dropped in something about having
a six month old baby, and I write two two
(18:07):
very small children. This is a woman, incredible, ambitious, a
very very large job that was my first example of
stealth mumming in real life.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And how did it make you feel?
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Did you feel a little like misled or was it
just I'm impressed?
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Is it wrong to say I was impressed? It was
my first example of the subtext being I'm not here
to talk about my kids. I'm not here to be
defined by them. I'm not going to be defined as
a harried, tired working mother. I'm here, I'm standing on
business and my kids are not my brand. And I
think that we have seen this cultural shift where probably
(18:48):
ten years ago it was all about sharinging. Well there
is still some of that, but a lot of millennial
parents were over sharing and over there was a raft
of like mummy blogs showing it this is what it's like,
this is the real me, very messy kind of parenting.
But now there is this shift into cool girl stealth
mums who don't make kids part of their brand and
(19:10):
who don't seemingly exist.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
But I worry about this though, because I'm like, why
should I pretend I didn't basically go to war before
I got to work, Like I've had to battle a
child into a uniform, get them out the door, get
myself ready within that deal with a tantrum, like it
is part of our brand, Like should we be denying
that part of our self exists?
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Do men make a part of their brand?
Speaker 1 (19:34):
No, because they're not doing that.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
And also I worry that it's just adding more pressure
onto us to keep this veneer of I'm not going
to say perfection, because I don't think anyone thinks I
have a veneer of perfection, but a veneer of just
kind of like impenetrability and like pretending like our kids
don't exist.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It just puts more pressure on us.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
It felt kind of boundaried to me. It felt like
that's my other life and this is my work life.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Like almost a relief. I guess that's why I do it.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
Actually, it is a relief to be able to go
to work and not think about my children while I'm there.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
The ang the greatest I've ever seen a man is
I went to a dinner where I was seated next
to a pediatric pomonologist and I was just making small
talk with him, and I knew that he had two
small children at home, and I said to him, Wow,
that must be a lot, because you got this kids
at home. And then you're talking to kids at work,
and he flew into a rage and started telling me
(20:32):
that his job isn't about talking to children. And I
was thinking about it afterwards and why he was so
angry at me, and I think there were two reasons.
So first is because men are accustomed to being stealth dads,
like that's the default to be a stealth dad, and
so to be told like there's some continuation between what
you do at home and what you do at work,
it was almost offensive to him. It was almost undermining
(20:53):
his professionalism in a way that a woman would never
take offense at that. She may not want to talk
about it once to your point, but she's not going
to take offense. And then I think the second reason
why he took offense was sort of specific to the
context of the conversation, which was that he thought that
I was saying that his job was requiring caregiving, it
was about looking after children, and for him it was
about solving a problem, not looking after them, not caregiving,
(21:16):
which is coded as feminine. But it's just interesting to
reflect on as an example of how for dads, stealth
dadding is what they've always done.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
It does feel like there's a motherhood penalty in the workplace,
there's a bias around if you say as a mother,
I'm a mother, it has connotations of you're not completely
focused on work, You're going to have to take time
off for sick kids. So I wonder if stealth mumming
is in response to that, trying to push back against
(21:45):
people's bias.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
It's kind of a necessity in order to be taken seriously. Potentially. Yeah,
I don't know if you've come across this, but there's
some new thinking around the idea of praise and compliments,
and this new thinking is that praise itself might be toxic.
Let me explain. Some studies actually compare excessive praise to
(22:07):
a dangerous chemical or at aol to manipulate people into
doing what we want.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Oh God, they were doing compliments wrong.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
And this came up for me because something happened to
my child at school recently which kind of upset me.
And it was around are You Oka Day, which is
always marked on the second day in September, And what
happened was that the students in my kids class were
creating compliment buckets and he and his classmates were encouraged
to fill these compliment buckets with compliments about other kids
(22:38):
in the class. Suffice to say, I'm sure you can
anticipate what ended up happening. There were a lot of
hurt feelings because kids were comparing how many compliments they
had compared with other kids, and it basically turned into
a popularity contest. And the other problem with it is
that what is a compliment for a child? What is
okay to compliment a child about? And I realized that
(22:59):
the whole thing is actually a bit of a minefield,
and it's really a new development. The first time I
thought about this was I noticed that gen X parents
around me were getting very mindful about how they were
praising their kid kids, and they'd say things like I
can see you tried so hard to draw this balloon,
rather than like, what a great picture of a balloon?
And I sort of inherited that when I had kids,
(23:20):
and I didn't compliment their appearances, even though sometimes they
were just wearing a great outfit. And I always talked
about effort rather than outcome. But don't children deserve the
same recognition as adults, Like I love a compliment, it
makes me feel good. Isn't a child simply asking for
our attention and our recognition and a pat on the
(23:41):
head for how beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
A picture is.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
And I'm just wondering, is this another example of millennials
overthinking everything to the nth degree?
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yes, yes, it is, okay, this is what we do.
We overthink everything. And this feels like, now to give
a child a compliment, you've got to put it through
a mind map of like does it praise their appearance?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yes, like to get the compliment even out of your mouth,
Like I know that even people say, don't say good
boy or good girl, Like you're not meant to do that,
because that's incururaging them to be really compliant, Like you
should be saying well done or good effort. You're not
meant to say good boy or good girl. So it
feels like every time we think about praising our child,
then we're stopping ourselves and going, no, but their appearance
(24:24):
isn't the most beautiful thing about them. I need to
praise them for being strong or being kind. And it
just feels like we're exhausting ourselves by just trying to
be good and tell them that they're great, Like if
we're not going to tell them they're great, who's going
to do it.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Oh, I'm so exhausted by this, So now we can't
even praise correctly. But you're right, Amelia, overthinking is the
millennial brand of parenting, right.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It's not our fault.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Though we have parenting books, podcasts, newsletters, Instagram accounts all
telling us that there's a right way to say good job.
But our parents just had like a cigarette and didn't
think about it.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
So of course we're hyper aware. It's how we've been conditioned.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
And I also want to inject a note here that
praise it does make people we feel good. And on
the other hand, I know I mentioned that the new
thinking is that it's kind of like a toxic chemical,
but there's also studies that show that people who say
they were praised a lot by their parents are more
likely to be happy. And there's even a correlation between
(25:26):
income and how much praise people received as children, which
is fascinating.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Because that's what I'm saying as well. There's this woman
I follow on TikTok, you know, when I'm meant to
be asleep and I just scroll for hours on end,
called doctor Chelsea and she said, you're meant to give
a hundred pieces of praise a day to a day,
each child, each child, each child, And she was saying
it's because if all you're doing is correction and direction,
like if all you're doing is saying no, don't do that, no,
(25:52):
get off that, put your shoes on, Like, all they're
hearing from our mouths is things that they need to
do or things that they need to not do. So
she was saying, you need to do really micro compliments
to them, so things like you put your shoes on,
well done, you came down for dinner, well done. No.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
I wonder how that translates into the workplace too, because
maybe it's like also a good management technique to be
praising everyone one hundred times a day.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
But can you imagine that would mean that we're saying
things like wow, that's an amazing font you used in
that deck, and wow you circled back when you said
you'd circle back and close the loop. Good on you. Yeah,
Like please.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I for one would like more praise in the workplace.
I don't think there's enough. There's a lot of stick
and not heaps of carrot in workplaces, and I think
it's a good cultural thing to tell people when they've
done a good job.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Which we mentioned Herem's that you look beautiful and you're
doing such a good job today, and you're so strong.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
My beauty. I praise the effort. I tried really hard today.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I did a lot of research, and I did research
on this, and I think the point we're missing is
over praise, excessive praise.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
This is the problem.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
And the research says that over praising kids can turn
them into external validation junkies, and it turns them into
doing things for extrinsic praise rather than like the intrinsic
motivation of working hard. It also diminishes rezilily. So if
kids have grown up with constantly wow, you ate your
vegetables so amazing, or everything you do is incredible, then
(27:19):
the first time they hit a real critic, or if
the first time they get feedback, the first time they
even just get sort of a neutral silence or not
someone pumping their ties, it can feel really crushing and
really derailing. And I think that we do see that
in the workplace. There is a generation here that can't
take feedback and can't handle it when you're not pumping
their tires every five minutes.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
Yeah, but Mon's I did my research for this segment too,
and deserve praise and recognition for that, And the studies
I found said the opposite. So now I think the
point is that that's why we're overthinking it, because there's
so much data on both sides. Do you praise them
one hundred times a day? Do you make sure that
you don't praise them too much? And then ultimately, maybe
what we previously might have thought was an instinctive act
(28:03):
to praise or not praise has instead turned into something
that we have to intellectualize.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah, I think we just need to tell people and
they look nice and move on. So now I've brought
you my favorite video from the internet this week, and
I want you to have a listen. It's a woman
named Chelsea who's just become my new hero. Here she is,
we don't do bath toys.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Over here, my baby does not do bath toys.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You want to know why? Too much bullshit?
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Okay, bad time is to get in, wash your ass,
get out. That's exactly what we do. We get in,
we wash our ass, we get out because there's two
minutes of a hassle with these toys. You load the
toys in, you get the toys out. You dry the
toys off, you hope the toys don't moved. Gotta keep
washing all the toys. I already gotta wash this toy.
I'm not adding a new group of toys that specifically
(28:50):
get wet and most of the time stay with that.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I also got to wash.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
That's extra work for what play with your toys when
you get out the bat.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I love Chelsea so much. I stepped on a bluey
toy and a dinosaur last night in my shower, so
she has now become my new icon. I'm doing less
toys in the shower and the bar.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
I love this from Chelsea.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
But for people that have neurodivergent kids who like deep pressure,
bathtime can be really important. And bath time is, as
you say, Amelia, the calming thing. You might be a
parent that has a kid that has multiple barths a
day because it's quite regulating for them.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
So yeah, that's just me being the fun police.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
And I know that Chelsea is not against bathtime per se.
She's pro bath, just anti bath toy.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, she's just saying just get them in there, get
them clean, and get out. I like it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
It's effiicient or business. But can I also give you
guys an amazing hack for bath time. So I fell
into this trap where both times went on and on
and on because I could never get them out. I
went to Bunnings and I bought pond lights like ten dollar.
They're a little disc and you have a remote that
comes with it and it turns them into different colors
and I put them on the bottom of the bath
(30:01):
and the kids are obsessed with them because it lights
up the bath. So you turn the lights off, you
put the pond lights on, and then when you've had enough,
you take your remote and you turn the pond light
to red and you say, oh far, time's finished. Like
the lights turned to red. That means we've got to
get out. Just works, They're just something in their brain goes,
oh shit, the light's red out.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
We get that's very good Monds, but that's another toy
for the bum. You're going against Chelsea's advice. I am
taking Chelsea's advice. I'm taking everything out and only adding bubbles,
and I guarantee it will be better. That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
There's a tiny internet feud on Facebook that I would
like to bring to your attention that I discovered this week.
So move over Hottest one hundred because the ABC are
running a competition for the Hottest one hundred books of
the twenty first century, and it listed Where Is the
Green Sheep?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
By Mem Fox a classic.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Total classic, but it left one thing off the illustrator
Judy horror Check. So this week she wrote on her Facebook, Hey, ABC,
you have Where is the Green Sheep listed as by
mem Fox alone? You know it's actually by Memfox and
me right, And then she goes on to say in
the comments, you know, the people that do the pictures
(31:16):
in picture books are frequently left off, like we're used
to it, but it also drives us nuts. So Judy
Horrichek has had just about enough of illustrators being overlooked,
and I just want to have a moment for the
illustrators of children's books.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Such a good point, I'm ashamed to say. I hadn't
even thought about this until I came across this item,
and then I started to think about how important illustrations
are in children's books and how they stir feeling in
children that they never forget, Like where would Roll Dhal
be without the Quentin Blake line drawings exactly?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Like the kids can't read the words. The thing that's
drawing them into the book is the illustrations. Like, I
feel so bad that I've never thought about this before.
Like I could not tell you the names of the
illustrators on my daughter's books, and yet we read them
every night. But I should. Now I'm going to pay
attention to this.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, I read this amazing piece in The Guardian about
illustrations and the history of illustrations and what was that
Illustrations are as memory evoking as smells or songs, So
you see things as a kid and it will stick
with you for life.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
That's so true, Stacy.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
If kids are visual learners, you know, we've spent all
this time trying to get them off of iPads.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
They're drawn to visuals all the time.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Our illustrators actually the real rock stars of our childhoods,
and we've just been ignoring them.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
They really are, Like we need to pour one out
for them now, Like they are the reason that our
kids even drawn to books in the first place. Like
I guarantee, if they were just black and white words
on the page, they're not going to sit there for
more than two seconds. So yeah, we need to pour
one out for the illustrators.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I reckon great illustrators, like as you said, Quentin Blake,
like Helen Oxbury, who did We're going on a bear Hunt?
They shape the stories as much as the writers do.
You know, We're going on a bear Hunt was originally
supposed to be about a line of kings and queens
going on a bear hunt, but Helen Oxenbury turned it
into like this regular family squelching through the mud, and
(33:07):
that's just where the beauty is. And this article also
said that kids love chaos in illustrations.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
They fixate on messy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Disruptive moments in books so peas spilling out or the
tiger that came to tea drinking all the water out
of the tap, and they find a lot of joy
in the disorder, and that these illustrations can also help
them deal with big feelings chaos, loneliness, loss or anger
all through the pictures much more than words can. The
(33:34):
upshot of this is that I went onto the ABC
Book's website. They have updated the entry for mem Fox.
They have included Judy horrorcheck. She gets my vote, Judy,
we love you. I also want to shout out to
Deborah n Island for drawing my favorite illustrations in Mulgarbill's bicycle.
And also she did that hippopotamus that goes on.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
That is brilliant hctics one of the bed illustrator right
such range.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
So thank you illustrators, thank you for bringing the magic.
To wrap up today's show, we're going to just share
the things that we are loving sick, so the stuff
you might text to your friends or put in the
Mums group, Chat Amelia, what's on your list.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
This is going to sound strange, but my recommendation this
week is getting the newspaper. Oh. I subscribed to my
local paper to have it delivered Monday through Sunday, and
it is bringing me such joy and delight. And I've
tried to think about why that is. I think it's
because when you read the news in the newspaper, it's
(34:37):
giving come closer, it's saying, come here, let's share this experience.
If you read the news on your phone and your
droom scrolling, that says go away. It says I don't
want to be disturbed. And there's something about the act
of scrolling where it doesn't invite people in in the
way that a big newspaper does, and a.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Newspaper's a novelty now to them, like they don't see that,
so how cool.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
There's so many nice things about it, like you can
practice numbers and talk about numbers on the world weather page.
You can do the word games together with a pen
and paper so fun.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
You can draw mustaches and all the world leaders.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
And I think it's modeling good information hygiene, which I
think is going to be increasingly a topic of conversation
going forward with AI and everything else that's going on.
And I just think overall, it makes me feel calmer
because when I read the newspaper, it's a finite experience.
I can get to the end of it and I
(35:34):
can feel like, Okay, I know what's going on. I
don't need to keep doom scrolling. I don't need to
read all the news in the world. This is the
news that I need to know today. So I think
it's been a really nice experience, not just for my kids,
but also for me.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I love that it's so intentional, and it's also you
can't skip around all over the place like you can
on a phone.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
It's just the one single tasking. Love it. What about you, Stacey?
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So mine this week is a docco that I cannot
stop thinking about. Have you guys watched Unknown Number The
Catfish Story on Netflix? Stacy obsessed? Yes, mons no?
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Is it a true crime?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yes? True crime documentary my favorite kind. So I promise
I'm not going to spoil it for you. I'll just
give you top line. But if you want to listen
to more and you have watched it, Mom and Me
are allowed did a subs episode on it this week.
So it's a thirteen year old girl, Lauren Lacari. She
lives in this tiny town in Michigan, like couple hundred people.
And Lauren starts stating a boy in her class named Owen,
(36:33):
and that's when the messages start. So she starts getting
up to forty to fifty abusive messages to her phone
a day from an unknown number, and so does Owen.
And then they start coming to different people, but they
are the main ones that start receiving these messages. This
goes on for fifteen months until they finally figure out
who it is. So it's satisfying in that you will
(36:54):
find out who it is, and it is infuriating when
you find out who it is. But I think the
most interesting part about watching it and I'm sure you'll agree, Amelia,
Like the question you have when you're watching it is
why didn't they take the phones off the kids? Like
why didn't they remove their And it's such an interesting
reflection on society today in that the other parents of
(37:16):
the kids at the school said, well, no, we don't
want our kids phones taken away because we want to
know where they are. We want to be able to
track them and to be able to contact them. And
that's actually something that we touched on in last week's
episode when we were talking about phone tracking. It very
much plays into that, like would you track your kids?
And why do we want to track our kids? So
this poor girl had to go to school every day
knowing these messages were going to come through, and it
(37:38):
was all because the other parents wouldn't get on board
and support it. It was a bit of an aha
moment for me because I've find that conversation around phones
and children it's often about well, the kids don't want
to give the phone up because they're addicted, and that
may or may not be true. But what this documentary
shows is that parents also feel ambivalent about taking their
phones away from their kids because it's a way to
(38:00):
keep in touch with their kids and keep in some
ways control over their kids. And it was a reminder
that that dynamic goes both ways. Yeah, and when the
reveal happens, it's so satisfying. Mons, Like there is videos
all over the internet. You will scream. You will scream
out loud when you find out who it is. It's
that satisfying. So please watch for principle, it's the teaching
(38:22):
a word. You'll have to watch.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
It's the teacher and it's an exercise in resilience. Everybody fails.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Mon's what's yours this week?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I have a viral two ingredient dinner for lazy people
who hate cooking to me ingredient.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Please give it to me.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
It's changed my life.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
I can't stop talking about this and telling everybody about this.
So I stole it from the Lee's and Sarah podcast,
which for transparency reasons, I work on this show. But
this recipe has gone viral in a way that we've
never seen anything do before.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
People are losing their minds. It's called the triple Bee.
All you need to do is get a beef bowler
blade from the supermarket. It's called a beef bowler blade.
A triple be.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
It's not like a cut of meat.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
It's a cut of meat. It's like a big roast.
It's called beef bowl blade.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Okay, got it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
And then a jar of Cha Sus sauce. It comes
in a red jar. What you do is you turn
on your slow cooker, you dump the triple be in it.
You pour over the entire jar of Chassius sauce, put
the lid on, put it on low for eight to
ten hours, and walk away.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
That is it.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
No browning, no nothing, two things, triple b Cha su,
walk away and at the end what you will have
is the most amazing, succulent, delicious pulley a party like
Chinese infused beef.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
What is the charge eating a meal a succulent Chinese me.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
That you could serve with rice. You could put it
on like a white roll with some kalslaur in it.
It's just amazing. It's become a weekly staple in this
house because it's so ridiculously easy.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
YEA.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Nothing insides. Rage in me is when you see a
slow cooker recipe and it says you've got a brown
in a pan fur, I might No, I'm not doing
that because I'll just book it in the pan. So
this is great, love it.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
That's all we have time for on Parenting out Loud
this week. We are so happy that you're here in
our new home in this feed, so thank you for
hitting the follow button. Actually, we do need a name
for our tribe of smart parents.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
What can we call them?
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Maybe poles call yeah the polyp Please pout louders like
parenting out Louders.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yeah, I like that?
Speaker 4 (40:40):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Well, before you go, we are so goddamn thirsty for
praise here. Maybe our parents did not praise us enough,
and frankly it shows. So if you've got any spare
praise rattling around that you're taking off your kids now,
we'd love to have it. So the way you can
do it is drop us a review on Apple Podcasts.
It actually helps other people find the show because the
Apple charts work in this way where it's this weird
(41:03):
alchemy of reviews and follows, so it's like the worst
game of roadblocks ever. So please write us a review.
But here's the challenge. Here's what I would love.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I would love if you could please write it in
gentle parenting speak, so very non praise speak. That would
really make me laugh.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
So none of this this is the best podcast in
the whole word world. Like that sort of reckless praise
will go straight to our heads. It's not good for us.
So I really want to see what people have got.
So here's an example. You worked really hard on this
episode and it shows keep going.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You're learning and growing every week. I'd like the way
you're speaking here. I bet one day you're gonna get it.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Please leave us one a little inside joke for all
of us, and I can't wait to read them. Big
Thanks to our team this week. Junior Content Producer is
Tessa Kotovich, produces Leaporgus and Sashatanic and the group ep
Is Roots de Vine.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Have a great week. Will be back in this feed
next Saturday morning. See ya, Bye, Yes
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