July 11, 2025 • 46 mins
Welcome to Parenting Out Loud where if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about it.
On the show today, Jessie Stephens, Amelia Lester and Stacey Hicks sit down to tackle;
- Glam retreats: a cultural necessity for post-partum mums?
- Why bedtime stories are being put to bed themselves.
- How some dads forget their kids names, refuse to change a nappy or fail to RSVP — and why some women let them.
- And, sleep divorces. Is this where intimacy gets put to rest, or a secret hack that's been misjudged?
Plus, in this week’s reccos:
🐣 Amelia is a fan of these Baby Origami wraps.
📚 Jessie solves a gift issue with a personalised book from Lucy and Co.
🧸 Stacey shares her obsession with magnetic tiles.
Support independent women's media
What To Listen To Next:
- Parenting Out Loud Ep 1: Grandparents — It's Time For Your Performance Review
- Parenting Out Loud Ep 2: The Death Of The Dining Table & 'Outdated' Schooling
- Parenting Out Loud Ep 3: A New Co-Parenting Rule & The 100% Work Dilemma
- Parenting Out Loud Ep 4: The Ms Rachel Controversy & The Great Kids Vs Friendships Debate
- Parenting Out Loud Ep 5: Dr Becky's DFK Theory & The Great Trampoline Debate
- How To Build A Universe: Into The Jungle We Go
- The Baby Bubble: Hi, I Have Some Feedback: The Baffling World Of Children’s Books
- Tell Me It's Going To Be Okay: Trump's First 24 Hours In Office Were Busy
- Connect your subscription to Apple Podcasts
What to read:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
On Hello and welcome to Parenting Out Loud. I am
Jesse Stevens and I am joined by Amelia Lester Hi
Jesse Hello, and MoMA MIA's deputy editor Stacy Here. Hello,
to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week.
(00:40):
Because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about
it on today's show. Sleep separation could be the secret
to a better quality of life, and one of us
is a very early adopter. Plus, why don't men RSVP
to party invitations? It's time to get into the hopeless
dad's debate? And good night to the bedtime story. What
happens when parents stop reading to kids. We're starting to see,
(01:04):
But first.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In case you, mister postpartum just got a glow up.
Perhaps you're like me and you remember that time as
a difficult one. Mesh undies, laundry piles, occasional abouts of
crying on the bathroom or kitchen floor anymore.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
Yes, hand is up.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
But now there are these things called postpartum retreats popping up.
They are for mothers to be mothered and for those
who can afford them. A writer for US Vogue wrote
about one at a Waldorf astoria in California. She spent
two nights there two weeks after giving birth, and she
enjoyed all sorts of marvelous things, round the clock baby
care with duelers on demand. She seriously just had an
(01:44):
iPad and she could just be like, I need someone
right now. Facials, fresh meals, massages.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
No crying on the kitchen floor.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
There are others across the United States, and they're now
also in Australia. There's one in Sydney's Double Bay and
there is one in Melbourne. These don't come cheap, however,
the one in Melbourne is fifty two hundred dollars for
four nights.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Ooh.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Now, we should say that the postpartum retreat is not
a new idea. There are many cultures around the world
that do recognize the importance of giving women.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
A break after childbirth.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
So, for instance, in South Korea, the tradition is called
Sanu Jewelry one and it refers to care centers when
new mothers check in and then they get these nourishing
broths and they get really taken care of for weeks,
often even months after birth. And there's actually a similar
tradition in China where a postpart and parent rests for
a month in a kind of confinement and family members
(02:36):
attend to the housework and.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
To the older kids.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I wish the Western take on this idea, which is brilliant,
was accessible to more people. I mean, I'm sure in
Scandinavia they probably have some kind of government funded program
where everyone gets it. And I think it's really important
these days because you and new moms are able to
live near family members, and for me in particular, it's
a really important corrective to a trend that I have
(03:03):
experienced firsthand in the US. So my first baby I
gave birth to in a so called baby friendly hospital.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
This is a new.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
You would think in hospitals across America. What this basically
amounts to is there's no crash, there's no formula, you
have to breastfeed, and there's no assistance at night because
the baby has to sleep with you the whole time.
So it's baby friendly, but it is not mother friendly.
And I'm here for the focus on mothers a little more. Jesse,
would you want to go to one of these I
(03:34):
don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'm not sure if I would. I have read a
lot about these. I read one article that kind of said,
is it I really like all the supportant terms of
food and you know, even lactation consultants and that kind
of stuff is great.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
But the broth, the broth broths.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
But one kind of criticism was saying, women don't need
a baby robe embroidered with initials, like we've just there
are some things that are probably a little too far.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Yeah, that's what the Vogue riter got at the Waldorf
Hotel in California.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So what this essentially is, as you alluded to, is
what Trevor Noah has talked about this among you know,
lots of researchers, which is we all lost our community
and now we have to pay to get them back, exactly.
And so in an ideal world, you wouldn't have to
pay for this kind of service, it would just be
(04:28):
on offer. And as someone in I have such privilege
when it comes to family and support, and so I
think I felt like I sort of got this, Like
I was able to rely on people who could bring
meals and if I needed someone to hold the baby,
I could ask them. But I do worry about the
disparity here and what class has access to this type
(04:50):
of thing, because postpartum depression has so much to do
with the environment following birth, and I worry that if
it's like, oh, you pay for this, you pay for this,
you pay for this, it means that our standard of
basic care kind of goes, oh, well, that's all outsourced.
Like ideally hospitals would do a little bit more of this, maybe.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Yeah, as opposed to a kick in the pants and
some meshondis exactly right.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
See what about you.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I don't know if it's a result of having a
baby who was in special care. So I was in
hospital for longer than a lot of new mums are.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
But how long were you in hospital?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I was in for three weeks before I had my daughter,
and then about ten days after she was born. That
is a long it's a long time. I knew the
meal rotation of that hospital like the back.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
Of my friend. I got to have a whole month's.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Worth a bet.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
But I basically had to be dragged out of that place,
Like I felt very anxious when I was away from
the nurses and the heart rate monitors and all of
the things, and so I think if something like this
had been within my financial reach, I absolutely would have
taken it, because it felt like whipplash to go home
and to have almost no one around because I'd been
(05:57):
in hospital for so long. My husband had to go
back to work a couple of weeks after I got home,
and it did feel very much like you're alone, and
so I and I think there's a certain level of guilt.
Not everyone feels this, but I felt very bad if
I asked anyone to help me with anything, even if
you know, and I think a lot of women feel
that they don't want to be a burden. They're like,
(06:17):
why am I finding this harder than the average person,
So you don't want to reach out. And it almost
feels like if you could pay for this, obviously not
that amount of money, because that's not achievable for most
of us, but if you could pay, it almost takes
the guilt away from that, like it's a service, it's transactional.
You're helping me and I'm getting something from that.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah, I remember thinking that if I asked, there were
instances where I probably would have liked help, but I
didn't want to look like I thought your narrative goes
so funny, you go, they'll think I don't want to
spend time with my baby exactly like they'll think they'll
think I had this, that there would be judgment towards
me more than an imposition on them. Yeah, but I
want to table one criticism that I heard from a
(06:57):
midwife about this kind of thing, and it's that with
too too much help. I don't know if I agree
with this, but I was interviewing her about these kind
of providers, and she was saying, when you're in a
situation where you are overwhelmed with expertise, whether that be
this is how you swaddle, this is nappy, this is breastfeeding,
it can undermine the instincts of the parents a little bit.
(07:23):
And I know that a lot of people poo pooh
the idea of instincts. I think that a lot of
us actually just need to learn how to do things.
But she said, you shouldn't feel as though you need
a university degree before you leave the hospital with a baby, Like,
we've got to make sure that we're not telling parents
that this is so hard and so complicated that you
need to do twelve classes a day in order to cope,
(07:45):
going and working it out is kind of part of
the experience.
Speaker 5 (07:48):
Yeah, and that's it.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I feel like we are so overly prepared now, like
we do courses. People here who are pregnant, we kind
of are saying to them, well, you've got two jobs now,
because you've got to keep up with all of the
appointments and the lessons and all of the things. So
maybe it does get in the way of your instincts
and just well, I've just got to get through this
rough patch and then we'll be fine. An article about
the benefits of getting a sleep divorce corn this week,
(08:10):
and I need everyone to know about it. Writing for
The Conversation, Monash University's psychology fellow, Alex Malaw explored the
many reasons otherwise perfectly happy couples might choose to sleep separately,
and how it can actually lead to a better night's sleep.
She said, well, many people say they prefer to sleep
or sleep better next to their partner. When scientists measure
(08:30):
sleep objectively, such as through an electro in cephalogram, and yes,
I did practice saying that.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
Ten times before we hit record.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
When they use the egs to assess brain waves, the
data actually showed poor asleep quality when co sleeping. So
some reasons obviously that people might choose to be in
separate beds is conflicting sleep schedules, one person snores or
has sleep apnea, or insomnia, sleep talking.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
The list goes on.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But the other main catalyst for a sleep divorce can
be when kids come into the mix and suddenly sleep
is the most precious but often hard to achieve commodity
in your life. And now I have something to confess.
I have been happily sleep divorced for five years, not
actually divorced, five years nearly, which is right around the
time I started getting pregnancy insomnia. And I'm just never
(09:19):
going back. So would either of you consider this? I'm
so interested.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
I have questions for you. First, please, pregnancy and somnia starts. Yes,
I was in exactly the same position, and I would
go I was like, I can't be up and down,
I can't worry about you. Yes, I had it to
separate myself often when the baby comes. If you're going
to go, all right, let's take shifts so that we're
both not losing sleep. Tell me about the next stage
(09:45):
where you're going. You know what I actually like having
my own space with a Now how old your daughter for?
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah? Four five?
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Talked to me about that.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
It was survival mode at the start. It was it
was I needed to sleep, he needed to sleep, and
so we would take turns with the monitor. Someone would
take a shift, and then it was kind of like,
look at this bed with the nice linen I've put
on it, and look how dark I and have the
room when you like to wake up with the sun.
And look at how no one stole my quilt in
the middle of the night. And it just snowball to
(10:17):
the point where we both were sleeping so much better
by sleeping separately that we both went I think we
just have to do that all the time now.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
And the most urgent question, I mean, how many bloody bedrooms.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Do you have?
Speaker 5 (10:30):
This is the thing. This is a big privilege to
be able to do this.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, so we
are very lucky to have three bedrooms. But this is
why we can only have one child. There's no more
bedrooms available. I'm not willing to give mine up. I
need to keep it so those kids would be sharing.
But it's just worked out so much better. And I
have to say, like, I love my husband, but I
love him a lot more when I can't hear his
(10:54):
snoring or experience the wwe like body slams that he
manages to do every time he turns over. So this
is definitely a good solution if you're experiencing that. Okay,
I went deep on this after you mentioned it. I
was really curious about when the double bed custom came about,
because when you watch old movies and TV shows, the
(11:15):
married couples do go to sleep into single beds. So
it turns out that it's very recently that we decided
that couples have to sleep in the same bed, and
we're talking the sixties.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Before then, it was actually.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Seen as healthier and more modern for a married couple
or a partnered couple to.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Sleep in separate beds.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
And I love this detail, which is that Victorian doctors
said that the weaker sleeper would draining all the vitality
from the stronger person. That's exactly what happened, and so
it's a very recent thing and it kind of reminds me.
I find it a bit confronting. I won't lie when
you told me about it. There is a kind of
instinctive idea of like, is there something wrong with their relationship,
(11:58):
because it's so ingrained in us that married couples sleep
in the same bed. But then I got thinking about
it and I remember that Esther Perell's big thing is
that we keep expecting one point to be everything, to
fulfill all functions, including to be sleep compatible.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
And this is just taking a little bit of the
pressure off.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Now that said, I do not have an extra bedroom
for people in my situation, I would recommend mouth tape.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
We have a like a day bed in Luna's room,
so it's like if you sleep separately, yep, you go
and you sleep and it's tiny, like you roll off
and break an arm. But we did that for the
first six months. Luke has slept in the nursery on
the day bed, and Luna and I were in the
big room with the big bed. But it was interesting
the moment we decided to come back and I was like,
(12:46):
I don't get to sprawl, I don't get a blanket
like this.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Is so did you consider ever keeping you see?
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Oh, the bed was more comfortable. I have time for it.
And then I was having a think about what the
stigma is right, And there is a stigma. There is stigma,
and it's to do with intimacy. And I also think
that it's a suggestion that it will absolutely kill your
sex life, right, because come on, you've got to sleep
the same bed.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Absolutely, that is the number one question I get asked.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
We won't ask you.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
What's funny about that, right, is that it's like how
many people are rolling over at two am and being like,
now that I can feel you there, we should have
spontaneous two am sex and that keeps our relationships strong. Like, no,
you wake up at two am, you hit the other
person in the face. I do it all the time
to luk up exactly, he mumbles, sleep talk, We fight,
and then in the morning we're shitty at each other,
(13:37):
like any sort of intimacy is not happening.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
No, I think you are much more likely to want
to be intimate with your partner if you don't want
to kill them all night.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And some of the studies she cited in this piece
spoke about how clients reported that sleeping alone can alleviate
some of the anxiety they have around sleep, because if
they're the person who's disturbing the other person. If they're
the snorer, then they're having less quality sleep because they're
worried about waking the other person. So they've actually found
that people sleeping separately means that there's not that stress
(14:10):
as they're going to sleep themselves.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I also find that when I've gone through periods of insomnia,
having someone beside you who's asleep is really distressing. Yeah,
it's like it's real because you go wish, Oh, you're furious,
You're absolutely angry. And it also means I've a partner
who goes to bed a lot earlier than me, and
that's bed time in our house, so I have to
go to bed. And if I fall into the habit
of then scrolling on my phone for the two hours
(14:34):
where he's asleep and I'm not ready to go to
sleep yet, terrible for your brain. So it's like I've
had to start to do like the kindle or whatever.
You can't you can't read a print book, can you.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
This also reminded me of I used to live in Japan,
and when you travel around Japan you go to traditional inns.
They often have a tatarmi matte arrangement where whole families
will sleep in one room onto Tarmi. So it just
was a reminder that the thing that we think is
the default is not the default for a lot of
(15:07):
people around the world and through human history.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Is it a really big space where the family will sleep.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Not especially big, but it feels like it's a very
different way of sleeping because instead of being given this
prescribed rectangle to sleep on. Yeah, there's a sense of
like you've got more latitude to move around because you're
all just sleeping however you like and in whatever shape
you like in this room.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So cool.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I want to talk about a particular type of person
who I think we all know, who we may even
have in our lives. Right now, let me back up
and say why I started thinking about this. A Shanty,
the singer A Shanty, and the rapper Nelly recently had
a baby together, which is lovely and Nellie seems very
(15:56):
happy about it. But in a recent interview, a joint interview,
he was sitting beside a Shanty and he said.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
To her baby, I'll give you the world, but I.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Just ain't changing no diaper, And as Shanty responded, the
only way women from Millennia have responded to such a statement, which.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Was with an eyeroll.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
A similar display of this was evident in an interview
that Nick Cannon did recently. The singer who you may know,
has twelve children and the interview. For some reason, this
interview was taking place on pilates mats. But I don't
know why that is. But the interviewer asked Nick to
run through his twelve children's names, and let's just listen
to what happened next.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
What are their names?
Speaker 4 (16:37):
You want?
Speaker 6 (16:37):
You want all twelve twelve names?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
This is where I usually get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Why because you don't know all that I know all
of them.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
But like last night, you see keep me, keep me honest.
There's rock Roll, Golden, Powerful, Rise, Onyx, Legendary, Zion, zillion Zin.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And just see this who were who U?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
How many you're missing too?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I'm missing two. Yeah, it's a little awkwul.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
That's where a hut's are.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
So look, these two men seem like nice people, but
they are what I would call hopeless dads.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And these are dads.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
They're not deeply problematic in any way, but they're just
kind of hopeless when it comes to the task of
raising children. So now that I've named this phenomenon and
described this type of person. I suspect you're going to
have a lot of examples for me and the newsletter
writer Melinda Wehnamoya, who has a great parent in newsletter,
had one recently. She asked, do dads know how to RSVP?
(17:45):
She wrote, I'd love to know what goes through dad's
minds when they receive kid party invitations. I don't mean
this in a snarky way. I am truly curious and
want to understand do they think not my department or eh,
my partner must be on this invite and they'll take
care of it. So I can really relate to that.
I just was planning a kid's birthday party, and as
a little social experiment, I did send half the invitations
(18:09):
to the dads on the parent contact list and have
the invitations to the mums.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And what did you find?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Well, it was a little predictable.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
The women responded and the men did not. So I
just started sending the men extremely passive, aggressive, polite messages saying, Hey,
any chance that you know whether you can make it
to this kid's birthday party. Some of them just never
responded to me and then showed up at the party.
So at this point I need to make clear that
this is obviously not all men. I'm not doing that
(18:43):
eye rolling at all men comedy routine that's almost become
a cliche at this point. But the question I want
to ask you both is do we deal with the
hopeless dads just by kind of shrugging our shoulders and
figuring that's how men are. Or are these hopeless dads
actually creating very real domestic labor imbalances and kind of
(19:04):
getting away with it under the guys of being hopeless.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
They are, and part of it is weaponized in competence
in terms of it just gets too hard to have
them do the task, so you know, women step in
and that leads to serious inequality and I think resentment
within a relationship. But there was such a fantastic point
in this newsletter that I think really highlighted why some
(19:30):
dad's about a rsvping, and it's that if you have
never organized a kid's birthday party, you don't understand how
important rsvping is. And so the reality is that mostly
it's mother's doing it. Having done it, they're going I
should let them know asap so that they can book it.
Whereas dads are going, what does it matter if I
show up or I don't.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
And the reason why it matters is because if you
do not have enough goodie.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Bags, yeah, all hell will break.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Loose, exactly right, and I'll be your kid crying. And
women know that, not because it is innate to women,
but because it has been so practiced.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
And they don't teach us that the POSTPARTU and retreat
the importance of having enough goodie bags have to learn.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
We learn.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
And I think that's an important mantra, right because even cooking,
I didn't cook before and I still can't cook, but
guess what, there has to be something on a plate, right,
So you set up systems, you set up processes, you
do trial and error, you work it out. And the
idea that you've got to let dads fail a bit
and work it out and make mistakes, I think is
(20:33):
just a really important one. Like if it's that they
don't RSVP and then they show up.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
At it, are you able to do that and step back?
Speaker 4 (20:40):
And I also a related question to this is I
think correct me if I'm wrong. You have used the
fair play playing cards? Can you explain what those are
and what your experience was with them.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah, the fair Play cards. I just so recommend them
to everyone and they have every have you heard of them.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Stacy, Yes, yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
So it has everything that happens in a household, from
like who sorts out the house Internet to who does
dental kids dental, to who does clothes, all that kind
of stuff, and we sorted it out and most of
the lunar stuff was on me. And I laugh with
friends that it's like there's never a discussion that clothes
(21:18):
are on you, but when you go away, packing is
on you. Yet somehow it is, and you know, Luca
does take it turns out there a few thinks he's
doing like tims or whatever, which I would say sometimes
I'm quite happy with that. I will also say this
is still a massive issue, and I think those examples
(21:40):
highlight that. But I reckon that we're watching a shift
in real time, Like I was thinking about the nineties
and your Homo Simpson and your Ray Romano, and like
the stereotypical bumbling fool dad who didn't know how to
do anything and just set a funny joke every now
and then. You're going to work right in front of
me where I can keep an eye on you.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
You got that? Who do you think you're dealing with? You?
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I may seem stupid, but it's just to get your
mother to not asked me to do stuff. And then
I was looking into this research that said that in
the nineteen eighties, forty three percent of fathers said they'd
never changed a nappy. Is this in the US? Forty
three percent of fathers had never changed a nappy. Now
(22:28):
that number has dropped to just three percents. That's enormous.
And so even like from in an Australian context, you've
got how are the dad's dad? Like Hamish Blake's podcast,
You've got two doting dads with Maddy j dadding and
fatherhood is becoming a verb in a way that motherhood.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Okay it has been, but I need to confess something. Yeah,
I get annoyed at the dad's dadding as well. Yeah,
tell me, tell me it's just like it. Am I
just setting that up to fail because I'm annoyed at
the hopeless dads. And then when the dads start talking
about dadding, I'm sort of annoyed at them too.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I see, I really like it, I really welcome it.
And I listened to a series of how other dads
done when I was pregnant, and it actually gave me
so many tips and insights into parenting from fathers, and
I think that making those communities, like we're talking about
the postpartum retreats, right, you then go to a mother's
group and there is all this shared knowledge and wisdom
(23:26):
that goes between women. And in defense of some of
those fathers, they have no equivalent. There's no kind of
fathers all sitting down and working out how they're going
to do this. I think there is some isolations.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I love that idea for them.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
So here's how you replied to what'sapp message is at
a party exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
But there are some things that they have just probably
never done in their entire life, particularly when it's a
father with the daughter. Like realize that my husband has
never tied a hair elastic in his entire life, because
why would he. So that was a steep linker that
he needed to go on and practice on my hair,
so he wasn't doing it on a moving target to
(24:06):
know how to do that. And I think there are
some things like that that yeah, I will have just
never come across their desk. But there are other things
like rsping tool party that aren't really forgivable and they
should know, and it is good to see that the
pendulum swinging back the other way.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
I also think that when it comes to talking about
hopeless dads, what we're really saying is is.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
It okay to let them back to that idea?
Speaker 4 (24:31):
So, for instance, a dad I know, who shall remain nameless,
is not great at matching the kid's clothes to the Weatherly.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Hypothetical is that dad good at matching his own clothes
to the weather? Because I have a lot of men
who are not, for example, my own father would be
in short, a great point.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
It's a really great point. And the question becomes do
I let them? Meaning do I let the children go
out without jumpers on and let this hypothetical father allow
that to happen, or do I intervene and say this
is going to lead to misery and can we not
just put the jumper on before we leave the house.
(25:16):
And that can set the heart of a lot of
these questions, because it's like, do I just let them?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Do I just let them go?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
I'm cold, I'm team let them because you know what'll happen.
They'll get to the park, or they'll get outside and
they'll start change and they'll say I'm very cold, and
then probably you'll get a call saying.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yes, can you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
But you know what the other thing is too, which
is really annoying. Sometimes it works out for them, and
that's even more irritating because you'll fret about something like that,
about your child going out without their jumper, and then
they'll come back incident free, nothing's been said, and so
really the dads are just working smarter, not harder, and
worrying less about those things and getting away with it.
So maybe we need to take a leaf out of
(25:58):
their ball.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Good Night to the bedtime story. Lauren Ironmonger wrote for
the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend that the number of
parents reading aloud to their children is at an all
time low. This research comes from HarperCollins UK, which found
that less than half of parents of kids under thirteen
said reading aloud to children was fun for me. And
(26:21):
can I just say on this, I think it's a
very different question saying do you read to your kids?
Do you think it's fun for me?
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Because two things are not the same.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I think reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fifteenth time.
I wouldn't describe it as fun. I'd describe it as something,
but fun would not be it. Australian data found that
many parents can't fit in daily reading with their kids,
and just quickly this article goes into why it's even important. First,
it's massive for literacy skills, but it also strengthens the
(26:49):
parent child bond. It sends a message to your child
that at the end of the day, they are the
most important thing. Amelia. Do you think culturally we've started
to see reading as something that a child does at
preschool or school, and therefore it doesn't have to be
done at home. We've outsourced it.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
It think that's such a good question, and I think,
very sadly, the answer is pretty clearly yes. And it
dawned on me recently that I am very much part
of the problem here. I take my kids to swimming
practice on a Sunday and I sit there and I
doom scroll on my phone and feel my anxiety spiral
(27:30):
and instead I should be reading a book. So last
week I took along Stephen King's Misery, which I've never read,
and I was like, this, Stephen King.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
It's good author.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
He's actually writing something, and then I realized I was
role modeling for my children, who I'm always sort of
flinging books at and telling them to read that reading
can be fun.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
That's so true.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
And did you was it a paper copy, like a yeah, paperback.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
With a really like spooky looking cover that my kids
were obsessed with, because, by the way, physical books are
kind of intriguing.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
You remember that idea, like, yeah, a cover of a
book is meant to entice you into it. And so
when I was reading this book, they're like, misery, what's
that book about? And it was just it occasioned a
great conversation that said, this is a work in progress.
For me too, I am exhausted.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
At the end of the day, and sometimes it is
easier for me to throw on an audiobook on the
Bluetooth speaker and then I can go and stack the
dishwasher while they're falling asleep. And I haven't felt too
guilty about that, because literacy experts do say that listening
to an audiobook can build all sorts of really important
literacy skills, such as comprehension and vocabulary, and they're often
(28:40):
read by fantastic actors, and so they're getting this really
entertaining story read to.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Them probably better.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It's better read by Emma Thompson than it is by me,
for instance, because we were reading Matilda on audiobook. So yeah,
I haven't felt too guilty about that, but that was
until I read this article and it made that really
important point that you reference Jesse, that you're not just
reading to them to teach them how to read. You're
reading to them to show them that actually the dishwasher
(29:09):
is less in important than us spending some time together.
And you know, okay, I'm just adding that to another
list of things I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
But that's the thing as well, is that usually now
there's in a lot of households, it's two working parents.
You're getting home later sometimes, I mean I get home
at six thirty seven o'clock from work to then try
an organize dinner, eat together, which we're also doing wrong
that we're never eating together now and get your kids
to sleep. Something has to give, and so I think
we are probably guilty of just replacing that, as you
(29:38):
say with I always use.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Sleep stories, audiobooks.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
We've got like the Yoto player with the little cards
that my daughter can listen to. And so yeah, we're
just kind of unwittingly putting our kids at a disadvantage
by not sitting down and doing reading with them in
the interest of cutting a bit of time.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
I wonder if the story here is more about adults
aren't reading, because this research came out as well that
the book industry broadly adults aren't going and buying books.
That's absolutely tanked. And as you say, Amelia, if we're
not modeling it, and therefore it does seem like a
(30:15):
biggert step. I always find this with reading, that there's
a big block if you haven't done it for a while,
and you can feel like it's harder, and then it's
a muscle, like reading is genuinely a muscle that gets weak.
And so I was reading about this because it's something
I really really worry about. Us during this event with
this academic whose name is Sophie g And she was
(30:36):
saying that not reading is worse for you than vaping,
that for the brain, like it is so important for
everything from memory to empathy to just all these cognitive
skills and the ability especially to read deeply. That's not
innate and we have not evolved to read. Every single
(30:57):
generation has to learn how to read, and in order
to learn how to read, it takes like years of
deep focus. Reading is one of you cannot do it
while you're doing anything else.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
No, and some people never get that. Travis Kel recently
came out and yeah, you can't really read.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
So that's what I was reading about. Even the Naplan
results came out recently and they said that Ozzie kids
have sunk to an all time low in terms of
reading and writing skills, and low literacy is an issue
among a lot of adults. And low literacy I found
this interesting. It was saying that actually being able to go,
I know what the words on the page mean is
(31:32):
one thing, but the step that seems to be missing
is then understanding what those words mean, and also the ability.
Do you see the article in The Atlantic recently about
college students who had never read a book. It was
so the ability to sit down and read a book
beginning to end is also a skill that you can lose,
and so deep reading is being able to sit with
something for a long time, follow it, like go to
(31:55):
work the next day, kind of remember where you were,
and even though it feels so hard, it's like, you know,
we've spoken about pickietas and stuff on this show. And
you know how they always say, like on the plate,
they're not going to eat the broccoli, but you've gotta
have brocoli on the plate.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
Yeah, yeah, you got.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
It's going to be an option. It's like having the
books in the house. See before I speak about a kindle, right,
because I've gone to that because I'm trying to at
night not have a lamp or anything on. But now
I think you.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Should get a sleep divorce.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Then you don't have to worry about because lights on
everywhere to the age where Luna might be coloring in
or something. And I don't want her to see me
constantly on my phone, so I'll go and read. But
it looks like I'm on an iPad or a screen
or a device, and I think it's more important she
sees me term page, and.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
It's also less interesting for her. She doesn't understand why
you're engaged with this kindle as opposed to Stephen King's misery.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah. She even goes into my room sometimes and when
I've got books next to my bed, like she loves
to flick through them and like look at the page.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, my daughter often now pretends she's the librarian now
that they're doing that in school of and then I
have to go and borrow books from her. And it
is just such a yeah, like it's a tangible thing.
It's not the same as having it on a device.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
This is it. This is a humble brag. But Luna
was going throughout the bookcase in our study recently and
got a book down and it was one of my books,
and she went to the back and another picture of
me and she went, Mummy had to explain, but that
is and I mum's an English teacher, so like this
is a special interest area. But like I grew up
(33:26):
and there was always a book in the and the
way that you would just go.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
On and they're so intriguing when you're a kid as well.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
You'd always find a naughty one and you'd go, I
will be reading that privately. Great, absolutely great, you're putting
words together. That's wonderful, or like names that I would
see your covers.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
I still remember when my parents love books and reading
and they have bookshelves all around the house and there
was a Joan Diddian book called.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
The White Album. I just had a completely white cover,
and this blew my mind.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
How can you have a cover that has nothing on it?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
It's so true the physicality of books. And apparently as well,
they're finding that the print book is a totally different
experience to read it.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
It's just the object of the print book is so special.
And in a world where we have so few objects
that are special, because even our photos are on our
phone and we don't have DVDs anymore videos, I think
that's a portal into reading, yes, is to give kids
the opportunity to be mystified by a book with a
(34:27):
white cover.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
And the smell, the smell of a book, Yeah, I
love the smells. Producer Ruth was telling us that the
reason we love the smell of old books so much
is because they smell as the ink and the paper
and everything break down, it smells like vanilla, which is
such a homely warm Like I'm thinking, there are a
few things to me more comforting than that smell. And
you can get like fragrances or candles or whatever in
(34:50):
your house to make it smell like that, which I'm like,
I just want to fill my whole house that smell
of like an old, old book, And.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
I also want to know that Producer Ruth is the
best smelling person at Mum and Men.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Which is talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
I wonder if it's also that we're a bit more
sensitive about what we're reading now and what we're reading
to our children now. The other week, my daughter brings
home a library book every week from pre K, and
she loves it. It's like a big event to bring
it home in the bag, which is great. But this
week she brought home The Ugly Duckling, and I found myself,
as I was reading it to her, feeling weird about
(35:22):
even using the word ugly. And I think that's something
that's coming up a lot now with books like even
Roll Dahl's books a couple of years ago were rewritten
to remove the words ugly and fat. And so I
think maybe we're not reading as many of the stories
that we loved as kids, worried that they'll be inappropriate,
and so we're not enjoying it.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Therefore we're doing it.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Let's true.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
I have two examples of that from recently. We have
a copy of Role Dal's Revolting Rhymes, which I remember loving.
It's actually my copy, and I was reading it one
day to the kids and I just suddenly my eyes
lit upon the next word, and the next.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Word was slut. Oh, that's a really.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Hard word to explain the meaning to kids, I find.
And then the second example was had a really nice
time reading the line the witch in the Wardrobe with
one of my kids.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
But gosh, that's a weird book, is it. There's a
lot going on in there. It's essentially a Christian allegory,
which is fine. I don't mean to.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Say that's weird, but it does raise a lot of
questions about what the book is actually trying to say and.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
What the wardrobe is a metaphor for.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
And you just find yourself going down some garden paths
that maybe you didn't expect that you'd be going down
at bedtime.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah, there are some. My mum brings a lot of
classics over that. Did you ever read There's a Hippopotamus
on my roofed? And cake? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so we're
big we read that.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Well, I'm sorry, but that there's one that's like Mummy's
on a diet. She has salad, cheese, and I read
that every day and I'm like, this is this is
a bit weird a diet. But those ones, right, are brilliant.
They're nonsensical, they're wonderful. I watch Luna just look at
the roof, and I'm like, just thinks that the hippotamus
in there. And I made it. But Mum always says
that a lot of the newer ones are quite sanitized,
(37:13):
and they there trying to hit you over the.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Head girls doing stem.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yes, exactly right. And it's like school has done this
a little bit too. They made reading into hard work
in terms of reading for knowledge or like reading for
moral like lesson instead of just reading for pleasure. And like,
I see the pleasure that Luna gets from hippopotamus, and
(37:40):
I'm like, let's just let's learn our colors later, and
let's just go to hippopotamus eating kay On the ugly
darkling thing. When I was a kid, I asked my
nan if I was pretty. She lived with us, and
I was like five or six, and I said, Nana,
am I pretty? And she said, you're an ugly darkling? Oh.
She died before I grew up, And so I still wonder.
I'm like, did I ever turn into this one?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Nan? You're you're one. It's time for our recommendations of
the week. So Jesse, do you want to go first, sure.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
On the topic of books, I remembered, don't you find
that it's really hard to buy gifts for like grandparents
and like Mothers Day comes around and you're like, oh,
it's my mom and speaking of hopeless dads, it's their mom. Whatever.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
Don't give me a hand cream, can you?
Speaker 3 (38:23):
You can't know? And what am I like? I'm not
going to get her like a nice blouse. She's going
to be like, this is disgusting.
Speaker 4 (38:29):
I always used to get my nana every Christmas a
jar of oil of olay, and that smell still takes
me bad.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
Talking of nostalging.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I won't want that, she won't want that. So what
I got was I went on Etsy and there are
heaps of examples of this, but I went on Etsy
and found this company that makes personalized children's books. So
this one is about going to Nana's house, and you
can say, like, when I go to Nana's house, there's
a blah and like you can put in all the
(39:00):
little details and they've even got like put in three
words to describe your nana. And I'm like, crazy, weird, annoying,
just a troll. But it's all about a day at
Nana's house. So it's and I made one for Meya,
and I made one for my mum. And they're just
the cutest, most personalized. It has their names, it has
(39:21):
whatever they call their grandmother on the front, and they're
just so so sweet. So this was on Etsy from
Lucy and Co. We have a link in our show notes,
but there are heaps and heaps online and they are
just a lovely, thoughtful little gift.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
My recommendation is something that I have not used in
quite a few years, but which I still like to
gift to new parents. And it is a fabulous product
that there's a little bit of a story behind. So
I used to do a show on Mom and Mia
many years ago with Maya called tell Me It's going
to be Okay. It was a show which we conceived
(39:55):
of and started doing after Donald Trump was elected, and
I think the title kind of summarizes where I had
spaces that it literally came to a screeching halt about
two years in when we realized that we could no
longer tell each other it was going to be okay.
So and It's never come back hasn't never to come back.
(40:17):
But it was a fun experience and we had a
small but devoted cadre of listeners, and one of them
was a lovely lady who lived in Neutral Bay in Sydney,
and she sent me an invention of hers called the
baby Oragami Rap. Now, this saved my life when I
(40:39):
had my first baby, because you know how the world
is divided into people who are good at oragami and
people who aren't. Yeah, I'm one of the people who's
not me or anything.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I think it takes like patience and grace to think.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Either of those things exactly.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
So this is called the baby Oragami Rap because if
you've never mastered swaddling, it makes it literally impossible not.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
To correctly swaddle the babies.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
So I think Nick Cannon could do with one of these,
and I think that Nelly could do with yown.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And I really.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Got a lot of use out of it. Basically, it's numbered.
It's a sort of a step by step numbered way
to swaddle your baby.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
And it's super tight, like it does everything you're.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Tight, and it's made a beautiful one hundred percent cotton.
It's really easy to wash, and I just love gifting
them to people because swaddling is just so hard it's
so hard.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I just never got it. I never got it.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
So it's called the Baby Origami Rap and it is
from an Australian company and a friend of the pod.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
So thanks for saving my life.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
How about you, Stacy, what's your reco Okay?
Speaker 2 (41:48):
So I am rubbish at imaginative play. I'm I'm just
not good. But the one toy I bought for my daughter,
I bought it nearly three years ago now and we
still play with these every single week, usually multiple times
a week. And they're those colored magnetic tiles. So I
haven't seen these okay.
Speaker 5 (42:05):
So they're just different colors.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
You can get like aesthetically pleasing pastel ones, you can
get the bright primary colors, whatever you want.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
They come in different packs.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
You might get like eighty pieces or one hundred pieces,
and they're just magnetic squares and triangles and they all
kind of you'll get a guide of different things. You
can build with them, or your kid can just stack
them up in a row like whatever stage.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Like Lego, but it doesn't ex scally.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
They are flat easy to clean up because unlike Lego,
they're not like little bits.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
So it all sticks together. So they're very handy. We
take them a lot to cafes or pubs or anything
because there's no mess, like if you worried about them
drawing on a table at a cafe, even when you don't.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Take your kids to the pot.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yes, I actually find I get quite territorial, and I
like move my creation away from my daughter, like, don't
mess with my color pattern that I've made. But you
can get like you can get cheap versions of them
at kmart. The ones I got we're on Amazon. I
got them from Steam Studios is one set, and then
we got another set from an Aussie startup called Kinetics
with an X on the end, and they're just so great.
(43:09):
You can even create puzzles for your kids, trace around
the outside and then remove the magnets, stick it up
on the fridge, and then they have to fit in
the shapes to the pattern you've given them, and it
takes some age, really good distraction.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
What age would you say you could start? So if
Luna's just two, like is this something she could play
with me?
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I bought them for her second birthday and she absolutely
loves them, still still do them every week.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
I'm going to hijack the recommendation and say.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
I wholeheartedly agree, and.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Recently I picked up the sort of like original brand
of the Magnetic Squares has now got a travel tin,
which is brilliant because they are sort of big, like
you wouldn't want to pack them in a suitcase.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
But now with this travel.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Tin with the miniature ones, they're so cute and you
can now travel with them too.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I knew I was losing the plot a bit this
morning when I was thinking about my recommendation and Luna
this morning heard the garbage truck man and we went
outside and saw that they all waved at her, and
I was like, I should recommend garbage trucks and came aside,
Luna's not well, like she's had a running nose and stuff.
And I found on YouTube garbage truck Man and it's
(44:20):
just people emptying bins right, and I had it up
on YouTube and it was so meditative. I was for me.
I was like, I'm not bored, I'm actually really it
was so satisfying, and I was like, what a great
job to just go and clean stuff up every day,
engage with the community. I was like, this is great.
We should just be watching and I wage truck YouTube.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
Kids are instinctively drawn to like some of the best
people in our community, people who pick up the rubbish,
the postman, the postman, firefighters, paleontologists don't know what's up.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
They know where it's at. They know the actual hierarchy
of society.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
I explained to my daughter that those are jobs like
about a yoga because I think I realized because my
husband and I both writers, that she just thinks like
work is keyboard.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
And that's a job.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
You could go.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
You don't have to be like us, you can do that.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
That is all we have time for on parenting out
loud today, And you know what my call parents? Where
can I go on a bit of parentally?
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Oo? Are we going on a baby moon?
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Well, we should go on a baby one.
Speaker 5 (45:23):
Of these postnatal retreats.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
That's what we're doing.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
We're going on a post post natal I hope that's okay.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Do you mean we're all post natal? We have producer,
Ruth has grown up kids, she's postnatal. She needs a
post natal retreat. We all do. So we're going to
go off there. And it's been.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
So fun Books centered, Candle.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
And just relas. It has been so fun working with
both of you. Amelia and Stacey and having all of
our listeners join us, and we're keeping it open.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
Well, maybe maybe the three of us can just get
together with some magnetic tie or create some things and
watch some.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
Sounds great.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Let's go now.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Until next time. Bye,
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
On Hello and welcome to Parenting Out Loud. I am
Jesse Stevens and I am joined by Amelia Lester Hi
Jesse Hello, and MoMA MIA's deputy editor Stacy Here. Hello,
to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week.
(00:40):
Because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about
it on today's show. Sleep separation could be the secret
to a better quality of life, and one of us
is a very early adopter. Plus, why don't men RSVP
to party invitations? It's time to get into the hopeless
dad's debate? And good night to the bedtime story. What
happens when parents stop reading to kids. We're starting to see,
(01:04):
But first.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In case you, mister postpartum just got a glow up.
Perhaps you're like me and you remember that time as
a difficult one. Mesh undies, laundry piles, occasional abouts of
crying on the bathroom or kitchen floor anymore.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
Yes, hand is up.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
But now there are these things called postpartum retreats popping up.
They are for mothers to be mothered and for those
who can afford them. A writer for US Vogue wrote
about one at a Waldorf astoria in California. She spent
two nights there two weeks after giving birth, and she
enjoyed all sorts of marvelous things, round the clock baby
care with duelers on demand. She seriously just had an
(01:44):
iPad and she could just be like, I need someone
right now. Facials, fresh meals, massages.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
No crying on the kitchen floor.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
There are others across the United States, and they're now
also in Australia. There's one in Sydney's Double Bay and
there is one in Melbourne. These don't come cheap, however,
the one in Melbourne is fifty two hundred dollars for
four nights.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Ooh.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Now, we should say that the postpartum retreat is not
a new idea. There are many cultures around the world
that do recognize the importance of giving women.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
A break after childbirth.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
So, for instance, in South Korea, the tradition is called
Sanu Jewelry one and it refers to care centers when
new mothers check in and then they get these nourishing
broths and they get really taken care of for weeks,
often even months after birth. And there's actually a similar
tradition in China where a postpart and parent rests for
a month in a kind of confinement and family members
(02:36):
attend to the housework and.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
To the older kids.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I wish the Western take on this idea, which is brilliant,
was accessible to more people. I mean, I'm sure in
Scandinavia they probably have some kind of government funded program
where everyone gets it. And I think it's really important
these days because you and new moms are able to
live near family members, and for me in particular, it's
a really important corrective to a trend that I have
(03:03):
experienced firsthand in the US. So my first baby I
gave birth to in a so called baby friendly hospital.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
This is a new.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
You would think in hospitals across America. What this basically
amounts to is there's no crash, there's no formula, you
have to breastfeed, and there's no assistance at night because
the baby has to sleep with you the whole time.
So it's baby friendly, but it is not mother friendly.
And I'm here for the focus on mothers a little more. Jesse,
would you want to go to one of these I
(03:34):
don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'm not sure if I would. I have read a
lot about these. I read one article that kind of said,
is it I really like all the supportant terms of
food and you know, even lactation consultants and that kind
of stuff is great.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
But the broth, the broth broths.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
But one kind of criticism was saying, women don't need
a baby robe embroidered with initials, like we've just there
are some things that are probably a little too far.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Yeah, that's what the Vogue riter got at the Waldorf
Hotel in California.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So what this essentially is, as you alluded to, is
what Trevor Noah has talked about this among you know,
lots of researchers, which is we all lost our community
and now we have to pay to get them back, exactly.
And so in an ideal world, you wouldn't have to
pay for this kind of service, it would just be
(04:28):
on offer. And as someone in I have such privilege
when it comes to family and support, and so I
think I felt like I sort of got this, Like
I was able to rely on people who could bring
meals and if I needed someone to hold the baby,
I could ask them. But I do worry about the
disparity here and what class has access to this type
(04:50):
of thing, because postpartum depression has so much to do
with the environment following birth, and I worry that if
it's like, oh, you pay for this, you pay for this,
you pay for this, it means that our standard of
basic care kind of goes, oh, well, that's all outsourced.
Like ideally hospitals would do a little bit more of this, maybe.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Yeah, as opposed to a kick in the pants and
some meshondis exactly right.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
See what about you.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I don't know if it's a result of having a
baby who was in special care. So I was in
hospital for longer than a lot of new mums are.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
But how long were you in hospital?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I was in for three weeks before I had my daughter,
and then about ten days after she was born. That
is a long it's a long time. I knew the
meal rotation of that hospital like the back.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
Of my friend. I got to have a whole month's.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Worth a bet.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
But I basically had to be dragged out of that place,
Like I felt very anxious when I was away from
the nurses and the heart rate monitors and all of
the things, and so I think if something like this
had been within my financial reach, I absolutely would have
taken it, because it felt like whipplash to go home
and to have almost no one around because I'd been
(05:57):
in hospital for so long. My husband had to go
back to work a couple of weeks after I got home,
and it did feel very much like you're alone, and
so I and I think there's a certain level of guilt.
Not everyone feels this, but I felt very bad if
I asked anyone to help me with anything, even if
you know, and I think a lot of women feel
that they don't want to be a burden. They're like,
(06:17):
why am I finding this harder than the average person,
So you don't want to reach out. And it almost
feels like if you could pay for this, obviously not
that amount of money, because that's not achievable for most
of us, but if you could pay, it almost takes
the guilt away from that, like it's a service, it's transactional.
You're helping me and I'm getting something from that.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah, I remember thinking that if I asked, there were
instances where I probably would have liked help, but I
didn't want to look like I thought your narrative goes
so funny, you go, they'll think I don't want to
spend time with my baby exactly like they'll think they'll
think I had this, that there would be judgment towards
me more than an imposition on them. Yeah, but I
want to table one criticism that I heard from a
(06:57):
midwife about this kind of thing, and it's that with
too too much help. I don't know if I agree
with this, but I was interviewing her about these kind
of providers, and she was saying, when you're in a
situation where you are overwhelmed with expertise, whether that be
this is how you swaddle, this is nappy, this is breastfeeding,
it can undermine the instincts of the parents a little bit.
(07:23):
And I know that a lot of people poo pooh
the idea of instincts. I think that a lot of
us actually just need to learn how to do things.
But she said, you shouldn't feel as though you need
a university degree before you leave the hospital with a baby, Like,
we've got to make sure that we're not telling parents
that this is so hard and so complicated that you
need to do twelve classes a day in order to cope,
(07:45):
going and working it out is kind of part of
the experience.
Speaker 5 (07:48):
Yeah, and that's it.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I feel like we are so overly prepared now, like
we do courses. People here who are pregnant, we kind
of are saying to them, well, you've got two jobs now,
because you've got to keep up with all of the
appointments and the lessons and all of the things. So
maybe it does get in the way of your instincts
and just well, I've just got to get through this
rough patch and then we'll be fine. An article about
the benefits of getting a sleep divorce corn this week,
(08:10):
and I need everyone to know about it. Writing for
The Conversation, Monash University's psychology fellow, Alex Malaw explored the
many reasons otherwise perfectly happy couples might choose to sleep separately,
and how it can actually lead to a better night's sleep.
She said, well, many people say they prefer to sleep
or sleep better next to their partner. When scientists measure
(08:30):
sleep objectively, such as through an electro in cephalogram, and yes,
I did practice saying that.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
Ten times before we hit record.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
When they use the egs to assess brain waves, the
data actually showed poor asleep quality when co sleeping. So
some reasons obviously that people might choose to be in
separate beds is conflicting sleep schedules, one person snores or
has sleep apnea, or insomnia, sleep talking.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
The list goes on.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But the other main catalyst for a sleep divorce can
be when kids come into the mix and suddenly sleep
is the most precious but often hard to achieve commodity
in your life. And now I have something to confess.
I have been happily sleep divorced for five years, not
actually divorced, five years nearly, which is right around the
time I started getting pregnancy insomnia. And I'm just never
(09:19):
going back. So would either of you consider this? I'm
so interested.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
I have questions for you. First, please, pregnancy and somnia starts. Yes,
I was in exactly the same position, and I would
go I was like, I can't be up and down,
I can't worry about you. Yes, I had it to
separate myself often when the baby comes. If you're going
to go, all right, let's take shifts so that we're
both not losing sleep. Tell me about the next stage
(09:45):
where you're going. You know what I actually like having
my own space with a Now how old your daughter for?
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah? Four five?
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Talked to me about that.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
It was survival mode at the start. It was it
was I needed to sleep, he needed to sleep, and
so we would take turns with the monitor. Someone would
take a shift, and then it was kind of like,
look at this bed with the nice linen I've put
on it, and look how dark I and have the
room when you like to wake up with the sun.
And look at how no one stole my quilt in
the middle of the night. And it just snowball to
(10:17):
the point where we both were sleeping so much better
by sleeping separately that we both went I think we
just have to do that all the time now.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
And the most urgent question, I mean, how many bloody bedrooms.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Do you have?
Speaker 5 (10:30):
This is the thing. This is a big privilege to
be able to do this.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, so we
are very lucky to have three bedrooms. But this is
why we can only have one child. There's no more
bedrooms available. I'm not willing to give mine up. I
need to keep it so those kids would be sharing.
But it's just worked out so much better. And I
have to say, like, I love my husband, but I
love him a lot more when I can't hear his
(10:54):
snoring or experience the wwe like body slams that he
manages to do every time he turns over. So this
is definitely a good solution if you're experiencing that. Okay,
I went deep on this after you mentioned it. I
was really curious about when the double bed custom came about,
because when you watch old movies and TV shows, the
(11:15):
married couples do go to sleep into single beds. So
it turns out that it's very recently that we decided
that couples have to sleep in the same bed, and
we're talking the sixties.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Before then, it was actually.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Seen as healthier and more modern for a married couple
or a partnered couple to.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Sleep in separate beds.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
And I love this detail, which is that Victorian doctors
said that the weaker sleeper would draining all the vitality
from the stronger person. That's exactly what happened, and so
it's a very recent thing and it kind of reminds me.
I find it a bit confronting. I won't lie when
you told me about it. There is a kind of
instinctive idea of like, is there something wrong with their relationship,
(11:58):
because it's so ingrained in us that married couples sleep
in the same bed. But then I got thinking about
it and I remember that Esther Perell's big thing is
that we keep expecting one point to be everything, to
fulfill all functions, including to be sleep compatible.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
And this is just taking a little bit of the
pressure off.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Now that said, I do not have an extra bedroom
for people in my situation, I would recommend mouth tape.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
We have a like a day bed in Luna's room,
so it's like if you sleep separately, yep, you go
and you sleep and it's tiny, like you roll off
and break an arm. But we did that for the
first six months. Luke has slept in the nursery on
the day bed, and Luna and I were in the
big room with the big bed. But it was interesting
the moment we decided to come back and I was like,
(12:46):
I don't get to sprawl, I don't get a blanket
like this.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Is so did you consider ever keeping you see?
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Oh, the bed was more comfortable. I have time for it.
And then I was having a think about what the
stigma is right, And there is a stigma. There is stigma,
and it's to do with intimacy. And I also think
that it's a suggestion that it will absolutely kill your
sex life, right, because come on, you've got to sleep
the same bed.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Absolutely, that is the number one question I get asked.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
We won't ask you.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
What's funny about that, right, is that it's like how
many people are rolling over at two am and being like,
now that I can feel you there, we should have
spontaneous two am sex and that keeps our relationships strong. Like, no,
you wake up at two am, you hit the other
person in the face. I do it all the time
to luk up exactly, he mumbles, sleep talk, We fight,
and then in the morning we're shitty at each other,
(13:37):
like any sort of intimacy is not happening.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
No, I think you are much more likely to want
to be intimate with your partner if you don't want
to kill them all night.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And some of the studies she cited in this piece
spoke about how clients reported that sleeping alone can alleviate
some of the anxiety they have around sleep, because if
they're the person who's disturbing the other person. If they're
the snorer, then they're having less quality sleep because they're
worried about waking the other person. So they've actually found
that people sleeping separately means that there's not that stress
(14:10):
as they're going to sleep themselves.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I also find that when I've gone through periods of insomnia,
having someone beside you who's asleep is really distressing. Yeah,
it's like it's real because you go wish, Oh, you're furious,
You're absolutely angry. And it also means I've a partner
who goes to bed a lot earlier than me, and
that's bed time in our house, so I have to
go to bed. And if I fall into the habit
of then scrolling on my phone for the two hours
(14:34):
where he's asleep and I'm not ready to go to
sleep yet, terrible for your brain. So it's like I've
had to start to do like the kindle or whatever.
You can't you can't read a print book, can you.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
This also reminded me of I used to live in Japan,
and when you travel around Japan you go to traditional inns.
They often have a tatarmi matte arrangement where whole families
will sleep in one room onto Tarmi. So it just
was a reminder that the thing that we think is
the default is not the default for a lot of
(15:07):
people around the world and through human history.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Is it a really big space where the family will sleep.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Not especially big, but it feels like it's a very
different way of sleeping because instead of being given this
prescribed rectangle to sleep on. Yeah, there's a sense of
like you've got more latitude to move around because you're
all just sleeping however you like and in whatever shape
you like in this room.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So cool.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I want to talk about a particular type of person
who I think we all know, who we may even
have in our lives. Right now, let me back up
and say why I started thinking about this. A Shanty,
the singer A Shanty, and the rapper Nelly recently had
a baby together, which is lovely and Nellie seems very
(15:56):
happy about it. But in a recent interview, a joint interview,
he was sitting beside a Shanty and he said.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
To her baby, I'll give you the world, but I.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Just ain't changing no diaper, And as Shanty responded, the
only way women from Millennia have responded to such a statement, which.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Was with an eyeroll.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
A similar display of this was evident in an interview
that Nick Cannon did recently. The singer who you may know,
has twelve children and the interview. For some reason, this
interview was taking place on pilates mats. But I don't
know why that is. But the interviewer asked Nick to
run through his twelve children's names, and let's just listen
to what happened next.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
What are their names?
Speaker 4 (16:37):
You want?
Speaker 6 (16:37):
You want all twelve twelve names?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
This is where I usually get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Why because you don't know all that I know all
of them.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
But like last night, you see keep me, keep me honest.
There's rock Roll, Golden, Powerful, Rise, Onyx, Legendary, Zion, zillion Zin.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And just see this who were who U?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
How many you're missing too?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I'm missing two. Yeah, it's a little awkwul.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
That's where a hut's are.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
So look, these two men seem like nice people, but
they are what I would call hopeless dads.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And these are dads.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
They're not deeply problematic in any way, but they're just
kind of hopeless when it comes to the task of
raising children. So now that I've named this phenomenon and
described this type of person. I suspect you're going to
have a lot of examples for me and the newsletter
writer Melinda Wehnamoya, who has a great parent in newsletter,
had one recently. She asked, do dads know how to RSVP?
(17:45):
She wrote, I'd love to know what goes through dad's
minds when they receive kid party invitations. I don't mean
this in a snarky way. I am truly curious and
want to understand do they think not my department or eh,
my partner must be on this invite and they'll take
care of it. So I can really relate to that.
I just was planning a kid's birthday party, and as
a little social experiment, I did send half the invitations
(18:09):
to the dads on the parent contact list and have
the invitations to the mums.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And what did you find?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Well, it was a little predictable.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
The women responded and the men did not. So I
just started sending the men extremely passive, aggressive, polite messages saying, Hey,
any chance that you know whether you can make it
to this kid's birthday party. Some of them just never
responded to me and then showed up at the party.
So at this point I need to make clear that
this is obviously not all men. I'm not doing that
(18:43):
eye rolling at all men comedy routine that's almost become
a cliche at this point. But the question I want
to ask you both is do we deal with the
hopeless dads just by kind of shrugging our shoulders and
figuring that's how men are. Or are these hopeless dads
actually creating very real domestic labor imbalances and kind of
(19:04):
getting away with it under the guys of being hopeless.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
They are, and part of it is weaponized in competence
in terms of it just gets too hard to have
them do the task, so you know, women step in
and that leads to serious inequality and I think resentment
within a relationship. But there was such a fantastic point
in this newsletter that I think really highlighted why some
(19:30):
dad's about a rsvping, and it's that if you have
never organized a kid's birthday party, you don't understand how
important rsvping is. And so the reality is that mostly
it's mother's doing it. Having done it, they're going I
should let them know asap so that they can book it.
Whereas dads are going, what does it matter if I
show up or I don't.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
And the reason why it matters is because if you
do not have enough goodie.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Bags, yeah, all hell will break.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Loose, exactly right, and I'll be your kid crying. And
women know that, not because it is innate to women,
but because it has been so practiced.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
And they don't teach us that the POSTPARTU and retreat
the importance of having enough goodie bags have to learn.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
We learn.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
And I think that's an important mantra, right because even cooking,
I didn't cook before and I still can't cook, but
guess what, there has to be something on a plate, right,
So you set up systems, you set up processes, you
do trial and error, you work it out. And the
idea that you've got to let dads fail a bit
and work it out and make mistakes, I think is
(20:33):
just a really important one. Like if it's that they
don't RSVP and then they show up.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
At it, are you able to do that and step back?
Speaker 4 (20:40):
And I also a related question to this is I
think correct me if I'm wrong. You have used the
fair play playing cards? Can you explain what those are
and what your experience was with them.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah, the fair Play cards. I just so recommend them
to everyone and they have every have you heard of them.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Stacy, Yes, yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
So it has everything that happens in a household, from
like who sorts out the house Internet to who does
dental kids dental, to who does clothes, all that kind
of stuff, and we sorted it out and most of
the lunar stuff was on me. And I laugh with
friends that it's like there's never a discussion that clothes
(21:18):
are on you, but when you go away, packing is
on you. Yet somehow it is, and you know, Luca
does take it turns out there a few thinks he's
doing like tims or whatever, which I would say sometimes
I'm quite happy with that. I will also say this
is still a massive issue, and I think those examples
(21:40):
highlight that. But I reckon that we're watching a shift
in real time, Like I was thinking about the nineties
and your Homo Simpson and your Ray Romano, and like
the stereotypical bumbling fool dad who didn't know how to
do anything and just set a funny joke every now
and then. You're going to work right in front of
me where I can keep an eye on you.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
You got that? Who do you think you're dealing with? You?
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I may seem stupid, but it's just to get your
mother to not asked me to do stuff. And then
I was looking into this research that said that in
the nineteen eighties, forty three percent of fathers said they'd
never changed a nappy. Is this in the US? Forty
three percent of fathers had never changed a nappy. Now
(22:28):
that number has dropped to just three percents. That's enormous.
And so even like from in an Australian context, you've
got how are the dad's dad? Like Hamish Blake's podcast,
You've got two doting dads with Maddy j dadding and
fatherhood is becoming a verb in a way that motherhood.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Okay it has been, but I need to confess something. Yeah,
I get annoyed at the dad's dadding as well. Yeah,
tell me, tell me it's just like it. Am I
just setting that up to fail because I'm annoyed at
the hopeless dads. And then when the dads start talking
about dadding, I'm sort of annoyed at them too.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I see, I really like it, I really welcome it.
And I listened to a series of how other dads
done when I was pregnant, and it actually gave me
so many tips and insights into parenting from fathers, and
I think that making those communities, like we're talking about
the postpartum retreats, right, you then go to a mother's
group and there is all this shared knowledge and wisdom
(23:26):
that goes between women. And in defense of some of
those fathers, they have no equivalent. There's no kind of
fathers all sitting down and working out how they're going
to do this. I think there is some isolations.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I love that idea for them.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
So here's how you replied to what'sapp message is at
a party exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
But there are some things that they have just probably
never done in their entire life, particularly when it's a
father with the daughter. Like realize that my husband has
never tied a hair elastic in his entire life, because
why would he. So that was a steep linker that
he needed to go on and practice on my hair,
so he wasn't doing it on a moving target to
(24:06):
know how to do that. And I think there are
some things like that that yeah, I will have just
never come across their desk. But there are other things
like rsping tool party that aren't really forgivable and they
should know, and it is good to see that the
pendulum swinging back the other way.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
I also think that when it comes to talking about
hopeless dads, what we're really saying is is.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
It okay to let them back to that idea?
Speaker 4 (24:31):
So, for instance, a dad I know, who shall remain nameless,
is not great at matching the kid's clothes to the Weatherly.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Hypothetical is that dad good at matching his own clothes
to the weather? Because I have a lot of men
who are not, for example, my own father would be
in short, a great point.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
It's a really great point. And the question becomes do
I let them? Meaning do I let the children go
out without jumpers on and let this hypothetical father allow
that to happen, or do I intervene and say this
is going to lead to misery and can we not
just put the jumper on before we leave the house.
(25:16):
And that can set the heart of a lot of
these questions, because it's like, do I just let them?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Do I just let them go?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
I'm cold, I'm team let them because you know what'll happen.
They'll get to the park, or they'll get outside and
they'll start change and they'll say I'm very cold, and
then probably you'll get a call saying.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yes, can you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
But you know what the other thing is too, which
is really annoying. Sometimes it works out for them, and
that's even more irritating because you'll fret about something like that,
about your child going out without their jumper, and then
they'll come back incident free, nothing's been said, and so
really the dads are just working smarter, not harder, and
worrying less about those things and getting away with it.
So maybe we need to take a leaf out of
(25:58):
their ball.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Good Night to the bedtime story. Lauren Ironmonger wrote for
the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend that the number of
parents reading aloud to their children is at an all
time low. This research comes from HarperCollins UK, which found
that less than half of parents of kids under thirteen
said reading aloud to children was fun for me. And
(26:21):
can I just say on this, I think it's a
very different question saying do you read to your kids?
Do you think it's fun for me?
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Because two things are not the same.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I think reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fifteenth time.
I wouldn't describe it as fun. I'd describe it as something,
but fun would not be it. Australian data found that
many parents can't fit in daily reading with their kids,
and just quickly this article goes into why it's even important. First,
it's massive for literacy skills, but it also strengthens the
(26:49):
parent child bond. It sends a message to your child
that at the end of the day, they are the
most important thing. Amelia. Do you think culturally we've started
to see reading as something that a child does at
preschool or school, and therefore it doesn't have to be
done at home. We've outsourced it.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
It think that's such a good question, and I think,
very sadly, the answer is pretty clearly yes. And it
dawned on me recently that I am very much part
of the problem here. I take my kids to swimming
practice on a Sunday and I sit there and I
doom scroll on my phone and feel my anxiety spiral
(27:30):
and instead I should be reading a book. So last
week I took along Stephen King's Misery, which I've never read,
and I was like, this, Stephen King.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
It's good author.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
He's actually writing something, and then I realized I was
role modeling for my children, who I'm always sort of
flinging books at and telling them to read that reading
can be fun.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
That's so true.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
And did you was it a paper copy, like a yeah, paperback.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
With a really like spooky looking cover that my kids
were obsessed with, because, by the way, physical books are
kind of intriguing.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
You remember that idea, like, yeah, a cover of a
book is meant to entice you into it. And so
when I was reading this book, they're like, misery, what's
that book about? And it was just it occasioned a
great conversation that said, this is a work in progress.
For me too, I am exhausted.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
At the end of the day, and sometimes it is
easier for me to throw on an audiobook on the
Bluetooth speaker and then I can go and stack the
dishwasher while they're falling asleep. And I haven't felt too
guilty about that, because literacy experts do say that listening
to an audiobook can build all sorts of really important
literacy skills, such as comprehension and vocabulary, and they're often
(28:40):
read by fantastic actors, and so they're getting this really
entertaining story read to.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Them probably better.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It's better read by Emma Thompson than it is by me,
for instance, because we were reading Matilda on audiobook. So yeah,
I haven't felt too guilty about that, but that was
until I read this article and it made that really
important point that you reference Jesse, that you're not just
reading to them to teach them how to read. You're
reading to them to show them that actually the dishwasher
(29:09):
is less in important than us spending some time together.
And you know, okay, I'm just adding that to another
list of things I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
But that's the thing as well, is that usually now
there's in a lot of households, it's two working parents.
You're getting home later sometimes, I mean I get home
at six thirty seven o'clock from work to then try
an organize dinner, eat together, which we're also doing wrong
that we're never eating together now and get your kids
to sleep. Something has to give, and so I think
we are probably guilty of just replacing that, as you
(29:38):
say with I always use.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Sleep stories, audiobooks.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
We've got like the Yoto player with the little cards
that my daughter can listen to. And so yeah, we're
just kind of unwittingly putting our kids at a disadvantage
by not sitting down and doing reading with them in
the interest of cutting a bit of time.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
I wonder if the story here is more about adults
aren't reading, because this research came out as well that
the book industry broadly adults aren't going and buying books.
That's absolutely tanked. And as you say, Amelia, if we're
not modeling it, and therefore it does seem like a
(30:15):
biggert step. I always find this with reading, that there's
a big block if you haven't done it for a while,
and you can feel like it's harder, and then it's
a muscle, like reading is genuinely a muscle that gets weak.
And so I was reading about this because it's something
I really really worry about. Us during this event with
this academic whose name is Sophie g And she was
(30:36):
saying that not reading is worse for you than vaping,
that for the brain, like it is so important for
everything from memory to empathy to just all these cognitive
skills and the ability especially to read deeply. That's not
innate and we have not evolved to read. Every single
(30:57):
generation has to learn how to read, and in order
to learn how to read, it takes like years of
deep focus. Reading is one of you cannot do it
while you're doing anything else.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
No, and some people never get that. Travis Kel recently
came out and yeah, you can't really read.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
So that's what I was reading about. Even the Naplan
results came out recently and they said that Ozzie kids
have sunk to an all time low in terms of
reading and writing skills, and low literacy is an issue
among a lot of adults. And low literacy I found
this interesting. It was saying that actually being able to go,
I know what the words on the page mean is
(31:32):
one thing, but the step that seems to be missing
is then understanding what those words mean, and also the ability.
Do you see the article in The Atlantic recently about
college students who had never read a book. It was
so the ability to sit down and read a book
beginning to end is also a skill that you can lose,
and so deep reading is being able to sit with
something for a long time, follow it, like go to
(31:55):
work the next day, kind of remember where you were,
and even though it feels so hard, it's like, you know,
we've spoken about pickietas and stuff on this show. And
you know how they always say, like on the plate,
they're not going to eat the broccoli, but you've gotta
have brocoli on the plate.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
Yeah, yeah, you got.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
It's going to be an option. It's like having the
books in the house. See before I speak about a kindle, right,
because I've gone to that because I'm trying to at
night not have a lamp or anything on. But now
I think you.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Should get a sleep divorce.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Then you don't have to worry about because lights on
everywhere to the age where Luna might be coloring in
or something. And I don't want her to see me
constantly on my phone, so I'll go and read. But
it looks like I'm on an iPad or a screen
or a device, and I think it's more important she
sees me term page, and.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
It's also less interesting for her. She doesn't understand why
you're engaged with this kindle as opposed to Stephen King's misery.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah. She even goes into my room sometimes and when
I've got books next to my bed, like she loves
to flick through them and like look at the page.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, my daughter often now pretends she's the librarian now
that they're doing that in school of and then I
have to go and borrow books from her. And it
is just such a yeah, like it's a tangible thing.
It's not the same as having it on a device.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
This is it. This is a humble brag. But Luna
was going throughout the bookcase in our study recently and
got a book down and it was one of my books,
and she went to the back and another picture of
me and she went, Mummy had to explain, but that
is and I mum's an English teacher, so like this
is a special interest area. But like I grew up
(33:26):
and there was always a book in the and the
way that you would just go.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
On and they're so intriguing when you're a kid as well.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
You'd always find a naughty one and you'd go, I
will be reading that privately. Great, absolutely great, you're putting
words together. That's wonderful, or like names that I would
see your covers.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
I still remember when my parents love books and reading
and they have bookshelves all around the house and there
was a Joan Diddian book called.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
The White Album. I just had a completely white cover,
and this blew my mind.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
How can you have a cover that has nothing on it?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
It's so true the physicality of books. And apparently as well,
they're finding that the print book is a totally different
experience to read it.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
It's just the object of the print book is so special.
And in a world where we have so few objects
that are special, because even our photos are on our
phone and we don't have DVDs anymore videos, I think
that's a portal into reading, yes, is to give kids
the opportunity to be mystified by a book with a
(34:27):
white cover.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
And the smell, the smell of a book, Yeah, I
love the smells. Producer Ruth was telling us that the
reason we love the smell of old books so much
is because they smell as the ink and the paper
and everything break down, it smells like vanilla, which is
such a homely warm Like I'm thinking, there are a
few things to me more comforting than that smell. And
you can get like fragrances or candles or whatever in
(34:50):
your house to make it smell like that, which I'm like,
I just want to fill my whole house that smell
of like an old, old book, And.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
I also want to know that Producer Ruth is the
best smelling person at Mum and Men.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Which is talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
I wonder if it's also that we're a bit more
sensitive about what we're reading now and what we're reading
to our children now. The other week, my daughter brings
home a library book every week from pre K, and
she loves it. It's like a big event to bring
it home in the bag, which is great. But this
week she brought home The Ugly Duckling, and I found myself,
as I was reading it to her, feeling weird about
(35:22):
even using the word ugly. And I think that's something
that's coming up a lot now with books like even
Roll Dahl's books a couple of years ago were rewritten
to remove the words ugly and fat. And so I
think maybe we're not reading as many of the stories
that we loved as kids, worried that they'll be inappropriate,
and so we're not enjoying it.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Therefore we're doing it.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Let's true.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
I have two examples of that from recently. We have
a copy of Role Dal's Revolting Rhymes, which I remember loving.
It's actually my copy, and I was reading it one
day to the kids and I just suddenly my eyes
lit upon the next word, and the next.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Word was slut. Oh, that's a really.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Hard word to explain the meaning to kids, I find.
And then the second example was had a really nice
time reading the line the witch in the Wardrobe with
one of my kids.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
But gosh, that's a weird book, is it. There's a
lot going on in there. It's essentially a Christian allegory,
which is fine. I don't mean to.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Say that's weird, but it does raise a lot of
questions about what the book is actually trying to say and.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
What the wardrobe is a metaphor for.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
And you just find yourself going down some garden paths
that maybe you didn't expect that you'd be going down
at bedtime.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah, there are some. My mum brings a lot of
classics over that. Did you ever read There's a Hippopotamus
on my roofed? And cake? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so we're
big we read that.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Well, I'm sorry, but that there's one that's like Mummy's
on a diet. She has salad, cheese, and I read
that every day and I'm like, this is this is
a bit weird a diet. But those ones, right, are brilliant.
They're nonsensical, they're wonderful. I watch Luna just look at
the roof, and I'm like, just thinks that the hippotamus
in there. And I made it. But Mum always says
that a lot of the newer ones are quite sanitized,
(37:13):
and they there trying to hit you over the.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Head girls doing stem.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yes, exactly right. And it's like school has done this
a little bit too. They made reading into hard work
in terms of reading for knowledge or like reading for
moral like lesson instead of just reading for pleasure. And like,
I see the pleasure that Luna gets from hippopotamus, and
(37:40):
I'm like, let's just let's learn our colors later, and
let's just go to hippopotamus eating kay On the ugly
darkling thing. When I was a kid, I asked my
nan if I was pretty. She lived with us, and
I was like five or six, and I said, Nana,
am I pretty? And she said, you're an ugly darkling? Oh.
She died before I grew up, And so I still wonder.
I'm like, did I ever turn into this one?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Nan? You're you're one. It's time for our recommendations of
the week. So Jesse, do you want to go first, sure.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
On the topic of books, I remembered, don't you find
that it's really hard to buy gifts for like grandparents
and like Mothers Day comes around and you're like, oh,
it's my mom and speaking of hopeless dads, it's their mom. Whatever.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
Don't give me a hand cream, can you?
Speaker 3 (38:23):
You can't know? And what am I like? I'm not
going to get her like a nice blouse. She's going
to be like, this is disgusting.
Speaker 4 (38:29):
I always used to get my nana every Christmas a
jar of oil of olay, and that smell still takes
me bad.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
Talking of nostalging.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I won't want that, she won't want that. So what
I got was I went on Etsy and there are
heaps of examples of this, but I went on Etsy
and found this company that makes personalized children's books. So
this one is about going to Nana's house, and you
can say, like, when I go to Nana's house, there's
a blah and like you can put in all the
(39:00):
little details and they've even got like put in three
words to describe your nana. And I'm like, crazy, weird, annoying,
just a troll. But it's all about a day at
Nana's house. So it's and I made one for Meya,
and I made one for my mum. And they're just
the cutest, most personalized. It has their names, it has
(39:21):
whatever they call their grandmother on the front, and they're
just so so sweet. So this was on Etsy from
Lucy and Co. We have a link in our show notes,
but there are heaps and heaps online and they are
just a lovely, thoughtful little gift.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
My recommendation is something that I have not used in
quite a few years, but which I still like to
gift to new parents. And it is a fabulous product
that there's a little bit of a story behind. So
I used to do a show on Mom and Mia
many years ago with Maya called tell Me It's going
to be Okay. It was a show which we conceived
(39:55):
of and started doing after Donald Trump was elected, and
I think the title kind of summarizes where I had
spaces that it literally came to a screeching halt about
two years in when we realized that we could no
longer tell each other it was going to be okay.
So and It's never come back hasn't never to come back.
(40:17):
But it was a fun experience and we had a
small but devoted cadre of listeners, and one of them
was a lovely lady who lived in Neutral Bay in Sydney,
and she sent me an invention of hers called the
baby Oragami Rap. Now, this saved my life when I
(40:39):
had my first baby, because you know how the world
is divided into people who are good at oragami and
people who aren't. Yeah, I'm one of the people who's
not me or anything.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I think it takes like patience and grace to think.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Either of those things exactly.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
So this is called the baby Oragami Rap because if
you've never mastered swaddling, it makes it literally impossible not.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
To correctly swaddle the babies.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
So I think Nick Cannon could do with one of these,
and I think that Nelly could do with yown.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And I really.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Got a lot of use out of it. Basically, it's numbered.
It's a sort of a step by step numbered way
to swaddle your baby.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
And it's super tight, like it does everything you're.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Tight, and it's made a beautiful one hundred percent cotton.
It's really easy to wash, and I just love gifting
them to people because swaddling is just so hard it's
so hard.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I just never got it. I never got it.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
So it's called the Baby Origami Rap and it is
from an Australian company and a friend of the pod.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
So thanks for saving my life.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
How about you, Stacy, what's your reco Okay?
Speaker 2 (41:48):
So I am rubbish at imaginative play. I'm I'm just
not good. But the one toy I bought for my daughter,
I bought it nearly three years ago now and we
still play with these every single week, usually multiple times
a week. And they're those colored magnetic tiles. So I
haven't seen these okay.
Speaker 5 (42:05):
So they're just different colors.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
You can get like aesthetically pleasing pastel ones, you can
get the bright primary colors, whatever you want.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
They come in different packs.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
You might get like eighty pieces or one hundred pieces,
and they're just magnetic squares and triangles and they all
kind of you'll get a guide of different things. You
can build with them, or your kid can just stack
them up in a row like whatever stage.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Like Lego, but it doesn't ex scally.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
They are flat easy to clean up because unlike Lego,
they're not like little bits.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
So it all sticks together. So they're very handy. We
take them a lot to cafes or pubs or anything
because there's no mess, like if you worried about them
drawing on a table at a cafe, even when you don't.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Take your kids to the pot.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yes, I actually find I get quite territorial, and I
like move my creation away from my daughter, like, don't
mess with my color pattern that I've made. But you
can get like you can get cheap versions of them
at kmart. The ones I got we're on Amazon. I
got them from Steam Studios is one set, and then
we got another set from an Aussie startup called Kinetics
with an X on the end, and they're just so great.
(43:09):
You can even create puzzles for your kids, trace around
the outside and then remove the magnets, stick it up
on the fridge, and then they have to fit in
the shapes to the pattern you've given them, and it
takes some age, really good distraction.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
What age would you say you could start? So if
Luna's just two, like is this something she could play
with me?
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I bought them for her second birthday and she absolutely
loves them, still still do them every week.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
I'm going to hijack the recommendation and say.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
I wholeheartedly agree, and.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Recently I picked up the sort of like original brand
of the Magnetic Squares has now got a travel tin,
which is brilliant because they are sort of big, like
you wouldn't want to pack them in a suitcase.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
But now with this travel.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Tin with the miniature ones, they're so cute and you
can now travel with them too.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I knew I was losing the plot a bit this
morning when I was thinking about my recommendation and Luna
this morning heard the garbage truck man and we went
outside and saw that they all waved at her, and
I was like, I should recommend garbage trucks and came aside,
Luna's not well, like she's had a running nose and stuff.
And I found on YouTube garbage truck Man and it's
(44:20):
just people emptying bins right, and I had it up
on YouTube and it was so meditative. I was for me.
I was like, I'm not bored, I'm actually really it
was so satisfying, and I was like, what a great
job to just go and clean stuff up every day,
engage with the community. I was like, this is great.
We should just be watching and I wage truck YouTube.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
Kids are instinctively drawn to like some of the best
people in our community, people who pick up the rubbish,
the postman, the postman, firefighters, paleontologists don't know what's up.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
They know where it's at. They know the actual hierarchy
of society.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
I explained to my daughter that those are jobs like
about a yoga because I think I realized because my
husband and I both writers, that she just thinks like
work is keyboard.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
And that's a job.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
You could go.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
You don't have to be like us, you can do that.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
That is all we have time for on parenting out
loud today, And you know what my call parents? Where
can I go on a bit of parentally?
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Oo? Are we going on a baby moon?
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Well, we should go on a baby one.
Speaker 5 (45:23):
Of these postnatal retreats.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
That's what we're doing.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
We're going on a post post natal I hope that's okay.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Do you mean we're all post natal? We have producer,
Ruth has grown up kids, she's postnatal. She needs a
post natal retreat. We all do. So we're going to
go off there. And it's been.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
So fun Books centered, Candle.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
And just relas. It has been so fun working with
both of you. Amelia and Stacey and having all of
our listeners join us, and we're keeping it open.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
Well, maybe maybe the three of us can just get
together with some magnetic tie or create some things and
watch some.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
Sounds great.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Let's go now.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Until next time. Bye,
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