You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.

Mumma Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of the land.

We have recorded this podcast on the Gatagoul people of the Eur Nation.

We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and torres strained islander cultures.

Hello.

I'm Stacy Hicks.

I'm the editor of Mamma Mia and I'm also the host of our new parenting podcast, Parenting out Loud.

And this summer, we're curating your listening with a healthy dose of culture savvy conversations that parents actually want.

This holiday season, we're bringing you unmissible episodes right here into your podcast playlist.

It's your summer listening sorted.

And if you're looking for more to listen to, every Mumma Mea podcast is curating Some are listening right across the network, from pop culture to beauty to powerful interviews.

There's something for everyone.

There's a link in the show notes.

Welcome to Parenting out Loud.

This is the podcast for parents who don't always listen to parenting podcasts.

It's the culture, it's the trends, it's a zeitgeist.

It's Marbo, it's the vibe.

I'm Monique Golly.

I'm Amelia Lastra and I love that Castle shout out, and I am Stacy Higgs.

First up, thank you for all the ears on last week's show.

So many of you dming us people loving it sick and heaps of non parents just here for it.

So we love that.

And Ladies number two on the Apple.

Charts, whoop, I love that.

That seems huge?

Are we stars now?

I think we are.

We've made it fine Diary of a CEO, which feels so validating because in twenty twenty five, parenting culture has become like an intense startup, right.

Yes, and both cultures lack sleep.

I feel that's true.

Yeah, you're giving your all and not getting a lot time.

Yeah, both cultures relentless.

Coming up on today's show, K Pop Demon Hunters, you might have heard it rippling through the culture.

We're going to talk about why it's so huge.

Then, parent or tracking apps are booming, but do children have a right to privacy?

I really want to get into this thauny debate with you, and a man has made a case for why we should be having kids younger, and he actually might convince.

You it's a good idea.

Maybe maybe we'll see.

But first, did you guys see Anne Hathaway gentle parent the paparazzi.

I feel like this.

I saw this video on Instagram a few times.

It's been viewed over sixty million times.

She was on the set of The Devil Wears Praa Too, which has had a lot of paparazzi interest, Like there's things being leaked from set, there's lots of images coming out.

But on this particular day, the paparazzi pack were bickering and she walked over.

She had this big smile and just completely diffuse the situation.

You're going to have to give us like a reenactment mons like what was she doing?

Calm zen Master.

We can't play this on the show because Muma Mia does not endorse paparazzi shots or videos.

So I'm going to explain to you instead.

She walks over to the pack.

She has an open palm, She has a very calm and present stance, and she says, you guys have got to relax.

There are children on set today.

Does everybody know there are children on set?

So everyone's going to relax.

We're going to have a very nice day because we have children.

It was very calm, very demure, very okay, everyone's having some feelings right now, but this is the boundary.

And it was so fantastic.

I tried it on my own kids as well today, like it worked.

It worked on my four year old.

It also worked on the paparazzi.

They all sort of diffused and said, oh, yes, thank you, ma'am.

I feel like Anne Hathaway was born to gentle parents.

First of all, she has an amazing voice.

Second of all, I remember reading an interview with her when her kids were a little younger, and she said that she had stopped drinking because she found that she was more present with them during the week, in particular when she sort of just ruled out drinking.

So every time I have a glass of wine on a weeknight, I think of Anne Hathaway and how she is present and I am not okay and another mum doing it right.

This week, I need to talk about Queen Mary.

So she's just given us all the masterclass in how to react when your kids.

Do stupid shit.

So our very own tazzyborn Queen of Denmark, she was at this public engagement and a reporter asked her what she thought of her daughter Isabella's outfit when she attended Have you seen this?

Remember this?

The princess wore a T shirt that had something rude on it.

Right, Yes, it was quite rude.

So it loosely translates to f tim yesterday with an arrow pointing to the right kind of light.

Those shirts from the nineties that said I'm with stupid and then pointed.

To the right of view.

I would be so worried wearing that T shirt that like on the bus, yeah.

Or that someone inappropriate walks up like your brother or your dad walks up next to you.

Very risky shirt.

But for context, it's lyrics from the band that she was watching at the festival, And so this reporter asked what did you think of this?

And Queen Mary gave the most perfect response in Danish.

So I have studied this clip with forensic levels of investigation.

The smile on her face doesn't crack, it doesn't break even for a second.

She just does a slight raise of the eyebrows, very demure and just says my first thought was are you completely confused?

Ha ha ha.

But let's just put it this way.

Some decisions are better than others.

Isn't a great response?

Like, I feel like this was the perfect way of saying I don't agree with it, but she can do what she wants and I'm not going to put her down in front of you.

I loved it.

What do you think imagine being a royal and having the balls to wear a T shirt that's got the F word on it, Like, are you okay?

Isabella?

Like do you put any weight behind birth order impact on personality?

So if you think about Isabella Princess Isabella Henriette to Ingrid MUGGERI, she's the middle child.

Her older brother is first in line to the throne, so he's going to be king, and her younger siblings are twins, right, so it's attention on him, attention on them.

Is this just like the middle child going attention attention to me?

And she's the Prince Harry in the birth order when you think about it, like, she's the second in line to the throne, she's the Prince Harry equivalent of Denmark.

So I feel like she can be a bit more cheeky with her behavior.

And she is eighteen, she's an adult.

She also has form in the area of breaking protocol.

So you might remember she had an official portrait where she was wearing this orange gown and this teal sash, she had the tiara, the turquoise earrings and she was holding her phone.

Oh wow.

She was kind of the first royal to do so, and it was apparently Mary our Mary's idea like this intentionally modern touch to like symbolize a modern princess and kind of a nod to her generation.

But what's interesting is the Danes mostly love it.

Like this TV presenter Jim I saw this on Facebook.

He said, I love that our royal youngsters also have personality and courage and they don't follow the neat plitated flow.

The time of the ladies in the hat is over.

Princess Isabella is in.

People are getting around it.

They're such a modern, cool royal family.

I feel like they're rode bikes everywhere.

It's so different to the British royal family totally.

And I think you can actually buy this shirt online, so we can drop a link in the show notes if anyone wants a T.

Shirt that says FtM Yesterday, it's available.

Oh to be eighteen, to not have the front to low fully developed.

I love it.

It feels like the whole world is talking about ky pop Demon Hunters.

It's not a great name, is it.

Let's just get that out of the way.

It feels like a placeholder name.

It feels like they were thinking this is just the working title, and they were like, you know what, let's just call it this.

This is just what it is.

I kept seeing it on Netflix.

I think it came out in June, and I kept seeing it shown me.

I was like, this sounds ridiculous.

I'm not gonna watch it.

But then one day my children had been possessed by K pop Demon Hunters.

They chose to watch it by themselves, and now it's all we listen to.

Yeah.

So, this little animated movie has completely captured the attention of kids the world over and adults too.

It's now Netflix's most watched movie ever wow, two hundred and thirty six million views, and the soundtracks made history too.

It's the first movie soundtrack to have four simultaneous top ten hits on the Billboard Top one hundred and Golden has hit number one.

So if you're thinking I have seen this, I haven't clicks on it.

It looks horrid on Netflix.

It's a terrible placeholder name.

But should I be worried if my kids are obsessed with this?

The answer is, don't worry.

This is excellent, and I want to talk about why.

Top line.

It follows a fictional K pop girl group now k pop stands for Korean pop, and they're also Demon Hunters.

It's written and directed by Maggie Kang.

It's about these three girls where demons lurk everywhere, but their music protects the world from the demons of Korean folklore.

So in a sentence, it's basically girl pop group save the world.

This movie goes so hard and it is so good.

Like in the first eight minutes I thought, what is this?

I cannot look away and it's not what I thought it would be at all, And I'm obsessed with that.

Have you guys seen it so good?

I hadn't, and you two convinced me to watch this, And now the songs are on repeat in my head like I can't get it out.

It's the catchiest ear.

Whem.

I'm happy it's there.

It's not even annoying me that these songs are in my head.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Yeah, it's fun.

It's funny, it's really tightly written, it's beautiful to watch.

The music is just all bangers.

But beyond that, I want to talk about the messages in it, because I think it's really solid and I think Disney would be looking at this and thinking, shit, our rain is over.

They would be sitting around the boardroom head in hands, I reckon.

So firstly, it's very girl power, So the girls are at the center of this.

Instead of being passive and pretty pop idols, they're warriors and it's their voices that are the weapons.

So that's doing two interesting things.

Firstly, it centers art and music as the thing that will save us, like music's going to save us, which I think is a really good message right now for the world.

And secondly, it's flipping the script on female pop stars, like this thing that's often commodified, their voices actually is what gives this group power.

It's really heavily about friendship.

So these three girls are all each other's anchors.

There's no male savior rushing in, and it's got all these amazing girlhood coded moments like goofy, messy, really silly energy and Maggie Kang, the director said in Glamour that she grew up watching Disney princesses and thought that's not me.

I'm goofy and I'm awkward and I'm gross sometimes, and she wanted to put that version of girlhood on screen.

Did you guys notice that.

Yeah, that's a big thing that stuck out to me, Like, I know, you kind of sold this to me as this is a great show to watch with your kids.

But my overriding thought when I was watching it is this isn't for the kids.

This is for the women who love girl groups and want to relive that fandom and girlhood, and it just happens to be done in a format that your kids will put up weird.

Did you think it was inappropriate for kids or more just that kids wouldn't get as much out of it.

I just feel like kids wouldn't get as much out of it.

I mean, the demons, depending on your kids age, probably might freak them out a little bit, but I think, like you know, it's no scarier than in Lying King, him falling off the rock, or the scary stepmother entangled.

Like, there's always dark themes in kids shows, so I could definitely overlook that.

I definitely though felt like it was more for us.

I felt like it was very much a movie for us.

Here's what I loved about it.

When I was growing up, I was not even aware of South Korea.

I consumed almost exclusively American content, with a little bit of British and a tiny bit of Australian content sprinkled in.

I just think it's so brilliant that the first big cultural touchstone for Generation Alpha is a non Western.

Creation, which is this movie.

And there's Korean language in the songs, as I discovered because my kids wanted to write out the lyrics to them, and then we realized there's a bunch of Korean lyrics in them.

There are Korean locations, there's nods to Korean myths.

Of course, the very plot is sort of premised on the idea of Korean demons and folklore.

It's part of this wave of Korean culture which is known as hall You, which has sort of taken over the world in recent years.

But I love that this is the first big moment for this generation and it's not Western.

I found it really interesting to learn that even though the characters speak English, their mouth movement actually match or reflect Korean pronunciation.

So little details like that the producer and the filmmakers really wanted to get across an authentic picture of Korean culture today and the ultimate message of reclaiming your identity and being true to yourself.

It feels almost subversive right now in a political environment, both in Australia and the US and in other Western countries where that whole idea of immigration, pluralism, multiculturalism is under attack from some sectors.

And Muma MIA's entertainment writer Chelsea Hoy she loved this movie.

She was a very early adopter of this movie and he's a big fan of the k pop craze and said that it does feel very true to that genre while bringing in this whole other group of people now that get to enjoy that.

And she wrote for the site, we can link the story in our show notes.

But bringing it back to what you said about female friendship Monds, she said that that was what felt like the best part of this film was that it perfectly captures friendship in all its chaotic glory.

She said, the.

Silliness, the unhinged chaos, it's so girlhood coded.

This is exactly how close friends should interact.

It's messy, supportive, ridiculous, and fiercely loyal, all at the same time.

Each girl has her own struggles, dreams, growth, arc and the film takes time to develop them all properly, and that the banter feels natural and lived in, so their conflicts feel real, but their bond feels very unbreakable.

And I think that's an excellent message for our girls to be growing up with well and our boys.

I love the fact that for boys and girls, this is a vital window when they are young to kind of shape their perceptions of the world and what relationships are.

And I've noticed that when boys watch that movie too, it's not centering a heterosexual romance.

It's centering friendship.

And that's just as powerful a message for boys to receive as for girls.

Yeah.

Absolutely, it's very emotionally intelligent.

Like I was comparing it to what we grew up with when we were kids, and it's sort of we had the Goonies, the Sandlot Kids, Lion King, I guess was really big Beauting the Beast, which is super problematic.

A lad and super problematic, a lot of mediation of other cultures.

And all centered on men.

Here's the small problem with it is that the men actually don't come off very well in this movie.

So Mark Lee wrote in Northwest Asian Weekly that once again Asian men get thrown under the bus, and he was arguing that at first glance, this looks like a win for Asian representation, Like the women are very stylish and confident and heroic, but the men in this film are either villains or they're passive like the Sarja boys.

They don't speak.

None of them have really a speaking role, so they're completely silenced, or they're just playing useless like their manager that the girls have.

The other main male character is basically like a buffoon, so it does leave the guys with almost nothing.

But I was thinking about childhood movies we had it.

I was arguing with my sister about this.

She was saying, don't worry about the men, like they've had their time in the sun.

If you think about the childhood movies we had, it was Goonies, all boys, Sandlot Kids, all boys, Lion King, a big boy dies and a little boy takes over, you know, and a weird evil boy uncle Beauty and the beast.

Like the smart girl marries her captor to save her dad.

So it's nice to see this tide turning in kids pop culture towards more female centric smart movies.

I can see that critique though, because in cell culture is really a big thing in Korea too, and this idea of young men feeling left behind as young women are empowered and are hitting educational goals and career goals in a way that they're kind of lapping men is just as big an issue there as it is in Western cultures, So I think that's an important perspective to bring in.

I guess the other thing that I think kids are really connecting with here, which we haven't yet touched on, is the way that it blurs the lines between the digital and virtual world and real world in a way that feels so on point and so relevant for Generation Alpha.

They are more than digital natives.

Their world is shaped by the Internet and by online culture, and this movie just blurs those boundaries in such a sort of neat and clever way.

Think about the way on the end credits, this isn't a spoiler.

You see the women who are actually doing the singing in the studio recording the songs, so you get reminded that.

This is the real world.

There is also the virtual world that you've been watching in the movie, and the two of them, it's really hard to toe where one ends and the other begins.

One interesting cultural reason for that is that South Korea got internet in a widespread way a lot earlier than the rest of the world.

I found out that broadband was delivered there back in twenty ten to basically all houses, and so I think that's part of the reason why they're able to sort of tap into a digital native culture in such a convincing way for young kids.

Yeah, it's quite TikTok coded as well, so in the way that Stacy said before that this is a movie for really for adults.

It does that beautiful thing where it todes the line between youth culture and adult themes.

So in the first few minutes we meet the girls, they're on their private jet and they're having this big feast of food, and that feels TikTok coded to me, because there is this subculture on TikTok of I think it's called Muckbang, where people buy Korean food and then film themselves eating it, And so I think there's all these like digital moments throughout the show that kids would connect with.

In a way that people who don't live their life on TikTok probably wouldn't.

But the other thing that really stood out to me was how inclusive this show was.

So the fans of this girl group, they're not just silly, screaming teenage girls.

It's everyone.

You see, all ages, all body types, all genders.

You see bloky men crying, you see elderly women with their little fan clubs.

Zoe, one of the characters, talks about the colors in her head and taking off her mask, which some people have said is coded as she's neurodivergent, and a lot of fans have read roomy.

The main character is queer.

Even the rival boy band has pink hair and sort of effemin looking soft men.

So the whole world of it is very fluid and very inclusive.

That's a great point, and it makes me reflect on the fact that, you know, there are all sorts of downsides to not having a monoculture anymore, like the fact that everyone's listening to their own music, everyone's watching their own TikTok algorithm.

But every now and then something hits that the whole world enjoys, and that brings us back to the monoculture that we used to have, and I've found that I'm reconnecting with friends who I've sort of fallen out of touch with because our kids are sharing videos of themselves dancing to Golden and it's just so nice for the whole world at this kind of moment to be able to enjoy the same thing at the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah, my only criticism when Monzy mentioned about the inclusiveness, I think that was great from the fan perspective.

But my only thing that bugged me was that the three main girl band members are all incredibly thin and attractive, and when they're showing other body types in the movie, but they're not showing them on them that was the only thing where I went, Oh, when they're talking about consuming ten thousand calories before they go on stage, I wish that that hadn't been part of it, because you kind of don't want that to be the focus.

Yeah, Like, I can't argue with that.

I think that's a really valid point though.

I was listening to a podcast with Jayha Kim.

She studies k pop, and she was talking about how k pop is this extremely manufactured and controlled machine and how women in K pop have to diet, like they're really controlled.

They have to look a certain way.

So I guess in some sense it's true to the K pop culture.

But yeah, I do agree.

Skinny, hot girls save.

In the world.

And it's even at the point, as you say about the dancers from the show novact.

Djokovic even when you want to match.

Last week did a little dance from one of the songs and said most lovable thing he's ever.

Donn't it.

I know That's what I thought.

I was like, do I like him now?

He did one of the dancers in tribute to his daughter.

He said, she's been teaching me how to do these dancers from K pop Demon Hunters, So it's at that level, like it's just permeated the culture in such a massive way, which is great to see.

Everyone can enjoy it.

The demons are funny.

They're not scary.

If you're thinking, Ahna, oh, my kid's watching demons, they're quite funny.

They poke fun at themselves like it's a ten out of ten for me.

I loved it.

There are a lot of questions that parents these days are having to ask themselves and answer that previous generations of parents did not have to deal with one of those questions.

A really really tricky.

One to answer is whether or not she use a tracking app on your kids.

Now, Mon's and Stacy, You're probably not yet at the stage where you're thinking about that.

I am sort of approaching that stage, and to be honest, I just don't know what I'm going to do.

But lots and lots.

Of parents have asked this question and decided yes, they do want to know where their children are, and there are lots of reasons why they do that.

For instance, experts say that for parents of children with autism, a tracking app can be really helpful, particularly when wandering off is common.

There are lots of reasons why they do it.

But we don't yet really understand what the effects of using these tracking apps will be on the children who are constantly surveyed by them.

So we have some clues that are emerging.

I should say they've become really ubiquitous.

One of the most popular apps, Life three sixty, is now on fourteen percent of all phones in the US.

What really, Yeah, it's crazy, right, And in Australia, one in five parents attracting their children, whether it's through an air tag or Life three sixty or another app.

We've got some stats coming out about what it's doing to kids to feel constantly surveyed.

Recent survey that Australia's e Safety Commissioner did looked at the effects on young people's attitudes to relationships and specifically intimate relationships, and they discovered that a full twenty percent of eighteen to twenty four year olds think that it's reasonable to track the location of their intimate partners.

That's higher than any other age group.

And remember this is the age group that came of age being trapped by their parents.

It's alarming.

I think I'm going to put my cards on the table here.

I haven't decided yet what to do about the tracking apps.

There are unforeseen consequences of children going up knowing that their parents know exactly where they are at all times.

And it's a real gray area, and it raises lots of uncomfortable questions to children.

Are they entitled to privacy?

Do we need to get their consent to use these apps?

What does it mean to link surveillance and love in this way?

Is this just the price of safety these days?

You know, as I was thinking about this, I came across a great quote from Tina Fey about photoshop, she said, and I want to get it right because she's so clever.

It is an appalling and tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society, unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

I suspect that's where I'm going to land on the whole tracking apps thing, but I also wanted to intellectualize it and overthink it first.

So Stacy, what do you think Do you think you'll use a tracking app?

Yeah?

Of course I bloody will.

Like I didn't even think this was a question.

Everybody's doing that now.

I have friends who track their kids, track their husbands, track their son's girlfriend, Like it's all very normal now.

And our kids are growing up in that generation where they're tracking their friends even on Snapchat.

They're used to sharing that.

They're not used to the level of privacy that we had.

So I very much feel that this is going to be the norm going forward.

I must admit it's something that I think, well, yeah, that probably would make me feel better knowing where she is.

But I kind of wanted to interrogate, like, what's our fear, Like, what's our fear around not knowing their every move, And I guess the one that's the the top of the list.

I think you'd probably both agree is that they'll get taken, Like that's the thing you're worried about, is that they'll get taken or they're a missing person and you don't know where they are.

And so I looked into that and the stats of that, and it's so minuscule compared to our population.

Like Dennis Moriarty wrote this piece where he quoted the National Missing Person's Coordination Center, and they track the number of missing child cases throughout the decades.

So when we're looking back at the seventies, it was eighteen.

In the eighties, it was eleven children, nineties fifteen, and then it drops way down four in the two thousands and five in the twenty ten.

Do they know why there's been such a drop?

I mean, those are small numbers to begin with, small numbers when you consider like the growth of people that we've had in the country as well.

Not to say that we ever want that to be happening to any child, but the world is by and large a safer place now than it was then.

But I wonder whether it's a chicken and egg, it's a bit safer now because we have the technology to be able to know where everyone is.

What do you think Monts.

Safety doesn't sell product, Stacy, Yeah, you said the magic word just before fear.

And these companies they don't care about your kids.

They care about their shareholders.

Life three sixty is a tech company and they have built a product on anxious millennial parents, on catastrophizing situations and marketing with fear.

Have you seen the ad for this product?

Cop this?

You are my.

Whole wide world, my heart, my joy, my baby girl.

You'll never know how much I love you when you're gone.

I just think of you dying.

Mom.

What every time you.

Leave my safe when you drive a school or stay out at night.

This is where I.

Got of the million ways since I've ran, and what you could die expend any given time.

That's to range.

That does make me very anxious.

When you go to marketing school, you know what they say.

They say like marketing one oh one.

Fear based marketing works because it hits the oldest part of our brain, like the survival instinct.

And for parents, the stakes are really high because you're talking about your children.

So I just think we need to take a zoom back and go.

Are they just exploiting a fear that we have that doesn't exist, Stacy, because as you say, the data shows that we actually are living quite in safe times, particularly in Australia.

Yeah, notwithstanding your point about autism and about some parents really needing this for certain reasons.

But what I think is really interesting is what the experts are saying about this.

I've been reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Height.

He wrote this best selling book.

Lots of people are talking about it, and he calls this phenomenon safety ism, and he says the research around this is really consistent, like hovering, tracking doesn't reduce anxiety, it actually makes kids and parents more anxious, and you see it in the data everywhere.

So Deacon University found that Australian parents are the most risk averse in the world.

Four out of five won't let their kids do risky things.

There was this University of Michigan study that found that half of parents won't even let their tween walk to a friend's house or go to another aisle in the supermarket, like parents will not let their kids go to Aisle three to collect a can of beans.

And what this is doing is making kids depressed and anxious more than ever and parents too, And so the experts are saying the solution to this anxious generation is not tracking them or texting them.

You have to let them go into the big wide world.

And when we stop children taking any risks, we actually block them with this safetyism.

We block them from overcoming anxiety, managing risk, learning to be self governing like, all of which are essential skills to becoming an adult.

The other thing that Height says is that we have set up a division between the real world and the online world that says that the real world is more dangerous than the online world, and kids get a lesson from this.

He says that they can retreat into their phones where they're not monitored and where they can roam freely, and that world is actually more dangerous than the real world that we're monitoring them in.

So I know it starts to feel overwhelming them because when you say, thinking about the supermarket aisle, I don't know if I have necessarily consciously let my kids go into a different isle in the supermarket.

And one way to get around that is that Jonathan Height has this organization called Let Grow that I know you've come across Tummons and that website.

The Let Grow website has a ton of useful information and practical tips on how you can start letting go of your kids and let them into the world.

And they even have this little card you can print out there that your child can carry that says, I am not a neglected child.

I am a child whose parents want me to be able to walk around in the world.

Here is their number if you have any questions.

And I think that's a brilliant idea, that's so interesting.

Maybe it is a case of that we're worrying about the wrong thing.

Like it's like when people are worried about getting on a plane and the plane crashing, but then they'll jump in their car every day after a couple of glasses of wine and not think.

Twice about it.

Like really, we're thinking that the danger is when they're out and about without us, But a lot of the danger is the phone.

Like we're seeing time and time again study showing that phones are the damaging thing to their mental health and they're overall well being, like to their resilience.

And yet we're saying, here, have the phone, never leave it alone.

You must take this with you so that I don't lose you.

It's kind of like misdirected fear.

I think I saw an article that said that in twenty twenty three, stalking victims filed a class action lawsuit against this company Life, and against tile and against Amazon for essentially promoting stalking, specifically multiple privacy law violations.

And there was this article in the Washington Post as well that said that parents are using this location sharing feature to track their teenage and adult children in ways that resemble emotional abuse.

So you talked about that before, Amelia, like, is it a thin end of the wedge?

Are we teaching our kids that surveillance is normal and surveillance is love?

And what does that say?

And I think we're teaching each other that too.

The new South Wales Crime Commission has actually highlighted the use of these apps in both domestic violence and organized crime settings.

In a lot of intimate partner violence situations, these apps are used to control And I wonder if we're just becoming used to having people on demand and having information about people on demand in a way that isn't just done reasonable for kids, but it's also bleeding into our other relationships.

And it's like the app doesn't guarantee the safety.

It's telling you where they are, but it's not telling you the circumstances of that location and how safe they'd be when they're there, Like you might be seeing them at their friend's house, there could be a party going on, all sorts of strangers there.

So it's not like a fail safe.

It doesn't account for everything that could go wrong.

So true, Stacey.

Also, kids are savvy.

They're going to find a workaround for this anyway.

They're going to put their phone under their pillow at home and then have a burn a phone that they're using at a party.

That's exactly right.

I found this awesome article Juliet Weisfogel wrote for She Knows, a Teens Guide to Temporarily Regaining Freedom, where she's written all about the hacks that she used when her mum put the tracking apps on her phone when she was a fourteen year old and got caught sneaking out the window.

On the ways that she got around it, so there were different things she did, like turning off the Bluetooth at home and the Wi Fi so that the app would know that that was her last location, and then sneaking out the.

Window to a party.

But I thought the best.

One that she gave is advice, which is so funny, really crazy idea to get around it.

She suggested leave your phone at home and go to the party.

But I thought the best part was that she said they still took their laptops because they needed a way to communicate and to uber home afterwards.

So they've got a bit of technology on them anyway, they can't escape it.

And that said, I'm getting a bit of deja vu here, which is before I had kids, I said I'd never let them watch TV.

I reserve the right to use tracking apps the minute I feel I need to.

Yeah, some sad news cross my feed this week.

Every reject shop in Australia is about to disappear for good.

No.

I love the reject shop, and I also love the top comment on this news from a Reddit post about the reject Shop.

No longer will I be able to tell my sister that's where my mum and dad bought her.

That was a classic.

I pulled that one a couple of times too.

Look, it's probably a deep psychological problem I have, but the reject shop really brings out my latent hoarding instincts.

I go in there, my.

Little basket, and because everything is so aggressively and reasonably priced, I just want it all.

And it makes me feel like I can be a different kind of parent.

This is the kind of parent who has a craft draw as opposed to just piles of nonsense, the kind who sharpens her kids pencils every evening while thinking about the masterpieces that they're going to create the next day that she's not going to throw out when no one's looking back in stay curate in a perfect scrap book that she also got at the reject shop.

And the kind of parent who creates seasonal tablescapes.

I really want to be one of those parents who celebrates the coming of spring with some pastels.

Yeah, I get that feeling in Ikia.

This is okay, that's yours reject, that's my reject shop.

Look, that's why I really want to pour out a bottle of aggressively scentered off brand bubble bath for the reject.

You know exactly what you're talking.

I can smell the smell as you said.

It's blue, right, it's blue blue.

And you're like, is this going to make my children's skin break out in a rash maybe, but they're gonna have fun doing it and it's going to be amazing thing.

Reject shop.

Thank you for the good times.

Remember when Tony Abbott I'm wittingly posed in front of its signage on a campaign stop in Canberra before the election he left.

Isn't that wonderful?

Thank you for making school holidays bearable.

Thank you for the competitively priced water colors.

Thank you for the Okay.

I've just been told by their producers that in fact, it's just being renamed, and they're telling me that it's going to be okay.

It's going to be called something called Dolorama, which is apparently a Canadian chain.

That just doesn't have the same ring.

And I am going to suspend judgment on this and wait to go and see it.

But in the meantime, thank you for the good times.

Thank you for the hairspray I have that has the name it's giving glam.

How impulse body spray?

There?

Guys, stop up now.

Oh.

I read a substat this week called once again I wish I had kids younger that I have been busting to talk to you too about because I know you'll have a lot of feelings.

Jim Dalrymple, who was thirty six when he had his first child, said he started thinking about the pros and cons of having kids younger when the CEO of an AI company, Brad Weiss, tweeted having kids before thirty is how you stay generationally poor, and it caused quite the debate.

So Wi's later Clara Frid that what he meant is that having kids young eats up your cash flow and your time, which makes having kids sound like dodgy investment properties and fair kind of does.

But Dalrymple argues that the opposite might be true when you consider what you could gain later down the track by having kids early.

So he says in his piece, if I become a grandparent at sixty two rather than seventy two, I might be able to provide ten years of full time care for my grandkids.

This could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to my descendants.

That's not generational poverty, it's generational wealth.

Suddenly, having kids young is a financial advantage, and his whole point is by having kids sooner, we can give ourselves a more active, involved village, which is something a lot of us millennials say that we don't really have is an involved village.

He makes the point that millennials complain that they don't have a village, but then go out and make choices that will actively ensure our children also don't have a village.

This is very simplistic, Like he acknowledges that that not everyone is going to have a village just by compressing the time span between generations.

Some people won't have a village, whether they have a baby at twenty two or they have one at forty two.

But the point is that we could rethink the way families are helping each other.

So mon's do you wish you got cracking sooner now that you heard this argument?

Jim, Jim, Jim, I see your argument.

I accept your argument.

What I don't accept is the thing that he's missed entirely, which is the reason so many of us don't have babies until like our thirties and older.

It's not just because we're making a choice about that.

There are all these systemic reasons, like there are huge socio economic and social drivers that are related to this.

And here's my receipts.

In Australia, the average age of first time mums is twenty nine point nine years, so almost thirty.

In the nineteen seventies, which is where Jim wants to live, it was twenty three.

Demographers and social researchers have looked at this.

They're like, why are people having babies older?

Here's why women are spending more years in higher education, They're establishing careers.

There are enormous economic pressures on us right now.

There's insecure work, there's better contraception, which means more control over timing.

Meeting someone is a shit show.

People are marrying their partners much later.

So the average age marriage in Australia is now thirty two for women thirty four for men.

That's ten years later than in the nineteen seventy so that pushes berths further out.

Also, FYI, it takes ten years now to say for a house deposit.

So I just think, yeah, cool story, Jim.

I see that, But the data doesn't quite match up.

And I think that that's the piece that was missing for me here is it's not a personal choice to have kids later.

There's all these other things happening around us.

This is not just in Australia, this is globally.

If you zoom out.

This is happening across the EU.

It's happening in Italy, Greece and Ireland, it's happening in Asia.

Maternal age is rising everywhere.

There are very few places that are bucking the trend.

Here it's sort of rural India and some parts of northern Europe.

But mostly the average age of parents is rising because we are being structurally funneled into it from all the pressures.

Jim I didn't like the article either.

At first.

I did.

At first.

I read it, and look, it's like everything you disagree with politically, often there's a kernel of truth in it.

And that's why on first read, I.

Was kind of seduced by his thesis.

Yes, I thought, it's true.

You know, when you have children older, your parents are older, they are less interchanging nappies because they are enjoying their retirement, and you're older, so it's harder to wake up in the morning.

None of this can be disputed.

Getting older in general is not great, and your energy levels do drop.

But then I started to think about what Jim was saying, and I realized that he was missing an elephant in the room, and that elephant is women.

He says, no, it's fine to have children young, because it turns out that men who have children young actually make more money than men who have children later.

And then I thought to myself, yeah, but women who have children younger make less money than women who have children later.

And you know why that is.

It's because the motherhood penalty is real.

The Australian Breer Statistics shows that women reduce their paid work hours by about thirty five percent across the first five years after the arrival of children.

Australia has one of the highest rates of part time work by women in the OECD.

In some ways, that's great.

It means we get a lot more flexibility when our children are young to give them the time that we want to give them.

In other ways, it means we're missing out on income for retirement and for financial security and stability because we're looking after children and we're taking ourselves out of full time work.

So the motherhood penalty for women is real, and it's even more real when you have kids younger.

The other problem with it is that when we talk about the village, let's be real, we're talking about grandmothers, right.

That is so true.

That's what the village is.

The village is just a series of grandmothers making crow shaped blankets and doing the stuff.

Yeah, it's the unpaid labor that women get lumved with.

Again, good point, Amilia.

And the thing about grandmothers is they're not paid for what they do.

The village is unpaid labor and that's wonderful.

Grandmothers want to do it.

They love their grandkids.

But we can't get away from the fact that we're basically saying that we want more unpaid labor by women.

And one way Australians are actually pushing to strengthen that village is they're pushing to include grandparents in the government childcare subsidy.

Parents around the nation are actually putting together a petition for the Prime Minister to say why shouldn't grandparents get the same kinds of financial reimbursement as other types of care And I think that's a really solid step forward rather than saying that women should take themselves out of the workplace earlier to have children.

Yeah, and it's also in an ideal world that would be lovely if you had your children earlier, your parents are around to help you.

But you can't bet on the fact that once you get there, parents will be around to help you.

Like, that's assuming that nothing will go wrong for them physically or health wise.

And assuming they're alive exactly, they have a relationship with you as well.

That's it.

That's not guaranteed that they're even going to be there.

And as you say, they're not paid workers.

They can change their mind at any time and say I'm not helping you with this.

Your kids are brat, You're on your own, so you're not guaranteeing yourself a village.

Obviously, in an ideal world that would be lovely, But why would I risk it and risk my earning capacity to have a child earlier.

On what if?

Sorry, Jim.

I love that more men are writing about parenting, and I think Jim's got a terrific newsletter which I have subscribed to because I do want to hear more perspectives from men, and it's really refreshing to have a man talk frankly about his regrets in fatherhood.

But turns out he really is pushing a gender.

He also writes for a conservative think tank in the US that's dedicated to strengthening marriage hint heterosexual marriage and families and I think blessed Jim, Like, even if we subscribed to this idea that we should be having them younger, I think we can all probably admit whether we it's not a great trait.

But when you hear of someone who's had a baby at twenty two to twenty three, your first question is, one, was that on purpose?

Did they mean to do that?

And two?

How are they going to do this now?

Who's going to help them look after that baby?

How are they going to move ahead in their career?

Like I get secondhand stress for women that have them younger because I think about how hard it would be to parent at that age.

It will help out.

Yeah, good Stacy, what they've got all the energy in the world.

That's the best age to be a parent.

That's what you're say.

That's true.

It is a young person's game, and that is the thing.

Like, really, when you look at all of the studies around when is actually best for us to conceive and when would equate to the lowest risk pregnancy, it is in our mid twenties to late twenties, Like that is when we should be having them, but we're just too busy getting our shit in.

Order to do it all right.

To wrap up today's show, We're going to share the things that we're loving, sick, things that we might text to our friends or put in the mum's group check at Amelia.

So, I have discovered a book series that I want to read just as much, if not more, than my children.

And it's called Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

This is a series that inspires absolute devotion and adoration in people.

And I guess I've been living under a rock because I only recently discovered it.

The book started coming out in two thousand and five that by an author called Rick Riordan.

I pick one up at the bookshop and I took it to the counter and the young woman behind the counter literally gasped and said, this is the book that got me into reading.

And now she works at a bookshop, so she's very into reading.

And I took it home and started reading it to my children and look, they think it's fine.

I'm obsessed.

I'm now like, can we start doing bedtime reading at six point thirty when bedtime is eight, just so we can read more of the books.

There are fantasy series.

They're about a twelve year old kid who travels across America to recover Russ's Lightning Bolt.

They're based on Greek mythology.

They're so exciting, they're so gripping, and they're a page churner for kids and adults.

Are like, that's great.

I love that.

Did you start with a particular one?

Is it a series that you have to start at zero?

Yeah?

Start at zero.

The first book's called The Lightning Thief.

But there's so many in the series.

So the good news is you have a lot of great reading ahead of you.

I've been reading Roldal to my kids, who role like, woa, the world has changed.

I was reading The Magic Finger to the middle of night.

Do you remember this one?

The kids have guns in it?

Is the Gunner Magic Fingers.

Yeah.

Wow, it's just like wow.

Another time.

Rodal did not give a shit about like being careful around language or he's just yeah, it's really cool to read.

Stacy, Stacy, what are you recommending?

So despite us onthly doing this show for a few weeks, I felt like I had run out of recommendations yesterday, and I of course made that my husband's problem.

I was like, do a lap of.

The house, look around at our daughter's stuff and see if there's anything that I should be recommending, And as I've got him on that wild goose chase, I found the thing that I wanted to recommend.

So it only cost me twelve dollars and I bought it five years ago and I still use it every single day, and they still have them.

I've checked.

It's a nappy caddy from Kmart, so I'm well out of the nappy stage.

But they're just a cute little box, chic looking little box with a handle on the top, and I use it now as like the shit bits box.

So you know when you find like a piece of a toy and you have no idea where the rest of that toy is, and you put it in that pile next to your fruit bowl, like where Hamish and Andy talk about this in my podcast.

Why do you know about my house?

Because we all have identical houses, and you just end up with all this crap that you don't know where it's meant to go.

And all my daughter's like hair stuff.

You know, you're the curl cream and the tangling brush and all those bits.

I use that nappy caddy still for all of those bits.

And now I've got a second one to stop the fruit bawl pile from piling up.

So just pulled all the little bits in there and figure it out later.

That's later means problem.

Are you literally recommending a bin?

Like, no, they are things that you can't throw out, yes.

Because you know that the kid's going to be like, where is the one small bit of a toy that I desperately need?

Yes, exactly, you need them at some point maybe, but you can't throw them out.

So that's where this stuff goes.

Doesn't it stink though from all the nappy odor that seeped into the plastic.

No, I don't know about your nappy.

No, I'm not talking about a nappy bin mons, I'm talking about a little square box with a little handle on top of the dirty nappies.

Never went anywhere near it.

It was the one that you keep like the wives, the clean nappies, gotcha the moisturizer all right?

Oh my god, No, that bin is long gone.

That bin has gone to the tip that was foul, never to be returned to my house.

My god, I.

Thought you were just throwing everything in the stinking I was like, oh yeah, here for that.

Anyway, they're like ten to twenty bucks at kmar and we'll put a link to one of.

So they've have a lid on it, Stacy, so you can cover the ship bits.

No, the bits are free and loose, but that's fine.

I've got confused shit bits.

You're imatching little bits of shit in there.

Yeah, I'm so sorry.

That's on mem ons.

That's what's your reco I've got this this hidden Netflix gem that I can't stop watching right now, neither can my kids.

It's not K Pop Demon Hunters.

It's toddler's running Errands.

It's a show called Old Enough.

It's a Japanese show where they send two three and four year olds off into the world to run errands completely on their own, and then they film them with hidden cameras.

Have they got tracking apps?

I must know there are no tracking apps.

Literally.

I watched one last night where a woman said to her three year old, take my pants to the store and get them mended.

And I cannot stop watching it.

It's equal parts adorable and terrifying.

Like you will laugh, you will gasp, you'll cheer for these toddlers, like these preschoolers.

And my kids love it too, even though they can't quite understand it because it's in Japanese, so they're subtitles, but they can't completely read them all.

It's going to make you want to send your kids out for errands too without a tracker, which is, you know, sometimes a good thing.

How successful are they fulfilling the errands?

Did she get the parts hammed?

Yes?

They do the most amazing things, some of these kids, and they show you during the show.

They say they have to walk three hundred meters, they need to cross two roads, so they set it up and yes, these kids are so capable at such a young age.

It's amazing to watch.

And now since we've watched it, my kids keep saying, Mum, send me on an errand I want to go to the shops by myself.

So this is definitely watching this great wreck.

You know what, We'll put a link to all of our recks in the show notes in case your brain is a sieve.

That is all we have time for this week on Parenting Out Loud.

A huge thank you to our team the group ep is Ruth Devine, produces Leah Porgus and Sashatanic and researcher Tessa Kodovic Bye