You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.

Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.

Hello and welcome to Parenting Out Loud.

I'm Jesse Stevens and I am joined by Amelia Lester, and we are here to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week, because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about it.

Amelia, Welcome, Thanks Jesse.

I wanted to thank you because a lot of people may know you as a fashionista.

I believe it tree is the correct term, and you recommended to me your Lulu Lemon fled pants.

We both agreed that they were an elevated active way.

Look, an elevated pant.

Term that fashion is to be used, and I bought them.

I went and found them, like secondhand.

You wearing your elevated pants.

Feel they're so.

Good because no one knows their leggings except you.

Yeah, they're my new uniform.

Like I feel so jens Z like how I'm like Billie Eilish the same I feel she has them.

I'm so bad in them.

I just just.

Mixed metaphors there, but let's go with it.

Infinitely cooler.

So you are my cool, Gurula.

People say that to me.

A lot, actually, and on the show today, one of the most pervasive pieces of parenting advice is making everyone feel bad about themselves.

We've solved the mystery of what happened to the family dinner table.

Plus Courtney Kardashian thinks school is dated, why more kids are being homeschooled than ever before?

And Skinny Talk Amelia is here to explain the social media phenomenon promoting a skinny lifestyle.

But first, in case you missed it, Kate Hudson has revealed Mindy Kayling was back to work an hour after giving birth, which made me feel bad.

Hudson, who will be forever almost famous to me and I'm assuming to you too, Jesse, but is in fact, somehow now forty six years old and has three children.

She is on a press tour with Mindy Kayling and they have a new show on Netflix called Running Point.

I had to look up what this was about.

It's apparently about a reformed party girl put in charge of her family's pro basketball team.

Apparently it's a lot of fun.

It's like a female ted Lassie.

That's what I've mead.

Okay, well, It's not an immediately interesting plot to me, I had to admit, but I do love everything Mindy Kayling does, and she co created the show.

Anyway, Hudson said, we had a script she and Mindy at our first table read she's on oom.

Then she has a baby and is sending notes like an hour after she has the baby.

I was like, isn't Mindy literally in labor?

She is a powerhouse and delivers what she's going to deliver.

Hudson continued, I want to unpack this with you because so Mindy Kayling is forty five, she has three children.

I don't have an issue with Mindy Kayling doing anything an hour after giving birth.

God speed Mindy Kayling.

She's an amazing creative woman.

But I think what I'm annoyed about here is Kate Hudson lionizing the behavior.

I think that's what annoys me because doesn't it just put pressure on other women who have maybe less power, fewer financial resources to immediately get back to work after having a baby when they hear stuff like this.

Yeah right, I agree with you.

I'm in two minds about it, because, like you, I think a woman can do.

I was gonna say whatever she wants post birth probably limits on that.

I think that she can pick up her phone if she wants, right, I've heard I remember Roxy just saying co speaking years ago, she's had two babies, and she joked that she took one hour maternity leave, and she said she checked her emails laying in the hospital bed, and when she was sort of pressed on it, she said, the baby was sleeping.

I was going to turn on the TV.

I was going to have a sleeper.

I was going to open my emails, and I chose that.

And she's a woman running her own business like you do.

You.

I actually find it really infantalizing when people tell women what they can and can't do.

Yep.

But I agree that the pressure it then puts on other mothers in particular, because let's not pretend like we wouldn't have any issue really with a dad checking his emails an hour after birth, that doesn't have the same.

He's probably checking his emails during.

During birth, yep, just checking his slack, making sure there's nothing urgent coming through.

But women, I think we do put this pressure on each other.

I remember seeing this imagery of a woman pumping in the boardroom and that being like it was some image that was going around and it's like working mothers.

I feel like when I was growing up, that was just sort of an image you saw every day.

It was like in the nineties there was a say of women in boardrooms pumping yeah, with babies.

And I saw that and I felt furious because it was like, but I don't want to be pumping in a boardroom.

I want to be at home with my baby.

And does that make me less ambitious or less hard working?

I think when it's used as a proxy for unshakable work ethic, it's super, super dangerous because if there's ever excus use to not be on your emails, yeah, surely it's when you've had a baby.

You've dislodged a memory deep within me of a cover of a magazine with Rachel McAdams pumping.

Oh I remember that.

Now.

There's also been covers.

For instance, Australian l I think was a World leader in a cover with a woman breastfeeding.

So I guess I shouldn't have an issue with the Rachel McAdams pumping cover.

It's certainly not anything prudish, but again it's this sense of why are you multitasking, because now I have to multitask.

Isn't it enough to just do one thing at a time.

And the thing with pumping is that it's always it's always spilling and you're always running, like that's the imagery of the pumping that it's like, now you're not physically bound, you too can do a marriage.

Sorry, do you not run when you pump?

That's weird, Jessie.

It's like, if you do want to sit down, it's lazy.

And I looked at this story and I even looked at Roxy a little bit more closely, and I thought, I don't know if anyone here is actually telling us that this is aspirational.

But there is this sensitivity when it comes to anything motherhood that we internalize it, that we immediately go, you've just made me feel bad.

And specifically the competition element, like this is probably my problem more than it is Kate Hudson's.

Yeah, yeah, I should understand that what Mindy Kayling does after birth has nothing to do with me, and yet we're always implicitly comparing.

One of the most pervasive pieces of parenting advice is making people feel bad about themselves, and it's got to do with the dinner table.

Eating dinner as a family is seen as a cornerstone of good parenting, According to an article published in Slate last month.

Research has linked the practice too better nutrition, improved academic performance, decreased depression, anxiety, and kids improve communication.

I could go on, but the author of this article, her name is Dawn t, says that in reality, most families just can't make it work.

In Australia, less than half of families currently eat together.

Amelia, why do you think this is?

On the surface, it looks like a relatively simple thing to do.

I think, Jessie, that this is a real estate story.

In what way?

Let me unpack this?

Do people even have dining room tables anymore?

And aren't they doubling mostly as laundry rooms?

Or is that just me?

I had my first dining table when I moved into a home two months before we had Luna, and my twin sister did not have a dining table for the first year of her baby's life.

So did you grow up sitting around the dining room table?

Yeah?

Yeah, And I was reading about Actually, they surveyed a bunch of millennials about whether you grew up in a house or an apartment, and the overwhelming majority was a house, not necessarily a big house, not necessarily in a city, but there was a house, which meant you had a backyard, it meant you didn't have super close neighbors who were maybe sensitive to yelling and crying.

And now the percentage because of high density living in cities, I believe it's gone through the roof.

Yeah.

An SPS story basically summed it up with the headline raised in a house, but parenting in an apartment.

That is the experience.

It's certainly my experience.

And just to throw some numbers at you because I thought they were really interesting, the number of families with children and apartments has increased by fifty six percent from twenty eleven, which is huge.

Yeah, and then one in five apartments now are occupied by a family with children.

Certainly, anecdotally, almost everyone I know lives in an apartment and yet grew up in a house.

But apartments fundamentally are not built for families.

They're not.

Well, this is what I need to get on my high horse about.

I think, even though Australians are now living more and more in apartments and raising children in apartments, I don't think that culturally we've caught up with this.

And I want to mention one particular aspect that you touched on before.

I think noise is a real issue.

So i live in an apartment with two kids, and I've noticed that I'm not the most popular resident of the apartment building.

I think that's safe to say.

I don't think any of them listen to this, and I don't think that I need to worry about them being offended.

I just don't think they like us living in the apartment very much.

Can talk about the various microaggressions, but this is not time for my real estate gripes.

It's not just in my head, because it turns out a twenty eighteen study found that Australians correlate being a good neighbor with being a quiet neighbor, which, fair enough, I get it, Yeah, quiet neighbors are probably better on balance than loud neighbors.

But also the survey found that people think that children shouldn't be the norm in apartments.

They think that they shouldn't be noise from children in apartments.

And so how this changes my parenting is that I'm constantly telling my children to speak less loudly.

The net result is that they actually play less.

They certainly horse play less because that's very loud.

And often, if I'm really stressed out about the volume, I'll just turn on the TV because then I know they won't be screaming and running through the apartment playing tip And I think that we're seeing the same thing with the dinner table idea.

We're constantly told that you'll only raise good conversation as if you sit down at the dinner table.

And certainly I was raised sitting at the dinner table watching the news every night.

I cannot imagine subjecting my children to the news in this day and age.

But the idea of that's what makes you a good parent is grounded in an assumption that people are living in houses, not flats.

Exactly right, And I suppose as well, the difference from parenting in an apartment is a necessity every single day to get out of the house.

There is no like they talk about how important it is to know, not supervise, and to let kids sort of play and explore.

When you've got an apartment that's for square meters, there isn't a lot of places to explore.

And I was reading about how in Singapore, for example, they open up public schools after school hours and stuff so that parents, because let's not pretend like Australia is the only place with high density living right like France, China, Singapore is one of them, and so they found ways to make communal green space where people can go out and play.

And Australia or the cities, it really depends on your suburb.

This was something that really surprised me when I moved back to Australia last year after many years in the US.

Public schools in the US routinely are open after school, before school, and on the weekends they're just not closed so you can take your kid in and play on the playground equipment.

Here, I was shocked by this notion that when school ends, the gates close and you can't use the playground, and it feels like a waste of space because you've got all these areas for kids to play, and it also again feels like it's a relic from a time when kids went home from school and maybe frolicked around the yard like chickens.

We don't have a yard now.

Most people don't.

It makes a really big difference.

But back to the dinner table.

Example.

I think even people who live in homes or who do have dining tables, and I think the apartment thing is that open it's too small for a dining table, or they've got like built in benches, so the bench is kind of the hub.

But I think the way our home have changed is that the centerpiece of the house is now the living room with a television.

True, and so screens have stolen the time that we would ordinarily sit around and have a chat.

Maybe, and that's not like we don't value that as much, or because we are living in smaller, smaller places, the dining table has become a place with just a lot of crap on it.

So it could be where you work during the day, if you're working remotely.

It could be homework.

It could be laundry, because I don't have a laundry, like we have to put it somewhere.

The other thing I thought, Amelia, and I wanted to know whether you feel the same when I now picture a family sitting around at dinner table.

Do you see that as class coded because I see it as a sign of money, Yes, Like because you've got both parents at home at six pm, which is I would say, pretty rare.

You've got someone who's made the meal before six pm, or maybe you've got help who's made the meal.

But when I see that image, I go, oh, that's become really loaded with class for me.

You're so right, because there's a fundamental physics problem in getting a hot meal on a table at the time that children want to eat it when we're all working around the clock.

How does that work?

I don't know.

It's like an impossible equation.

And so this idea of having the space for the dining room table, having the parents who have divided the labor such that someone's made the meal or they, as you say, assigned that to someone else, and then having you all sit around the table, Yeah, it does feel like a luxury in this day and age.

But I wonder do you think we should be worried about this or do you think that the studies themselves are kind of caught in the past.

Look, I think ideally it would be really good for us.

I think it would because in terms of nutrition and mindfulness, when you're eating, it is better to not be looking at a screen.

I say, this is someone who often eates in front of a screen and The second thing is I was reading about how evolutionary we tend to trust people we eat with.

It's like a programmed thing.

That's like there's a sense of connection we feel equal to.

It is hardwired into us that something social happens when we eat, Like, for example, if you're doing a business negotiation, you have snacks on the table, it's more likely to go well.

So that's hardwired into us.

And I think that that connection even growing up.

I think they're some of my favorite memories.

So I keep going, I'll do it eventually, I'll do it eventually.

It's aspirational.

It's a work in progress.

Courtney kardashi In, the forty six year old reality star and mum of four biological children and two step kids, says going to school is dated and let me explain.

So.

She was recently on her sister Chloe's podcast and said she has a rebel streak that includes questioning the purpose of sending her kids to school.

Apparently her kids started sending her videos of successful people.

She didn't quantify that.

I don't know what her definition is.

I'm going to say that coded for rich saying that their kids will never go to school and when she really grappled with what the goal was.

She agreed that it was unnecessary and decided to homeschool, and Chloe enthusiastically agreed.

Now, there are a myriad of reasons why you at homeschool your children.

But Amelia, do you think it's possible that Courtney just got played by her kids who didn't want to go to school next week?

I am intrigued by this notion of the videos of successful people saying the kids will never go to school.

Look, I think this is part of a trend that has come out of the US post COVID, and I'm actually surprised that this trend has taken so long to make waves.

Basically, I think that as society becomes less equal, as the very rich become not just very rich, but sort of gluttonously extravagantly rich, there's no wonder they've decided school is not for them.

School is a fundamental leveling field.

It's a place where all children are meant to go to learn the same things.

And it's actually surprising that we've managed to hold on to this kind of egalitarian institution for as long as we have in such a stratified society.

So in Courtney's defense, does it kind of not matter if her kids go to school?

Like for the rest of us, it does matter because it is a great equalizer.

But if you are the child of Kourtney Kardashian, maybe you don't need that.

Maybe you don't need that background.

Well, now that we have this phrase generational wealth in the language, I guess it doesn't really matter from a financial perspective.

But I think that once the rich start pulling their kids from school, the institution starts to crumble.

I'm very worried about this.

We've seen it also in the US with the way that Silicon Valley has rejected the idea of higher education and of university.

They've decided that you don't intergo to university at all, no matter what.

It's a waste of time, it's indoctrinating you and certain sort of center left ideological beliefs that they don't approve of.

Now they've come for school.

It's all part of the same movement.

There's obviously been this widespread rejection of institutions, some of it which is really understandable.

For example, the Catholic Church that have been criticized, and understandably people are moving away but there's also this rejection of education, of the scientific method, of academia, of studies, of any sort of rigor to the ideas that we put forward.

And I wonder if this is the beginning of the end in terms of any sort of enlightenment ideals like it is worth reading what other people say so that you can evolve how you'd think.

Yeah, it's fundamentally anti intellectual.

And I think that what is of a piece with it is the Robert F.

Kennedy Make America Healthy Again movement, This idea that the scientists might say that vaccines are worthwhile and that fluoride makes your team stronger, but what do they know.

I'm sure that Courtney Kardashian is sympathetic to that kind of quasi scientific thinking as well.

It's really a rejection not just of education, but of expertise.

Yes, And the rejection of that expertise doesn't hurt the Kurtnay Kardashians.

It hurts the people who don't get the vaccination and have comeobidities and a black or Hispanic and have you know a number of things that would make them particularly vulnerable to an illness.

Right, And that's what I think Hearing her talk about that, I agree made me worried.

And I agree as well that this has a lot to do with the pandemic, because in Australia, if you look at homeschooling rates absenteeism, which we should say are not the same thing, but absenteeism school refusal, they've gone through the roof, and experts have said they think that COVID made parents see schooling as something that could be done from home.

So in the same way that working from home became something all employees went, well, it's possible, you just sent us home.

If they saw that as something that worked for them or was even a possibility, then suddenly you've got literally there are more Australian Is being homeschooled than ever before.

And they say that's a result of things like bullying, of obviously the increase in tech that it can be done, and also of safety like them not feeling safe at school, which I think is everyone's prerogative.

And also homeschooling is a lot higher among people with an autism diagnosis or an adh DE diagnosis.

Maybe there's also a discussion to be had about the failings of some schools to cater to those diverse.

Needs, and specifically the underfunding of public education around the country as well.

I've heard similar things from friends in the US.

I have a friend in a US state that is very religious and she has to homeschool her child because they do not have a lot of schools to choose from around and her child has many additional needs that the local schools were just not really able to meet, so they made the decision to hire a private tutor and homeschool their child.

When she went to the local town office to put in the upp location to homeschool, she was shocked by how easy it was to say that you're going to homeschool your child, and how little supervision was applied to this process.

So she basically filled in a one page form that asked her very little about what she was going to teach, didn't provide her with any resources visa VIE, curriculum or anything else.

She essentially just had to say, I want to homeschool my child.

I don't need to tell you the reasons, and then got approved for it.

And it was really viscerally upsetting to her because while she's going to be making sure that her child is meeting the state curriculum requirements and has been in a position where she can hire a tutor who she feels really confident in that can educate her child properly.

There are many people in this state who clearly have parents who are not necessarily trying to check all those boxes and are doing it because they don't want them to be exposed to a mainstream school curriculum.

And that's really concerning to me.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

And that speaks to the Courtney Kardashi an example too, because I don't think any of us would imagine that Courtney is going to sit at home and teach maths like that's access to a private shootor which is again like something that's on offer to some families and not to others.

Another thing that I've heard everyone in my family, teachers and both my parents spoke about an enormous rise in this school refusal phenomenon after COVID.

It's been almost rebranded by some people in the space as school can't because they say refusal suggests they're making a decision, and these are kids who cannot go to school, and so all these psychologists are trying to work out what to do because in Australia, you have to go to school, like there are repercussions and the school has to get involved, and it can be really complicated.

I would look at these stories and kind of go, all right, there were days I didn't want to go to school either, like I didn't have a lot of empathy for it.

And Dad told me this story about a kid, the poor mother just putting the kid in the car and dads standing there and the mother just trying to like pull him by his ankles and being like, you have to go to school, this is so important, and the kid just couldn't, like couldn't go into the classroom.

This is a post COVID study.

This is a post COVID story.

And the numbers nearly half of all students missed ten percent of school in twenty twenty two, so that's actually quite a lot.

The sick days thing is becoming more and more prominent, which I guess is probably to do with screens.

But again the idea that it's optional.

When something becomes optional as well, then I suppose you go.

I'm not going to go today.

I was surprised when I started my kids at their school that they still give out prizes for best attendancy.

Yes, that's controversial, contras, I can.

See why, because kids can't help it when they get sick.

Do we learn nothing from COVID?

I'm just really surprised.

Why do you think schools?

I mean, I guess I'm going to answer something own question here.

I think schools are persisting with that idea of perfect and tended and rewarding kids who make it into school the most because they're seeing this trend of school refusal or school can't and they want to hammer home what an example of a kid showing up.

Every day looks like and the importance of sitting in the classroom, because my parents would say that, you know, you might look at your nine, or you might look at your five and go, come on, what's a day?

But if you repeatedly miss that, there are certain blocks in learning that are very difficult to catch up on.

So there is something that you will learn in year five.

I'm not saying on one day.

I'm just saying, like, if you you know, and people who have had a prolonged illness will know this, you miss that and it become very hard to catch up in year six or year seven.

So I suppose it is like, if you're on the fence, go, but presentee is a more forcing that also isn't the ideal?

Yes, So I guess we're kind of talking about a few different things here.

One is the rise of homeschooling, which I think we can attribute to the general decline of trust in authority and expertise post COVID, And it's right now.

It's being led by very wealthy people, I would say, who want to control what their children learn and are maybe not very interested.

And then on the other hand, people with kids with different needs.

I think that's the other group.

Yeah, we've probably got to acknowledge and in fact, for them, the outcomes are really good.

Liv Schmidt is a twenty three year old model in New York City who makes her money encouraging women and girls to follow the skinny lifestyle.

This was a story in The Cut last week that is causing people to lose their minds.

Basically, I knew nothing about this but Live Schmidt.

She was on TikTok until last year, then she was banned after a Wall Street Journal article.

Now she's on Instagram.

She's just been banned from Instagram as a result of this article.

Basically, she mocks women who she says are large and fat.

She posts videos where she says things like girls be three hundred pounds, saying I'm a snack.

No Megatron, you're the fkn vending machine.

So just really nice things like that.

She has a subscription only group called Skinny Society, which, for twenty dollars a month, members gain access to exclusive content, including recipes, workout videos, and diaries of everything Schmid eats in one day.

She gained some notoriety recently because she said that instead of having dessert, you could swallow your boyfriend's semen, and she said that semen's only something like five calories of tea spoon, so that's good to know.

There's also a group dm thread that you get access to where people basically egg themselves on to eat less.

And it's just really distressing to read about airmail.

The publication Airmail recently estimated that she makes one hundred and thirty thousand US dollars a month from the six and a half thousand members in the Skinny Society.

So look, I think why this article made such as splash is that people definitely did not realize how thriving this somewhat underground community is because as shown by the fact that TikTok and Meta both had to ban her after news articles came out, so clearly they're not moderating their platforms very well.

If you search skinny or skinny talk on TikTok and Instagram, you'll apparently see thousands of videos along these lines of very thin women showing off their locale diets.

What's interesting about liv Schmidt to me, having lived through the nineties and Kate Moss and heroin Chic, is that she's very careful not to advocate for particular foods, particular diets.

She frames it all in this sort of faux feminist empowering language.

She says things like eat like you're the main character, because you are.

She says, eat like your highest self is watching.

So it's a very interesting kind of twist on that feminist rhetoric to basically further eating disorders.

And the Cut article found evidence of girls in high school posting on skinny society, including about how thin they were for their graduations.

I was shocked by this, but maybe that's because I'm not super immersed in social media.

Jesse, how did this article make you feel?

Were you shocked by it.

I was because I'm not being served this.

But then the way the algorithms work, the people who will be most sensitive to it will And maybe it's easy for us to assume that the culture has shifted.

But I was at something a few weeks ago where it was like a kid's fun day thing, right, and there was like an obstacle course.

There was a jumping castle and there was face painting, and in the obstacle course there was a tunnel thing, you know, kids like run through these little tunnels.

And there was a girl she might have been six or seven, and she was standing there and her friend said why aren't you going through the tunnel like because she hadn't been doing it, and she said, I can't fit through the tunnel.

I'm too fat.

And the look on this girl's face, I went, oh, I thought that didn't happen anything.

Yes, I thought that that's not how we spoke exactly.

It wasn't that she said I can't fit, because she could have gone I'm too big.

She was a little bit older than the four year olds going through.

It was the way the word fat came out of her mouth that I went, oh, that's got to her at seven.

Yeah, like that is sickening.

There is so much information now on food and solids and feeding and all of that and how to prevent you know, restriction and all of that.

And I've been deep in this because I have a child who eating has never been very straightforward, and the idea that you put it there and you decide when you're full and you don't comment on things like that.

But I've certainly noticed that even like oh, she's so little or whatever, has already started.

And I wonder how you then protect them from because inevitably, and I went through this, you then go through puberty where your body starts to change and suddenly you know, maybe you're not that little, or parts of you, whatever it is, it's a really hard thing to sort of recalibrate.

I wouldn't think that seven year old is even on social media, so I imagine that it's just coming into the well.

It's plackground.

As you point out, with your own child, people are already judging or commenting on her body, on Luna's body, so it's happening early.

And I completely agree with what you said about thinking that we were over this, because you and I both lived through the body positivity moment in the mid two thousands, and thinking back to I guess it all started actually with the Dove ads and then it kind of snowballed from there, and it coincided actually with the decline of magazines, which is where I certainly inhaled a lot of this content in the nineties, and I sort of thought we were just beyond it, that along with them on nuanced understanding of things like sexuality and race relations and the environment and taking care of the environment, we were just getting more progressive, more enlightened, and that our children wouldn't have to deal with this.

While it turns out I was wrong, and what came through to me in this cut article is that every generation ends up having this issue, and it's just that the language around it changes and the media in which it's consumed changes.

So I mentioned that for me in the nineties, it was very much magazines that were conveying the diet tips.

In the early two thousands, it was probably live journal, Tumblr of those kinds of platforms.

Oh Tumbler, I forgot, how And that was very much the image that it had.

This Really there was a term that was used that was almost hashtagged, and it attracted people who were struggling with eating disorders and glorified bro Anna.

Right, yes, yes, yeah, so that was the thing then and now it's just moved on to a different platform.

What I want to ask you is, do you think that there is any escaping it or is this kind of like nihilistic idea that every generation of young women inevitably has to cope with this.

I think it's true that we had this optimism.

I remember hearing mums talk about it in the office of like, I'm going to get my daughter when she has a phone, I'll just follow a bunch of diverse people on Instagram, so she'll see all of those images and it'll be the antithesis of a magazine or whatever because she'll have all of these different bodies and shapes coming up.

You can't do that on TikTok, like you just can't.

And won't curate in that way.

No control.

All it takes is you know, I'm pretty sure if that app knows that you're a young girl, it's going to go I know what to give you, and then all you have to do is stay for a second, and you're just going to get more and more so in that way.

I don't think so.

But from what I've heard, people I know that grew up with a real complex around weight seemed to absorb some of that from their family, And I just maybe the hope or the thing that I go the difference we can make is like how we talk about it inside the house, yes, and the language, how you speak about other people, how you speak about food, how you speak about bodies, how you look at yourself in the mirror, all of those things I think does impact it.

I grew up with a mum who never commented on her body once, not negatively, not her face, not anything, and I think it was just like to me in my house, it felt irrelevant, whereas I know that that really impacted other people who grew up with a different experience.

It's also really hard to escape even when you are trying to create a body neutral space within your family.

So, for instance, I loved roll Dyal books growing up.

Oh yeah, been.

Reading them to my children, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Twits.

And the problem with these books is that the word fat and the idea that people who are ugly on the inside are always ugly on the outside, and that those two things are essentially synonymous.

It pervades those books a sort of repulsion for women's bodies, particularly fat women's bodies, particularly women who are maybe not your platonic ideal of beauty and the merging of the inner and outer self.

It's there just through those books.

It's shot through them, and a lot of older books do have that idea of inner beauty being the same as out of beauty, and if fairy tales have it too.

In fact, the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella, for instance, they're both ugly and mean.

Cinderella is both beautiful and kind, and to decouple those qualities if you're going to read classic kids literature, it's really difficult to convey that those two things are not synonymous.

That must be why every children's book now is animal.

It's like it's a gendlest animal because it's like we could project on it.

It doesn't matter the size.

Sometimes it's an elephant, sometimes it's a mouse.

But it's like you don't get all of that complexity of trying to then identify them into a certain body or you know that's.

True because it is also quite recent that we've started to talk about this in this way.

For instance, Harry Potter is full of the same thing, and that was written in the two thousands.

So it just goes to show that we're hopefully on the cutting edge of trying to teach a different thing to our children.

But then again, I'm sure our feminist mothers thought that they were doing that too.

Alright, it's time for recommendations, Jesse, what have you got for us?

Amelia?

Have you ever been to a toy library?

No?

I see these sides, tell me what they're If they sound wondering.

They're so good and it's so not something I would ever have gone and found.

Well, it would be weird if you didn't have kids and were just hanging out at toy library exactly.

But the toy library is part of my local library, which is on my string.

That's so very, very easy.

But I looked it up and there are hundreds across the country.

It's not just my neighborhood.

But a toy library is literally you go in and it's got every toy you could possibly imagine.

It has costumes.

You know, there's a stage at which they might like a little pram to practice their walking because and you know, you need that for like two months and then you never need it again.

It has things like that, and then you do aigh.

I think it was like seventy bucks for twelve month subscription and I could go every week if I want it, and I can get like three or four toys, and then I get three at a time.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you get multiple toys return them.

And I was like, can I donate toys to this because I remember reading something a while ago about how there's an ideal amount of toys.

They say it's between ten and fifteen so and probably wouldn't and probably wouldn't And it inspires creativity because it's like, if they don't have the doll, then they have to make the doll out of playtoes, which is yeah, yeah, that's.

That's where my parents went wrong.

But Toy Library is so so good because we all know the clutter everything.

Often your kid just wants it for two weeks and then it disappears and they never think about it again.

So I love that.

That's my my hack.

How about you, Amelia.

My recommendation is one very near and dear to my heart.

It's been a companion in my life.

For years now.

It's a podcast.

It's called Grim Grimmer, Grimist.

Have you heard of it?

Is it Grim Brothers related?

Yes?

Oh I love them?

Yes, it grim fairy tales.

I mean the Grim Brothers are like true crime for the eighteenth century?

Right, Were they twins or just brothers?

I think they want maybe just brothers.

But Clara and I find them very inspiring because they watchmen.

Yeah, it's really sweet.

So the host is Adam Gidwitz.

It's an American podcast, and the fifth season of this podcast drops, And yes I did say dropped.

I'm very excited about it.

Dropped a couple of days ago.

That's my household version of rep TV.

Just to give you a sense of how exciting this is.

So here's the premise.

Adam Gibwitz goes to the classroom of a very fancy school in Brooklyn, New York to tell grim fairy tales, and he records himself telling the story and also records the kids responding in real time to the story.

So this podcast works on a number of levels for parents.

There's something slightly voyeuristic about the milieu of this podcast, which is, like I mentioned this very fancy school because the kid's parents, you learn through their anecdotes, are all like really fancy careers, like their set designers, their novelists, and you're just getting this glimpse into kind of like the upper crust of New York and how they're raising their kids.

It's heavy.

I love it, Yeah, I love it.

And then the second thing is the kids are extremely precocious and well spoken because their parents are again set design as a novelist in the upper crust of New York, so they add in these actually very witty interjections to the stories.

And then the third thing that's great about it is that the grim fairy tales are just the best stories.

It's like canceling Gretelin styf Yeah, right, Like it's all the really disturbing ones that I loved.

Really disturbing.

And so that's why it's called grim, Grimmer, Grimmest, because each fairy tale is ranked is it grim, is it grimmer, or is it grimmest, And so you can kind of pick how dark you want the story to be.

They're not sugar coated, they're not done down.

In fact, some of the stories most of the stories are quite violent.

Love that, but in a kind of kid's storybook somehow age appropriate way.

How long are the episodes.

They range in between about twenty and fifty minutes.

You probably need to buy some episodes if you want the whole back catalog, but there's plenty available for free on podcast platforms to just try out.

A good one to try out versus Rumpelstiltskin, which is one of my favorites, and Gidwitz itself.

He's just a fantastic storyteller.

There's a reason why when you type his name into Google the first result is Adam Gibbwits married, because I've definitely googled that and you will too.

I love that.

Thank you so much.

That is all we have time for on Parenting out Loud today.

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