You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast.

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

Haylee Bieber broke the Internet again.

Jennifer Aniston shared something that no one saw coming, and do you have a favorite kid?

Because no one wants to admit it, but shit, it can really do some damage.

This is Parenting out Loud, the parenting podcast for people who don't listen to parenting podcasts.

I'm want Eat Bowley, I'm Amelia Lester, and I'm Stacy Hicks.

Thoughts and prayers for anyone dealing with a sugar come down post Halloween.

How is your Halloween night?

It does feel a little bit like I remember after I got married.

I felt a little flat in the days afterwards because I've been looking forward to it so much.

And I sort of see.

The same thing in kids after Halloween, just a sense of I put on my special clothes, I have my special night.

What is that a look for to now?

The answer is Christmas.

Yeah, it's not far away.

Hey, it's been a massive week for celebrity honesty in the parenting department.

So what have we seen?

Stacy Hailey Bieber has done it again.

My unlikely parenting guru said the thing that no celebrities ever want to seem to admit on the In Your Dream podcast, I.

Do have help.

I have full time help, and I'm super not ashamed to say that, and I would never shy away from talking about that because I wouldn't be able to have my career and do the things that I do without the help.

And I feel really grateful for that.

Thank you, Hailey.

Do you know if you had said to me maybe four weeks ago, Hailey Beba, this Hailey Beb, that I would say to you, who like?

Who is Hailey Baber?

I had no idea, And now I feel like every single week she says something that I'm like, thank God, someone is saying this.

Someone who's cool, someone who's influential, someone who's really powerful is saying these things.

Yeah.

I loved it and it was interesting because I first came across it on People Magazines, Instagram, went for a real Journey.

A lot of people are angry at Haley Beaber for admitting that she has helped unclear why, but then the top comment really restored by faith in humanity and was such a good point too.

Someone wrote, people be like it takes a village to raise a child, but then get mad when they see someone with a village.

Exactly, And I think it's a good reminder to us that celebrities can do all the things they do because they're not parenting in the same way as we are.

They can hire a village, and that's a good reminder.

The other comment that I loved on this was why does some people think that to be a good mother you have to suffer?

Like It's been proven that kid's success in life is linked to their mother's happiness, So why wouldn't we want to have like happy, rested, healthy mums.

From one surprising admission to another, did you see what Jennifer Aniston said this week on the Dak's Shepherd podcast.

It is so good?

People say, but you can adopt.

I don't want to adopt.

Yeah, I want my own DNA and a little person.

Yes, And that's the only way selfish or not whatever that is.

I wanted it to.

But is there the moments of when you meet someone and you go, God, we would.

Have made some good kids.

Yes, I almost snapped my achilles.

Running to the comments section of this, I was like, she's going to get reamed, She's going to be canceled for saying this thing, which is so honest and like incredibly shockingly slapped in the face honest from a celebrity.

Yeah, it feels like the thing that we're not allowed to say.

Like, I don't think I've ever heard anyone be as blunt and cut and dry about their decision to not want to look into adoption.

I have the exact same reaction.

But then you mentioned that adoption advocates and experts say that this is the correct way to talk about adoption.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I loved what was happening in the comment section.

Unlike the other comment section on Hailey be but this one was surprisingly insightful and so many people really praising her for saying this because they said adoption is not a band aid for fertility.

This shouldn't be your last resort.

And my favorite comment that I saw in there was from someone saying everyone who thinks she should adopt should go and adopt themselves.

You don't have to be infertile to do it.

It's an act of love, not a last resort.

And so I kind of looked into this to be like, what do the experts say around adoption and the reasons you do it, then, like, if that's not the main reason people are doing it, and they say that adoptions for the child's welfare, not the parent's needs.

So if you're using it as a way to move on from infertility, then that's very much the wrong reason.

And they recommend that you fully grieve the infertility period of your life before you even consider adoption.

So it needs to come from a place of wanting to change a child's life, because it's not an easy path.

I'm also loving that Jennifer Aniston, at this stage in her life and career, is speaking so candidly about what was clearly in retrospect a very painful period of her life when there was so much tableau speculation about why she wasn't having children and maybe that was the end of her marriage with Brad Pitt, for instance, Well maybe that's why justin throw finally took his leather jackets and walked off into the sunset, When what we know now is that she desperately wanted to have children, and that that is a sadness in her life that it didn't happen, And there's just something so admirable about being able to speak about the most difficult parts of your life in that way.

Yeah, it probably helps someone else who's going through it.

Yeah.

I think she's the perfect example of speaking from the scar not the wound.

Like she has not spoken about this really at all over the years, and rightly so.

But it feels like now she's in that place where that window has very much shut for her.

She feels completely content, and she goes on in that interview to say when there are periods like she said, oh, we would have made a good kid, She said, it passes in a couple of seconds, that sadness goes, and that she has a peaceful life and feels like it was the right choice for her.

What do you mean by saying talk from the scar, not the world wound?

Can you explain that?

Yeah.

I think if she'd spoken about this as she was going through the infertility journey, her emotions around it probably would have been very raw, and she might have said things that she regretted at that point about what she wanted to do.

I think now she's at a point where she'd probably feel very resolved in her decision, like it was the right decision for her.

And so she can speak about it in hindsight in a way that's probably much more useful for people to hear.

And I loved that lots of people were saying, I've adopted and that was the right choice for me.

But I respect her for knowing her limits and going this wasn't right.

That's not the path I want to take, and that's okay.

And also equally for people who choose adoption regardless of their fertility status, it's a nice affirmation of why they do what they do.

I want to talk about something that's quite a parental tobo, and I want you both to keep an open mind on this.

Okay, are you the favorite child?

Or did your parents have one and it wasn't you?

Because parental favoritism it might just be the last parenting taboo.

Every parent swears they love their kids equally, and yet and yet studies show that two thirds of families have a hidden favorite, and the way they treat that child compared to their siblings I have a really long lasting impact.

So you might be listening to this thinking I don't have a favorite, not me.

I don't.

When my kids ask, I say, I love you all equally.

But the science can be really subtle.

So I've got a little quiz for listeners to answer as they're listening to this.

I'm calling it, does your family have a favorite?

It's based on actual research into parental favoritism.

So as you're listening to this, I want you to think about the family that you grew up in and just answer in your head yes or no.

Did one of you get hugged or praised more than the others.

Did one of you get punished harder when things went wrong?

Did one of you make your parents.

Laugh more that one's so good?

Was there someone who got away with things because they were sensitive?

Did our parents celebrate one sibling's achievements a little bit louder than the others?

Is one of you more like your mum or dad in personality or temperament?

And when money or help like babysitting or advice or handout is on the table, does one of you get it first?

Now, if you answered yes to any of these congratulations, your family probably had a favorite.

Amelia.

It's really really subtle.

It's these tiny little moments.

But what happens when parents play favorites?

Yeah, you're right that this is really something that's so hard to talk about.

And that's the first thing experts say is we're not talking about this, but we need to be because it's ubiquitous and it affects family dynamics.

So by not talking about it or actually making the effects worse, and the effects are really weird and surprising.

One of the things that wele in my mind when digging into this is that it's not just the one who's not the favorite who misses out.

The favorite has some detrimental impacts from being the favorite.

And one study which really stood out to me from researchers in China, found that parental favoritism is a positive indicator for mobile phone addiction as an adolescent, So in other words, if you were the favorite, you are more likely to develop a mobile phone addiction in adolescence.

And another that blew my mind is that maternal favoritism is an indicator for depression in adulthood.

And the reason experts think is because it creates tension with other siblings and that tension enduers for decades beyond childhood.

But I don't want people to feel hopeless when they hear that, because even though as you've mentioned, mones, it's an incredibly widespread phenomenon.

The point is that we need to start being aware of the impact it's having.

We can never avoid it, and we certainly can't change it if we did grow up in a household where we felt that another child was the favorite or that we were the favorite.

But being aware of it is the key.

And it's interesting what you say, like, I think a favorite probably isn't set either.

I think you probably can have a favorite.

The changes as you enter different life stages.

But there's a lot of research around similarity bias, and it shows that if you have multiple children and that one's more similar to you, whether that's their temperament or their interests, that does draw you closer to that child because you know how to parent that type of person because you are that type of person.

So that's often what they say around, Oh they're a mini me, Like, it's the one that is more similar to you.

It's probably the one that you feel a bit more ease in parenting, And it's not just the oldest.

I think we sometimes assume that the oldest child is the golden child and is therefore more likely to be the favorite.

But apparently this is not what the studies show because that key indicator is whether or not the child is like you.

Yes, it's not gender either, it's not mum's loving sons or whatever.

It is the key indicator, as you said, Stacy, it's that bias there.

There's also a stress factor in the research where it shows that parents who are under high stress inadvertently give less warmth to children who are sort of high needs or who demand attention or more regulation.

And so the effect of that is that the difficult child can often become the scapegoat in family dynamics.

So yeah, and as you said, Amelia, like everyone assumes that it's great to be the golden child, but the research says that is not the case.

Like these favored kids carry more guilt, feel more pressure, and have this lifelong need to sort of keep performing to earn that love.

I think what's what was fascinating to me in this entire research that we did around this is how tiny the differences are.

So I was listening to the Michelle Obama podcast this week.

It's called IMO if you haven't heard it, she makes a rule where she doesn't talk about grades at the dinner table.

Have a listen.

I needed a point not to talk about greedes at the dinner tea just because you know, it's like, let's talk about school.

Yeah, but when we talk about grades or scores, you know, I was always sensitive, what if the other one's not doing greed and we are rewarding and cheering an A when the other one might be getting a C.

And that's you know, and then you set up you know, competitions, some kind of measure unintentionally.

And I think that's how this sort of subtle favoritism can sometimes show up.

It's not in like grand declarations like you get a car when you turn eighteen, or it's just in these microme moments like who we comfort, who we praise, who we laugh at, who gets the benefit of the doubt in a fight.

Like these little tiny moments to a child seem quite big and they kind of tell this story about where they stand.

The interesting thing is that when we first started talking about this topic, Stacy, you said, well, that's not relevant to me because I only have one child, as you've spoken about on this podcast.

What I think people will take away from this is that the patterns of your childhood are likely to repeat in the way that you parent, so even if you only have one child, if you grew up with siblings, there were certain biases and patterns of behavior that you learned from your parents to do with your sibling dynamic that will invariably shape how you parent as well.

Yeah, and do you think the favoritism ever gets misconstrued?

Because I was thinking about families like as you say, Mons, where there's one child that might be high needs or be a deeply feeling kid.

The other sibling may view that because that child needs more attention as them being the favorite, when really the parent may prefer the ease of the other child.

So it's interesting that we all kind of probably clearly have a thought in our head over who the favorite was in our family from that quiz you did, Mons, but that might not actually be the case.

I'm just actually conscious that this discussion, listening to it now makes me feel bad.

I'm like, oh, for God's sake, here's another thing that I'm doing wrong, like another thing that I'm going to be screwing my kids up over.

But I don't want that to be the case.

I think, as you said, Amelia, this is the great unspoken thing.

But maybe it's just that awareness is the first step.

Maybe we just need to be more like Michelle Obama in the way that we talk to our kids and just be conscious of what we're saying in those stories that we're kind of telling them.

Are we messing them up?

Though?

If we have a favorite, like of course in the more blatant ways, like if we were pulling a Rupert Murdoch and like widely telling everyone that you know, Lachlan was our favorite, or Chris Jenna.

She's gone on the record several times saying that Kylie is her favorite.

MM.

She says it rotates sometimes, but when she was asked on a lie detector, she said Kylie and the lie detector said, yep, that's correct.

And she's the youngest in the family.

She's also made the most money out of that family.

So maybe that's why Chris prefers her.

So does it actually affect them, like, are the others struggling because your parent has a favorite?

Yes, that's what the research is saying, but that's why I don't.

But it's character building, monds, isn't it.

Like, you know, if you feel a little hard done by in your family, maybe it is something that builds a bit more resilience.

I know, but Stacey wear intense millennial parents.

We are so conscious of screwing our kids up.

Look, I think the point is to be aware, and one way that you can even be aware of it is outside of the family in the workplace.

That point you made minds.

That you're more likely to favorite someone who's like you is equally true in workplace environments.

People have found that when people are hiring, managers tend to gravitate towards people who look like them, behave like them, think like them, and just like in a family situation, we've just got to be aware of these biases that we all have.

It's the same in the workplace.

Is that why you and I have both ended up in matching blue shirts?

Today?

We should explain to listeners that we're wearing the unofficial Parenting podcast uniform of elastic waist pants and a blue shirt with a French tuck.

We are, we are.

That's our bias and brown hair down the mum uniform.

Okay, guys, I think we're moving to the country because this week I have two stories to bring to you of country kids who did things so wholesome it's going to make you book The movers and go to the bush.

Okay, this is my rural rap.

Try saying that three times quickly.

Mon's r rap.

I love it.

First up, ten year old Brock Knewett from Nadamook in Country Victoria.

Most ten year olds would be glued to Minecraft.

Not Brock.

He has his train collection, two hundred and thirty five toy trains.

He took them to the local pub.

He set up a display, and then he charged people a gold coin to come and look at them.

And what did he do with the money?

Pray tell?

Did he go and buy a PS five or whatever they're doing nowadays?

I don't know five.

He took the eight hundred and ten dollars that he raised and donated it to the Royal Children's Hospital.

Not even all right.

And then over in Country wa eleven year old Harry said rock hold my beer.

Because he was a bit bored on the farm, so he went to the local tip and he found a nineteen seventies land cruiser.

Instead of climbing in pretending to drive it like my kids would have done, he took it home and restored the whole thing.

He apparently spent four hours a day on this thing, like before school, after school, rebuilding the engine, painting it, restoring it all via YouTube and some help from dad, and then he won the People's Choice Award at the Bruce Rock Show.

I just our country kids just better.

There's absolutely something about this story of eleven year old Harry restoring the nineteen seventies land cruiser, which as an anxious city parent, I would absolutely pay for a school holiday program where my kids did this, which is very sad to admit that I'm having to enroll them in programs where.

But we just don't know these things.

Like I love that he just was like, I'll just teach myself, Like, how credible our.

Country kids better minds?

You know more about the country than I do.

Do you think that's true.

I think that's the romantic view of it.

I think country kids also have difficulty accessing good health services, sometimes educational services, so it's not all restoring land cruisers and toy trains in the pub.

You've talked before about biases in the workplace, Amelia.

If I see that someone has grown up in the country, I am very heavily biased towards them.

I don't think I'm overselling this, But this week was the Millennial parenting moment of the year.

It also happens to be my recommendation for the week, and it is the New Yorker's profile of Jennifer Lawrence that dropped at around ten pm Tuesday night, and which I have been reading ever since.

Now.

It is it's long, right, it's eight thousand words.

How many times have you read it?

It honestly felt like eighty words to me.

I think I've read it maybe seven times.

The profile is written by Giatolentino, who is the author of the book Trick Mirror and who has been probably the I think, the best writer on what the Internet is doing to our brains of our generation.

And she is profiling Jennifer Lawrence, now thirty five, now a mother of two.

She is now the cool girl, all grown up.

And we learn so much in this profile about what it means to return to the workplace after children.

Now her workplace is more glamorous, well not more glamorous than ours, because ours is very glamorous, but more glamorous than many workplaces.

But I still think that there's some really telling, universal themes in there to draw out.

She's so honest with Gia Tolentino Jennifer Lawrence about how she feels like a completely different person after children.

May I unpack a few gems for you.

Please, because when you sent this to me, I said, Amelia, eight thousand words.

I will skim it at bet, so tell me all the best bits, like why I should read this.

I got the highlighter out to Emelia.

I'm here for good.

Let's compare notes.

So the big headline that you may have seen is that Jennifer Lawrence has breast surgery schedule for November.

Now we don't know what the nature of that surgery is, but it's some kind of esthetic procedure.

Because she says she has a nude scene to do early next year.

Now, Gia says to her, would you be doing that anyway even if you didn't have a nud scene, And she says yes, because after her first child, whose name is CSI, her body bounced back, that's her phrase, by the way, bounced back.

After her second child, who we think is called Louis, although the name is not mentioned in the article, she says her body did not bounce back, and that is why she is having the breast surgery.

I found that the least interesting part of this article, I could not care less.

She also talked about she's going to get a face it too.

This is just fodder on the side of it.

What I want to talk about is how she's rebranding herself.

She's gone from being the cool girl who ate pizza and drank beers and burped and fell over on the stairs at the Oscars Red carpet, and she's had this metamorphosis into serious artists.

Now she's gone away, she's had two kids, she started a production company, and she's coming out with this really artistic, deep movie that Martin Scorsese rang her up and said, you've got to do this.

In fact, I thought that was really key.

She says, it was six weeks after the birth of my first child when Scorsese's name popped up on my phone.

He said, this is the kind of thing you should be doing.

Go take a chance, not any sense of a comfortable character off the board, and just go for it.

And in this entire eight thousand word article, I felt like that was really key, because there is this moment that mums have after they become mums where work takes on a whole new meaning and you need it to feel really worth it in a whole new way.

If you are spending time away from your child, you want it to be for something.

It's just like weird, desperate puol of this has got to matter.

Maybe that was just my reading of it, because that feels intensely personal to me.

But it does feel like this profile takes her from being that ubiquitous cool girl into like serious artist, and I just thought that transition is really interesting.

I think that's so profound because it's a lot to do with how she approaches her work.

She was always a serious artist.

She won an Oscar, she was a critically acclaimed actor in a lot of indie films in addition to the Hunger Games trilogy.

She was always a serious artist.

But what's changed is that now she's comfortable talking about herself and treating herself like a serious artist.

Before it was all kind of a joke.

It was the falling down stage at the Oscars.

It was the eating of the fried chicken.

It's interesting that there was this trope of cool girls doing interviews where they ate like lots of fast food and showed how relaxed they were around food and so on.

It's interesting that in this interview she and Gia Tolantino go out for lunch at one of the most sought after restaurants in New York, and Jennifer Lawrence doesn't eat.

And what I take from that is that she's so serious about nailing this interview.

She's not going to concentrate on anything else while she's there, because she was.

Very much the victim of that over exposed Hollywood actress, right Like, she kind of got put in the same basket as the Anne Hathaways where they were just everywhere, and then they got branded as too annoying, that they were almost too relatable and too cool girl.

And it feels like she's pulled back on that yew.

Kind of be relatable and yeah, she's just like, I've got a film to promote.

I feel very proud of that film.

It took me away from my children, and now I want to make.

Sure that it's a success.

There's another great moment where when they're at that lunch or that meeting at the restaurant, Gia Tolantino describes this sense of an invisible string pulling Jennifer back to her six month old baby who's at home.

That sense when you have a newborn where it's like a ticking time bomb if you're away from them, And that just underscores this sense of I am away from my baby.

I don't have time to eat elaborate foods to prove to you anything.

I just want to talk to you about this movie and why I feel passionately about it.

Oh, that was such a beautiful line, and Giotlantino can write the shit out of it, right, but she says, I highlighted it for you.

It was like there was an invisible tether new mothers have to their infants, the rope tightening, the clock counting down.

Like Jennifer Lawrence is in a cafe talking to a journalist, but her body is still on baby time.

It's just nailed it.

I've never heard it put that way, but that is what it is, isn't it.

When you have a little kid, everything feels like it's on a timer, like you're counting down to getting back to them.

All the time, everything's heightened.

Yeah, there's another great moment that didn't make the headlines, but which I think is so interesting, which is that when you become a parent, you start to reevaluate your relationship with your own parents, and you see it in a new light, and that can be positive, it can be negative, it can be neutral.

But in Jennifer Lawrence's case, that means feeling able to pull away from this very rigid religious upbringing she had, where she felt a lot of shame around sex and her sexual identity, she maybe didn't agree with her parents' political views, and now that she's had her own children, she feels able to stand on her own two feet aside from that parental unit that she grew up with.

Sort of like what we were saying before about favoritism in families, you start to only see those dynamics, I think, or you can start to only see those dynamics after you have your own children.

So true.

The other really honest thing she talks about is her postpartum anxiety, not with her first child, but with her second.

She says, I just thought every time he was sleeping he was dead.

I thought he cried because he didn't like his life or me or his family.

I thought I was doing everything wrong and that I would ruin my children.

That's so interesting to say about a second.

I feel like that's the thing from everyone with a first I know, I definitely felt like that and was kind of leaning over twenty times a night to make sure my daughter was still alive.

But you never hear that with the second so I love that she's talking about that too.

She also gets at that feeling when you have a newborn where you're just typing things into your phone for reassurance at all hours of the night.

So she asks chat GPT a question about breastfeeding and then gets back this very rope response, you were doing a beautiful thing for your child, And she says that that just made her feel worse because she was like, I don't believe that chat GPT cares about me.

Who cares about me?

It was very relatable, that sense of seeking answers from the internet late at night.

She does seem incredibly self aware and intelligent.

Does she not?

This entire profile, I was really surprised at what I was reading about her and the way that people talked about her, and what it acting genius she is as well, and how she never had any training and that's actually her superpower.

She just drops into the roles and the more she studies the character, the tighter she gets about it.

Anyway, I'm going down a wholerabbit hole about her.

Acting.

Now, what else do we need to know about it?

But that's connected to what you started with Mons.

Because all these people are quoted admiringly in the article about how great an actor Jennifer Lawrence is, from Emma Stone to Jodie Foster.

But what comes through so clearly is that now Jennifer Lawrence knows that she is a serious actor, and she is owning that.

And it seems like that realization and that acknowledgment of her own skill is actually intertwined with having children for her.

On that same note, the other thing that really struck me was how the machine of Hollywood was controlling her.

But now she's taking control back, Amelia in my mind.

So she talks about how when she was at the height of her fame, she was hounded by the paparazzi and now she just plays their game.

Now that she's got children, the stakes are higher.

So what she does is she leaves her house, she lets the pap take their photos, and then they leave her alone for the rest of the day.

And on that she says, I realized that my kids would be aware of my energy, and that if I was nervous and pissed when we left the house and the paps were there.

They would feel that in their little bodies.

So it's almost like she goes, yep, I get the game, have your photos, and leave us alone.

And that feels very much, in a way, taking back the control of what she can control.

And I saw that in action this week because I did see some photos of her crossing the street in New York wearing a giant witch's hat, and I thought, that's Jennifer Lawrence doing the mum thing.

Yeah, So that's your recommendation for this week?

Familiar you must, I guess it is.

Yes, that is my recommendation.

Where do people find it?

It is a profile of Jennifer Lawrence in the New Yorker magazine by Geotolantino.

The New Yorker does have a pay well, but typically you can get away with reading one piece for free.

Let's put a link in the show notes to the article.

If you are struggling with some of the issues that we've discussed here around postpartum depression and anxiety, we will include a link also in the show notes with some resources.

And we send all our love to you.

Stacy.

What is your recommendation this week?

Look is not as high brow as there.

So mine is just a multi screen show.

So you know how you just need a show at night where when you're scrolling on your phone and your bugget you just need something that's easy and lovely to watch.

And I have been watching Building the Band.

What is that?

Okay?

So it flew under the radar, but hosted by Nicole Scherzinger from Pussycat Dolls.

But she's also like a Tony Winner or something.

Yes, yeah, she is an aj McLean from Backstreet Boys, so they host it so they are well versed.

He's bad, bad.

Backstreet boy, right, no street boy, he's like an anti vaxsa.

Oh no, I don't think it's him.

He's fine.

He gets a bath.

But they get all these talented singers and they all have to audition for each other sight unseen, and then they decide if they'd want to be in a band with that person.

So it's kind of like love is blind Slash the Voice, and they have to decide after hearing each other who they want to pair up with.

They get a few chances to chat.

And then they're thrown in as a full band, so they have no idea what these people look like.

If they're going to mesh.

It's just actually quite wholesome.

It's really good.

It's really good.

And late Liam Paigne from One Direction, who passed away last year, he was a guest judge on it, so it was obviously filmed a long time ago and just came out this year.

It's just great, Like it's just such a vibe, so highly recommend able.

Yes, that's a great recommendation.

I think that's a really good co watching show.

I'll tell you what's not a good co watching show.

I've been watching The Golden Bachelor, and I mean, I'm loving it sick.

But my kids were drawn in by the rousing music and you know, all the beautiful lights in the mansion.

Explaining that show to my kids was so diabolical.

I was like, Okay, so all these amazing women are trying to get the attention of this one man and he gets to pick.

The man gets to pick which one he wants.

And my kids like, why does the man get to pick?

What's good about the man?

And I was like, what's good about nothing?

Nothing, Let's turn the shuttle over.

So, but what a good question.

It was confronted the man and it's a great question for life.

It's a lot exerciety so too, and what's your recco mons apart from the Golden Bachelor.

Okay, So, a friend of mine who's a speech therapist recommended this to me and she says, every single ot and speech therapist has this little game in their kit bag.

It's a little kid's game called spot It, and it's very simple, it's very fun.

But here's the genius.

It teaches like visual processing, fine motor skills, attention and social skills.

And you would never know it because it's actually really fun.

It's called spot It.

It's about twenty dollars from Big W Target came out all those places.

Just throw it in your kids Christmas stocking or put it in the.

Present cupboard for little kids.

Like how young are we talking that you do?

Use this with no I reckon?

You could play it like three year olds to probably ten year olds.

Cool.

That's great.

That's all we got time for.

Thank you for being with us today all the way through to this point.

And a huge thank you to the people who clicked follow because there were actually hundreds last week and it's such a micro thing to do, but it helps us massively Some people even went beyond that, guys and left a review.

Now, usually we like to ask people to leave a gentle parenting review, which makes us really laugh, but we can't control everyone.

Some people just go completely rogue, such as this one from a sixty year old child free person who says, I'm in my early sixties and free of offspring by choice, but have amazing nephews, nieces, and a gorgeous collection of god children.

My friend's grandchildren are being introduced into our crazy, wonderful world at a rate of knots.

So I like to be across all the things around, navigating the journey.

I enjoy listening to these girls so much.

You all rock.

Can I just say that I know that that woman gives the best birthday presents.

Oh, she's so totally.

She's doing so much research.

She's got tabs open, she's got a little notes app thing on her phone with like a list of ideas year round.

She's such a yeah.

Okay.

The other thing I loved about is that she left no name, just emojis as her kind of name, shell and like an octopus.

That's so cool.

I didn't even know there was a jellyfish emoji.

She's the cool jellyfish shell and a piece of coral.

You rock too, our emoji godmother, thank you so much, and also a big thanks to our team Tesakotovich, Leap, Worgeous and Sashtanic and the big Boss is ripped.

Devine, have a great week.

We'll be back in this feed next Saturday morning.

I cannot wait.

Bye byeye