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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.

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Welcome to Parenting out Loud, the podcast for parents who don't always listen to parenting podcasts.

Here we are again, another week of parenting culture, some hot takes, and this time we're in our own podcast feed, which is nice.

So we'd let go of the mother ship of Mum and mea out Loud.

We're off the teat.

We now must learn to walk.

Here we go, eating a lot of avocado, yeah, and mushy feed.

It helps you to learn to walk a classic food.

Yeah.

I'm Monique Bowlly, I'm a Mellia.

Lesto, and I am Stacy Kicks Stacy.

Before we begin, I'm just sensing a vibe from you this week that you're very stressed out.

Is that correct?

Yes, I'm very stressed this week.

I've had a bit of a week.

I have cried multiple times this week, just to make the listeners feel seen if you've done the same, which culminated in me crying because I couldn't do a Copenhagen plank.

Sorry, Jim, what is.

A Copenhagen plank?

I thought Copenhagen was just about like being stylish, yes, n ice cream.

Yeah, it was like a torture device.

I don't know why.

I had to have one leg suspended in the air in a sideways plank and I couldn't do it, and the trainer came to help me.

I got very upset and I said, it's not about the Copenhagen plank.

It's never about the Copenhagen over the edge.

But I'm very happy to be with you guys, very happy to be doing this.

It's the highlight of my week.

Oh, Stacy, let's just ignore you crying in the corner.

Grab a tissue.

This is what's coming up on today's show.

The girl Boss is dead and them influencer is out, and there's a new status symbol in pretending you just don't have kids at all.

I want to talk about how the raw book around praise has changed, and whether compliments and how we compliment people is just yet another topic around which millennials are overthinking.

I saw a tiny feud on Facebook and it's changed the way I think about reading with my kids, and I want to bring it to your attention.

Oh, I love a tiny fewd There's a Reddit board called niche Scandals and it's just all about like people on crafting boards, like arguing with each other and it's the best to have a low stakes feud.

That sounds juicy.

This starts like a niche scandal, but then what I discovered is it's actually a bigger thing.

It's a bigger thing.

I can't wait.

But first, in case you missed it, I have to talk to you about roadblocks and why it's in the news this week.

What is a roadblock and why am I buying my friend's kids Roebucks gift cards every Christmas?

And why am I talking about it this week?

So Roadblocks is an online gaming platform, and the reason it's in the news this week it's been around since two thousand and six, is because as we're all preparing for the government's social media ban to come into effect, a loophole has been discovered.

And the loophole is Roadbox.

Because while Roadblocks is ostensibly a place where you go to play games online, it's actually a social media site in disguise, and so it's not subject to this new under SIXTEENES ban, but a lot of people are saying it should be.

So Roadblocks has tried to pre emp this by saying, hey, here's this new suite of safety features we have.

But a lot of parents and experts say this is not going far enough.

That Roadblocks is actually really dangerous for kids, and we have to think more systematically about how to make it safer.

Roadblocks is cooked.

Let's just put this on the table.

It is.

But I say this was like the sims like, is this not just like building little villages?

Yes?

I think it started out like that, Stacy.

I think ten years ago when it came out, people touted it as this great place for entrepreneurship, and it teaches kids how to code, because essentially what it is is it's a platform where you can go on and build a game, and then people come and play your games.

But what's happened is that now.

Because of the popularity of it, and it's something like sixty eight million uses a day, forty million of them are under the age of thirteen, it's just become this kind of freefall.

And now it's a place that's full of grooming, inappropriate content, bullying, racism, anti semitism.

It's banned in Qatar and Turkey.

It's being sued by Louisiana.

But most importantly, this game uses addiction and based mechanics for kids.

It addicts kids, it hooks them.

It is a very bad place.

So I've been hearing about it a lot from my seven year old and I sort of thought, oh, it seems gentle, like one of the most popular games on there is a game where you essentially grow a garden, and.

I thought, well, that sounds nice.

It stead of sounds like Beatrix Potter.

How lovely, and it's free.

Great, so I go online to play it.

With him, and very shortly he's in a game where he's playing an ice agent, as in The Masked People, who scoop people up off the streets in the US and take them to immigration prison.

And I suddenly realized that because it's open source, you start with the garden game, you end up playing an ice agent with a machine gun.

Mon's you have done some research around this, and so I'm curious to know the answer.

Has it always been like this, like why do we think it's the acceptable face of gaming?

Like what happened?

I think it's victim of in shitification.

Now, this is a term I don't know if you've heard of it.

It's basically for when things turn to shit.

So it's the process where online platforms start out really good and then they deteriorate over time because they become sort of just about shareholders at everyone's expense.

So an example like me, yes, or you know, when Instagram first started, it was just your friends in the news feed, and now it's people you don't know and a lot of ads.

It's sort of the same thing with Twitter.

It's really gone down the toilet.

So I feel like perhaps Roadblocks is victim of institification.

And that's why Australia's e Safety Commissioner has flagged roadblocks and has said that in addition to the under sixteen social media banent, we've got to talk about how to protect kids on roadblocks and look to be fair to roadblocks, I should mention what they came out with this week.

They said that under sixteen's accounts will now be private by default and they will be unable to chat with adults.

And the reason why they had to put that in is because there was grooming happening on roadblocks.

There have been many people arrested.

Two dozen is the number.

Actually two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicion of abusing or abducting victims that they groomed on roadblocks.

So this is very much a live issue they reckon.

The big problem with roadblocks is the chat feature.

Right.

This is what a lot of people say is that's how predators come in.

They chat with your kids, they can groom your kids.

But I don't quite believe it.

I think eliminating the chat function does not solve any of the problems because there's other ways that your kids can see things.

People can write things on buildings, people can have a speech bubble coming out of them.

I know there's probably people listening whose kids play this.

There are other games that kids can play where they are building things, learning things.

I can't see any advantage for kids being on.

Right, But I don't think it's as easy as that.

Mon's like speaking as someone who's having to negotiate this right now.

If I disconnect from Roadblocks and I ban it completely, the children will always find something else to play.

And keeping the line of communication open, I think is the only solution rather than saying we're just not going to play it all.

The experts say there is no safe way for kids to use this, and if they are not old enough to see porn, they are not old enough to play this game.

I know you're rolling your eyes, but I follow this quite daggy Instagram account called the family it Guy.

This guy's a cyber security expert and a dad, and he registered on Roadblocks as an eight year old, and he joined a game within minutes.

He joined a game called Public Bathroom Simulator, which was a simulator where you can only imagine what was going on in there, stuff that eight year olds should not be seeing.

So I don't think Roadblocks is going far enough with parental controls.

I think that also this e Safety Commissioner is not going far enough with this fine.

So the Australian government is saying we're going to find Roadblocks forty five million dollars for non compliance.

But guys, this is a ninety five billion dollar company.

Forty five million to them, that's like you walking down the street with one hundred thousand dollars in your pocket and shelling out fifty bucks.

It's nothing.

I've seen stories.

There was a case in Kansas where an eight year old girl was sending inappropriate images to a stranger that was sending her roebucks.

Send her thousands of roebucks.

Yes, Because the other element that we haven't even really talked about here is the fact that while these games start out as free very quickly, as I discovered when I played, you were prompted to buy things in order to level up to a more advanced stage of various games, and those numbers add up really quickly.

Yeah, but you're doing the right thing by playing the games, like I don't want everyone, especially people whose children are already on this game, to feel like right.

The solution is that we need to just snatch the iPad off them and they're not allowed on it anymore.

Like we run a story on the site this week written by Madeline West, you know Neighbors actress Madeline West, like she's an icon, but she works as an online safety advocate now for Old Shift, and she was saying that the best thing to do is never make your child a friend, that if they tell you something that you'll take their devices away, that you need to as much as it can feel like pulling teeth, be involved and be playing whatever games they're playing so that they do feel like when things like this happen they can raise it with you well.

And the other broader problem is that as a parent, you're always trying to stay ahead of what the kids are interested in.

It is a little bit like whack a mole because once you've established that one thing is problematic in some way, they will move on to something else.

So that, as you say, the solution is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but instead try and find a way forward with the platforms that they enjoy and stay connected to what they're doing.

I guess, so, I guess we're going to be planting veggies on this game on the weekend, not being ice agents.

While women once loudly and proudly celebrated the era of girl bosses and leaning in, we're now seeing women pretending that they aren't even parents at all, so they're working and looking like they're child free.

There's a few examples of this in the culture this week.

Case in point Margo.

It would have been hard to ignore the images of Margo Robbie around this week on her press tour.

Have you seen them?

Yes, the naked dress.

You've surely seen her believable.

Yeah, loved it.

I fell hook line and singer.

I've seen her from every angle that you could see her.

I thought she looked amazing.

So she's on the press tour for her movie, which is called A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey, which feels like too many words for a movie title, but we're gonna skim right over that.

So what she's doing, essentially, which a lot of the celebrities do nowadays, is that they're getting you to notice their film.

Like we saw Zendea do it with Challengers.

We saw Margo do it when she was on the Barbie press tour as well.

Like people are paying attention because of their outfits.

There's six words I've heard on repeat when people are seeing these images this week that I wanted to interrogate a little bit, and those words are didn't she just have a baby?

So I feel like that's the reaction that everyone I have said that.

I said that myself.

Actually, do you know the headlines around this rankled me a little bit.

I know you're going to get into some other stuff, but I just want to put this on the table first.

Every headline that I read was like, she's back, She's back.

And I just felt like the undertone was, oh, thank God, like she's bounced back, she's hot, and she's working again, And it was just this subtext of a woman pretending she never really had a baby in the first place.

Is what we want to see, like the yea glamorous hot.

But this is a discussion that they had in MoMA Mia out Loud.

So if you want to go into sort of that, I would highly recommend you listen to Mumia out Loud episode on that Mia Friedman goes.

Off, Yeah, we need to remember like this is her literal job, like her body and her appearance.

Let's be honest is her job, so of course that is what she's going to be doing to be getting back to her role.

That's not the case for us, thank god.

But people are either saying, didn't she have a baby or they totally forgot she had a baby at all.

And I think there's a little bit of a pattern that we're seeing now with this, where women were once celebrating that era of girl bosses and lean in, and we're now seeing women pretending that they're not even parents at all, Like that seems like the new cool girl thing to do, Like don't you think this feels like the new top tier of mummy.

What I found fascinating about it is that our team here established that Margo has talked about her baby exactly once.

Everyone who was sitting with me were, I mean, the music number, the musical number happens, and honestly.

I'm so sorry you can do that.

I'm sorry I had to stop the interview for a set, yeah, because like, aren't you isn't there a part of you as like yes, I like that's it.

And what I think is fascinating about this is it's kind of the era of being a stealth mum, and it's so different from ten years ago, when celebrities would talk endlessly, ad infinitum about how having children had changed everything for them.

I'm now picking that are more compassionate and more deep, and now they're.

Just not talking about it at all.

I feel like you see that with your friends, like your normy friends that have three hundred followers on Instagram.

Like I know a lot of people now they don't announce their pregnancy.

They don't have it's the birth, Nope.

They just start having like little toes in the corner of their photo or the back of a baby's head.

Like it's very much a thing now, like a cool girl thing.

And I guess Margot is the old people girl.

It started with.

Kylie Jenna having a completely secret pregnancy, maybe that was ended.

Yeah, the stealth mum started with Kylie like every other bloody trend on this planet.

Yeah, I so agree.

This cultural shift is so interesting.

So first we had girl Boss, Rise and Grind.

Then it was sharaning, like it was very much oversharing everything about parenting everywhere like hashtag real.

But now I agree it is stealth mum where your kids are not your brand.

So Kylie Jenner, what about Hayley Bieber.

She never talks about her baby.

Margot Robbie doesn't talk about her baby.

It's like a flex of Yeah, I have kids, but I don't need to make them my brand.

And I get it.

Look, I used to have a thing and I've spoken about it on this podcast where I still kind of have it at my day job where I just do not want to talk about having kids at work and if no one ever has to hear about me going to a school concert, that's my sweet spot.

I kind of tried to do the same thing when I started at Muma Mea.

I was like, you know, it's a fresh start.

I'm going to be really cool and mysterious, and you know they'll be shocked, like a year down the track when they find out I have a kid, because obviously I'm too young to.

Have a child.

And then, like I think, at about one pm on my first day, I might have mentioned I got an update photo of my daughter.

So it all went out the window.

But why do we think that way?

And why is it sort of now cool to not talk about your children or to sort of act like you don't have children.

It's almost like you've got to pick a brand for your job, and if your child doesn't align with your brand, then you know they have to be kept separate.

I wonder if it's a generational thing.

So Millennials centered their children at the center of the world.

We are intense parents, we are overparenting.

I wonder if the next generation alphas or z's are going the other way, where they're centering themselves and they keep true to themselves in what they're doing and they don't make their kids.

Their entire personality.

It's just probably a reflexive action.

You know, how we parent in the way in the opposite way to our parents parented.

Maybe the next generation is saying, I don't want everything to be about my kids.

Still about me, I'm still number one.

I've got a theory that I think it's a bit political.

I think the reason why we've seen the rise of the stealth mum is because it reflects as newfound ambivalence we have about the very idea of the working mother.

We all know that the tradwife wave happened, but those trad wifs were already doing a job.

They were performing the job of being a tradwife.

But now I think there's this deep seated kind of nervousness about how you have a kid in capitalism at all, and people are just saying, of all political stripes, I don't want to have to do that.

The workplace was structured for men, and it's impossible in some ways to fulfill both the role of being a parent and the role of being a good employee, and they're checking out of it, and they're saying, I don't want to do that anymore.

And I think that's why it's almost become like daggy to try and balance the two, because it's sort of seen as like, well, you're clearly not doing a good job on either of them.

And it's interesting when you use the term stealth mumming, because I've seen that.

This week there was a piece in the Cut where they talked about Vogue's new editor or Vogue's new she's called head of editorial Content, so that there's never another editor after Anna wint All, which I love, but Vogue's new head of editorial content Chloe mahl So.

The author Catherine jess and Morton admitted that her first thought when she saw that mal had been promoted to this spot was how is she going to do that?

With a four and a two year old, and she was saying this, She said she felt like hard working, ambitious mothers have gone into stealth mode in the last decade.

Mon's we talked about how we've tried to stealth mom unsuccessfully at work.

Have you stealth mum?

No?

I haven't stealth mum.

But my most recent boss was a stealth mum.

Where she was this unbelievably impressive woman and I had been working with her for a few weeks when she casually just dropped in something about having a six month old baby, and I write, two, two very small children.

This is a woman incredibly ambitious a very very large job.

That was my first example of stealth mumming in real life.

And how did it make you feel?

Did you feel a little like misled or was it just I'm impressed?

Oh?

Is it wrong to say I was impressed?

It was my first example of the subtext being I'm not here to talk about my kids.

I'm not here to be defined by them.

I'm not going to be defined as a harried, tired working mother.

I'm here, I'm standing on business and my kids are not my brand.

And I think that we have seen this cultural shift where probably ten years ago it was all about sharenting.

Well there is still some of that, but a lot of millennial parents were over sharing and over there was a raft of like mummy blogs showing it this is what it's like, this is the real me, very messy kind of parenting.

But now there is this shift into cool girl, stealth mums who don't make kids part of their brand and who don't seemingly exist.

But I worry about this though, because I'm like, why should I pretend I didn't basically go to war before I got to work, Like I've had to battle a child into a uniform, get them out the door, get myself ready within that deal with a tantrum, like it is part of our brand?

Like should we be denying that part of our self exists?

Do men make a part of their brand?

No, because they're not doing that.

And also I worry that it's just adding more press shut onto us to keep this veneer of I'm not going to say perfection, because I don't think anyone thinks I have a veneer of perfection, but a veneer of just kind of like impenetrability and like pretending like our kids don't exist, it just wants more pressure on us.

It felt kind of boundaried to me.

It felt like that's not my other life and this is my work life.

Like almost a relief.

I guess that's why I do it.

Actually, it is a relief.

To be able to go to work and not think about my children while I'm there.

Yeah.

The angriest I've ever seen a man is I went to a dinner where I was seated next to a pediatric pomonologist and I was just making small talk with him, and I knew that he had two small children at home, and I said to him, Wow, that must be a lot, because you got this kids at home and then you're talking to kids at work.

And he flew into a rage and started telling me that his job isn't about talking to children.

And I was thinking about it afterwards and why he was so angry at me, and I think there were two reason.

So first is because men are accustomed to being stealth dads, like that's the default, to be a stealth dad.

And so to be told like there's some continuation between what you do at home and what you do at work, it was almost offensive to him.

It was almost undermining his professionalism in a way that a woman would nowver take offense at that.

She may not want to talk about it once to your point, but she's not going to take offense.

And then I think the second reason why he took offense was sort of specific to the context of the conversation, which was that he thought that I was saying that his job was requiring caregiving.

It was about looking after children, and for him it was about solving a problem, not looking after them, not caregiving, which is coded as feminine.

But it's just interesting to reflect on as an example of how for dads, stealth dadding is what they've always done.

It does feel like there's a motherhood penalty in the workplace.

There's a bias around if you say as a mother, I'm a mother, it has connotations of you're not completely focused on work, You're going to have to take time off for sick kids.

So I wonder if stealth mumming is in response to that, trying to push back against people's bias.

It's kind of a necessity in order to be taken seriously.

Potentially, Yeah, I don't know if you've come across this, but there's some new thinking around the idea of praise and compliments, and this new thinking is that praise itself might be toxic.

Let me explain.

Some studies actually compare excessive praise to a dangerous chemical or a tool to manipulate people into doing what we want.

Oh God, now we're doing compliments wrong.

And this came up for me because something happened to my child at school recently which kind of upset me.

And it was around are Uka Day, which is always marked on the second day in September.

And what happened was that the students in my kids class were creating compliment buckets, and he and his classmates were encouraged to fill these compliment buckets with compliments about other kids in the class.

Suffice to say, I'm sure you can anticipate what ended up happening.

There were a lot of hurt.

Feelings because kids were comparing how many compliments they had compared with other kids, and it basically turned into a popularity contest.

And the other problem with it is that what is a compliment for a child?

What is okay to compliment a child about?

And I realized that the whole thing is actually a bit of a minefield, and it's really a new development.

The first time I thought about this was I noticed that gen X parents around me were getting very mindful about how they were praising their kids, and they'd say things like, I can see you tried so hard to draw this balloon, rather than like, what a great picture of a balloon?

And I sort of inherited that when I had kids, and I didn't compliment their appearances, even though sometimes they were just wearing a great outfit, and I always talked about effort rather than outcome.

But don't children deserve the same recognition as adults, Like I love a compliment, It makes me feel good.

Isn't a child simply asking for our attend and our recognition and a pat on the head for how beautiful picture is?

And I'm just wondering, is this another example of millennials overthinking everything to the nth degree?

Yes, yes it is, OK.

This is what we do.

We overthink everything.

And this feels like now to give a child a compliment, you've got to put it through a mind map of like does it praise their appearance?

No?

Yes, like to get the compliment even out of your mouth, like I know that even people say, don't say good boy?

Or good girl, Like you're not meant to do that, because that's encouraging them to be really compliant, Like you should be saying well done or good effort.

You're not meant to say good boy or good girl.

So it feels like every time we think about praising our child, then we're stopping ourselves and going no, but their appearance isn't the most beautiful thing about them.

I need to praise them for being strong or being kind, and it just feels like we're exhausting ourselves by just trying to be good and tell them that they're great.

Like if we're not going to tell them they're great, he's going to do it.

I'm so exhausted stood by this, So now we can't even praise correctly.

But you're right, Amelia, overthinking is the millennial brand of parenting.

Right.

It's not our fault.

Though we have parenting books, podcasts, newsletters, Instagram accounts all telling us that there's a right way to say good job.

But our parents just had like a cigarette and didn't think about it.

So of course we're hyper aware.

It's how we've been conditioned.

And I also want to inject a note here that praise it does make people feel good.

And on the other hand, I know I mentioned that the new thinking is that it's kind of like a toxic chemical, But there's also studies that show that people who say they were praised a lot by their parents are more likely to be happy.

And there's even a correlation between income and how much praise people received as children, which is fascinating.

Because that's what I'm saying as well.

There's this woman I follow on TikTok, you know, when I'm meant to be asleep and I just scroll for hours on end, called doctor Chelsea, and she said, you're meant to give one hundred pieces of praise a day to a day, each child, each child, each child.

And she was saying, it's because if all you're doing is correction and direction, like if all you're doing is saying no, don't do that, no, get off that, put your shoes on, Like all they're hearing from our mouths is things that they need to do or things that they need to not do.

So she was saying, you need to do really micro compliments to them, so things like you put your shoes on, well done, you came down for dinner, well done?

No I wonder how that translates into the workplace too, because me, it's like also a good management technique to be praising everyone a hundred times a day.

But can you imagine that would mean that we're saying things like, Wow, that's an amazing font you used in that deck, and wow you circled back when you said you'd circle back and close the loop.

Good on you.

Yeah, Like please.

I for one would like more praise in the workplace.

I don't think there's enough.

There's a lot of stick and not heaps of carrot in workplaces, and I think it's a good cultural thing to tell people when they've done a good job, which you.

Mentioned Herem's that you look beautiful and you're doing such a good job today and you so strong.

My beauty.

I praise the effort I tried really hard today.

I did a lot of research and I did research on this, and I think the point where missing is.

Over praise, excessive praise.

This is the problem.

And the research says that over praising kids can turn them into external validation junkies, and it turns them into doing things for extrinsic praise rather than like the intrinsic motivation of working hard, it also diminishes resilience.

So if kids have grown up with constantly wow, you ate your vegetables so amazing, or everything you do is incredible, then the first time they hit a real critic, or if the first time they get feedback, the first time they even just get sort of a neutral silence or not someone pumping their tires, it can feel really crushing and really derailing.

And I think that we do see that in the workplace.

There is a generation here that can't take feedback and can't handle it when you're not pumping their tires every five minutes.

Yeah, but Mon's I did my research for this segment too, and deserve praise and recognition for that, and the studies I found said the opposite.

So now I think the point is that that's why we're overthinking it, because there's so much data on both sides.

Do you praise them one hundred times a day?

Do you make sure that you don't praise them too much?

And then ultimately, maybe what we previously might have thought was an instinctive at to praise or not praise has instead turned into something that we have to intellectualize.

Yeah, I think we just need to tell people when they look nice and move on.

So now I've brought you my favorite video from the internet this week, and I want you to have a listen.

It's a woman named Chelsea who's just become my new hero.

He she is.

We don't do bath toys over here.

My baby does not do bath toys.

You want to why too much bullshit?

Okay, bad time is to get in, wash ass, get out.

That's exactly what we do.

We get in, we wash our ass, we get out because there's two minutes of a hassle with these toys, your lord, the toys you get, the toys that you draw, the toys off you hope the toys don't all gotta keep watching all the toys.

I already gotta watch this toy.

I'm not adding a little group of.

Toys that specifically get wet and most of the times stay we that I also got a wash that's extra work for what play with your toys when you get out the math.

I love Chelsea so much.

I stepped on a bluey toy and a dinosaur last night in my shower, so she has now become my new icon.

I'm doing less toys in shower and the bath.

I love this from Chelsea.

But for people that have neurodivergent kids who like deep pressure, bathtime can be really important.

And bath time is, as you say, Amelia, the calming thing.

You might be a parent that has a kid that has multiple barths a day because it's quite regulating for them.

So yeah, that's just me being the fun police.

And I know that Chelsea's not against bath time per se.

She's pro bath, just anti bath toy.

Yeah, she's just saying just get them in there, get them clean, and get out.

I like it.

It's effishent oh business.

But can I also give you guys an amazing hack for bath time?

So I fell into this trap where both times went on and on and on because I could never get them out.

I went to Bunning's and I bought pond lights, like ten dollars.

They're a little disc and you have a remote that comes with it and it turns them into different colors and I put them on the bottom of the bath, and the kids are obsessed with them because it lights up the bath.

So you turn the lights off, you put the pond lights on, and then when you've had enough, you take your remote and you turn the pond light to red and you say, oh, bath time's finish.

Like the lights turn to red, that means we've got to get out.

Just works, they're just something in their brain goes, oh shit, the light's red out.

We get that's very good Mond's but that's another toy for the bum.

You're going against Chelsea's advice.

I am taking Chelsea's advice.

I'm taking everything out and only adding bubbles, and I guarantee it will be better.

That's what I'm doing.

There's a tiny internet feud on Facebook that I would like to bring your attention that I discovered this week, So move over Hottest one hundred because the ABC are running a competition for the Hottest one hundred books of the twenty first century, and it listed Where Is the Green Sheep?

By mem Fox?

A classic, total classic, but it left one thing off.

The illustrator Judy horror Check.

So this week she wrote on her Facebook, Hey, ABC, you have Where is the Green Sheep listed as by mem Fox alone?

You know it's actually by Memfox and me right, And then she goes on to say in the comments, you know, the people that do the pictures in picture books are frequently left off like we're used to it, but it also drives us nuts.

So Judy Horror Check has had just about enough of illustrators being overlooked, and I just want to have a moment for the illustrators of children's books.

That's a good point.

I'm ashamed to say.

I hadn't even thought about this until I came across this item, and then I started to think about how important illustration our own children's books, and how they stir feeling in children that they never forget, Like where would Roll Dahal be without the Quentin Blake line.

Drawings exactly, Like the kids can't read the words, the thing that's drawing them into the book is the illustrations.

Like I feel so bad that I've never thought about this before, Like I could not tell you the names of the illustrators on my daughter's books, and yet we read them every night.

But I should.

Now I'm going to pay attention to this.

Yeah.

I read this amazing piece in The Guardian about illustrations and the history of illustrations, and what it said was that illustrations are as memory evoking as smells or songs, So you see things as a kid and it will stick with you for life.

That's so true, Stacy.

If kids are.

Visual learners, you know, we spent all this time trying to get them off of iPads.

They're drawn to visuals all the time.

Illustrators actually the real rock stars of our childhoods, and we've just been ignoring them.

They really are, like, we need to pour one out for them now, like they are the reason that our kids even drawn to books in the first place.

Like I guarantee, if they were just black and white words on the page, they're not going to sit there for more than two seconds.

So yeah, we need to pour one out for the illustrators.

I reckon great illustrators, like as you said, Quentin Blake, like Helen Oxbury, who did We're going on.

A Bear Hunt.

They shape the stories as much as the writers do.

You know, We're Going on a Bear Hunt was originally supposed to be about a line of kings and queens going on a bear hunt, but Helen Oxenbury turned it into like this regular family squelching through the mud, and that's just where the beauty is.

And this article also said that kids love chaos in illustrations.

They fixate on messy, disruptive, moments in books so peas spilling out or the tiger that came to tea drinking all the water out of the tap, and they find a lot of joy in the disorder, and that these illustrations can also help them deal with big feelings chaos, loneliness, loss or anger all through the pictures much more than words can.

The upshot of this is that I went onto the ABC Books site.

They have updated the entry for Memfox.

They have included Judy Horrorcheck.

She gets my vote, Judy, we love you.

I also want to shout out to Deborah and Island for drawing my favorite illustrations in Mulgarbill's bicycle.

And also she did that hippopotamus that goes on.

That is brilliant.

My cotics one of the bed illustrator rite such range.

So thank you illustrators, thank you for bringing the magic.

To wrap up today's show, we're going to just share the things that we are loving sick, so the stuff you might text to your friends or put in the Mums group.

Chat Amelia, what's on your list?

This is going to sound strange, but my recommendation this week is getting the newspaper.

Oh I subscribed to my local paper to have it delivered Monday through Sunday, and it is bringing me such joy and delight, and I've tried to think about why that is.

I think it's because.

When you read the news in the newspaper, it's giving come closer, it's saying, come here, let's share this experience.

If you read the news on your phone and you're dooom scrolling, that says go away.

It says I don't want to be disturbed.

And there's something about the act of scrolling where it doesn't invite people in in the way that a big newspaper does.

And the newspaper's a novelty now to them, like they don't see that, so how cool.

There's so many nice things about it, like you can practice numbers and talk about numbers on the world weather page.

You can do the word games together with a pen and paper so fun.

You can draw mustaches and all the world leaders.

And I think it's modeling good information hygiene, which I think is going to be increasingly a topic of conversation going forward with AI and everything else that's going on.

And I just think overall, it makes me feel calmer because when I read the newspaper.

It's a finite experience.

I can get to the end of it and I can feel like, Okay, I know what's going on.

I don't need to keep dooom scrolling.

I don't need to read all the news in the world.

This is the news that I need to know today.

So I think it's been a really nice experience, not just for my kids, but also for me.

I love that it's so intentional, and it's also you can't skip around all over the place like you count on a phone.

It's just the one single tasking love it.

What about you, Stacy, So mine this week is a docco that I cannot stop thinking about.

Have you guys watched Unknown Number The Catfish Story on Netflix?

Stacy, I obsessed?

Yes, mon no.

Is it a true crime?

Yes?

True crime documentary my favorite kind.

So I promise I'm not going to spoil it for you.

I'll just give you top line.

But if you want to listen to more and you have watched it, Mama and me are allowed to a subs episode on it this week.

So it's a.

Thirteen year old girl, Lauren Lacari.

She lives in this tiny town in Michigan, like couple hundred people, and Lauren starts stating a boy in her class named Owen, and that's when the messages start.

So she starts getting up to forty to fifty abuse messages to her phone a day from an unknown number, and so does Owen, and then they start coming to different people, but they are the main ones that start receiving these messages.

This goes on for fifteen months until they finally figure out who it is.

So it's satisfying in that you will find out who it is, and it is infuriating when you find out who it is.

But i think the most interesting part about watching it, and I'm sure you'll agree, Amelia, like the question you have when you're watching it is why didn't they take the phones off the kids?

Like?

Why didn't they remove their phones?

And it's such an interesting reflection on society today in that the other parents of the kids at the school said, well, no, we don't want our kids' phones taken away because we want to know where they are.

We want to be able to track them and to be able to contact them.

And that's actually something that we touched on in last week's episode when we were talking about phone tracking It very much plays into that, like would you track your kids?

And why do we want to track our kids?

So this poor girl had to go to school every day knowing these messages were going to come through, and it was all because the other parents wouldn't get on board and support it.

It was a bit of an AHA moment for me because I find that conversation around phones and children it's often about, well, the kids don't want to give the phone up.

Yeah, they're addicted, and that may or may not be true.

But what this documentary shows is that parents also feel ambivalent about taking their phones away from their kids because it's a way to keep in touch with their kids and keep in some ways control over their kids.

And it was a reminder that that dynamic goes both ways.

Yeah, and when the reveal happens, it's so satisfying.

Mons, Like, there is videos all over the internet.

You will scream, you will scream out loud when you find out who it is.

It's that satisfying.

So please watch school Principle.

It's taking a word.

They'll have to watch.

It's the teacher and it's an exercise in resilience.

Everybody fails.

Mon's what's yours.

This week, I have a viral too ingredient dinner for lazy people who hate cooking to be ingredients.

Please give it to me.

It's changed my life.

I can't stop talking about this and telling everybody about this.

So I stole it from the Lee's and Sarah podcast, a which for transparency reasons, I work on this show.

But this recipe has gone viral in a way that we've never seen anything do before.

People are losing their minds.

It's called the triple Bee.

All you need to do is get a beef bowler blade from the supermarket.

It's called a beef bowler blade.

A triple B.

It's not like a cut of meat.

It's a cut of meat.

It's like a big roast, but it's called beef bowl blade.

Okay, got it.

And then a jar of cha Sus sauce.

It comes in a red jar.

What you do is you turn on your slow cooker, you dump the triple be in it.

You pour over the entire jar of Chasius sauce, put the lid on, put it on low for eight to ten hours, and walk away.

That is it.

No browning, no nothing, two things.

Triple B Chasu walk away.

At the end, what you will have is the most amazing, succulent, delicious pulley a party like Chinese infused beef.

What is the charge eating a meal?

A succulent Chinese meal that.

You could serve with rice, You could put it on like a white roll with some kalslaur in it.

It's just amazing.

It's become a weekly staple in this house because it's so ridiculously easy.

Yea.

Nothing insights rage in me is when you see a slow cooker recipe and it says you've got a brown in a pan.

First, I'm like, no, I'm not doing that because I'll just pook it in the pan.

So this is great, love it.

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

We are so happy that you're here in our new home in this feed, So thank you for hitting the follow button.

Actually, we do need a name for our tribe of smart parents.

What can we call them?

Maybe poles call yeah the poly sauce.

Pout Louderts like parenting out louders.

Yeah, I like that?

All right?

Well, before you go, we are so goddamn thirsty for praise here.

Maybe our parents did not praise us enough, and frankly it shows.

So if you've got any spare praise rattling around that you're taking off your kids now, we'd love to have it.

So the way you can do it is drop us a review on Apple Podcasts.

It actually helps other people find the show because the Apple charts work in this way where it's this weird alchemy of reviews and follows.

So it's like the.

Worst game of roadblocks ever.

So please write us a review.

But here's the challenge.

Here's what I would love.

I would love if you could please write it in gentle parenting speak, so very non praise speak.

That would really make me laugh.

So none of this this is the best podcast in the whole word world.

Like that sort of reckless praise will go straight to our heads.

It's not good for us.

So I really want to see what people have got.

So here's an example.

You worked really hard on this episode and it shows keep going, you're learning and growing every week.

I'd like the way you're speaking here.

I bet one day you're gonna get it.

Please leave us one a little inside joke for all of us, and I can't wait to read them.

Big thanks to our team this week.

Junior content producer is Tesla Kotovic produces Leaporgus and Sashatanic and the group ep Is Ruth de Vine have a great week.

Will be back in this feed next Saturday morning.

See ya bye