Summary

The Parent Rap is back, and our first new episode (live in your feed now!!) is with Olivia Scobie, a clinical social worker in Toronto and author of the upcoming book 'Impossible Parenting: Creating a New Culture of Mental Health for Parents'.⁠ We’ve linked to Olivia’s online presence, her book, and her work in the resources below.

We talk about the culture surrounding parenting, who gets to think of themselves as a good parent and what that means for us as we go about living in the world, and touch on some of the trials we've faced as we try to navigate the whole new challenge of making choices through the pandemic lens.

Resources & Information

Olivia Scobie

Impossible Parenting: A New Culture of Mental Health for Parents at Another Story Bookshop

Impossible Parenting: A New Culture of Mental Health for Parents at Dundurn Press

Canadian Perinatal Mental Health Trainings

Postpartum Support Toronto

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior

Becoming the Parent You Want To Be by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser

The Nap Ministry

Gabrielle Griffith

We also mention the work of Linda Clark Amankwaa on postpartum mental health

Food is the worst. Helping our kids not have weird issues with food is really complicated and difficult and frustrating. Things that have helped: Having a quality “safe food” alongside the “challenge foods” Trying to make sure the foods we have available are foods we’re comfortable with; Giving the kids as much control as we can over which things they choose to eat. from the selection we provide; Trying to model exposures: touching, smelling, tasting, biting things we’re not sure we’re ready to eat.

Summary

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Most members of our cohort of parents are constantly battling with their anger. Being a parent is frustrating, and kids push every one of our buttons and drag up all of our baggage, even the stuff we thought we’d handled a long time ago. Adding the close quarters and extra anxiety of our current moment only exacerbates the problem, and we all need a little bit of touching up on our anger management muscles.

For us, that means:

Remembering that there are no bad feelings, only bad actions,

Working to make our actions something we’ve chosen, not just something that happens,

Accepting that the feeling is normal (even the urge to hurt),

Taking responsibility for the choices we make about those feelings,

Making sure we don’t hurt ourselves or anyone else,

Naming our feelings and working to identify and resolve triggers.

Summary

Our connection with nature is important to us, whether it’s dandelions in the sidewalk cracks or deep-woods hikes. Naturalist and friend Bethany Ricks talks to us about maintaining that connection with nature near and far, even when we can’t get out of our living rooms.

Pedigree | Emily Dickinson

The pedigree of honey

Does not concern the bee;

A clover, any time, to him

Is aristocracy.

Revery | Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

Resources & Information

Merlin Bird ID

iNaturalist

Association of Zoos and Aquariums

The Frog Hunt - Everything is Connected (Bethany tells a story; originally created for Tamarack Nature Center)

Beetles Project: Resources (“I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of”)

Animal Planet Aquarium Watch

The Ultimate Game Freak (Interview with Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokemon)

A Soft Place to Land

Well, things have gone pretty sideways, huh? All the systems for our lives that we've built over the years are out the window as we adjust to #QuarantineLife. This episode is theoretically about gender roles, but also about *gestures wildly at everything*.

Listeners, if you need anything, please don’t hesitate to shoot us an e-mail. Anna is available for video chats if your birth/postpartum/breastfeeding support system has been shaken down, and will help any organization that needs it get set up for remote meetings. Sara is, as always, super happy to help you figure out how to run games remotely, and has a seemingly endless supply of links and gifs available to distract and cheer you.

Cool Stuff

It was snowing at Anna’s house while we recorded this episode. That is not a cool thing, it is a cold thing, and Anna was pretty salty about it. Also, does Georgia have beaches?

Resources & Information

The Year of Jubilee (Biblical)

The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism | Helen Lewis for The Atlantic

Women Still Handle Main Household Tasks in the US | Megan Brenan for Gallup

Young Men Embrace Gender Equality, But They Still Don’t Vacuum | Claire Cain Miller for the New York Times

Work-from-Home Survival Guide: Managing a Team During COVID-19 | Anna Carey for Fluency

What Moms Always Knew About Working from Home | Brigid Schulte for The New York Times

Our Kids Will Always Remember Living Through a Coronavirus Pandemic. We Don't Have to Make it Normal for Them | Heidi Stevens for The Chicago Tribune

Moms Will Inevitably Shoulder Extra Domestic Work During This Pandemic \ Sara Peterson for The Washington Post

How to Be an Inclusive Leader Through a Crisis | Ruchika Tulshyan for Harvard Business Review

A Soft Place to Land

In this episode, a subject very dear to Anna’s heart: birth stories and experiences. Most people experience birth in a really intense haze of emotion and complexity and as a culture we really fail a lot of the time to handle that well. Birth is, for most of us, a day or two of time, but it’s a lot. Content warning on this episode for talk of birth trauma and obstetric violence, and also we give several f*cks and do not censor the audio, so just a head’s up on that, too.

What we’re talking about today is some of that birth experience Stuff, about how that influences the lives of our families and communities, and some of the really egregious disparities out there in the world of childbirth. We start by sharing our experiences a little to give you some background on us and how we approached things when our babies were born.