Parents & Professors Podcast

Are you navigating a no-fault divorce or looking for honest divorce advice ?  Is any divorce really no-fault? Legally, yes. In real life, divorce still carries blame, shame, and the feeling of failure. In Episode 88, Dr. Michael Steven Williams and Dr. Marjorie Dorimé-Williams ask what no-fault divorce means and why the legal label does not make marriage problems, accountability, or pain disappear...

Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a segregated, high-poverty Brooklyn school to live her values. A decade later, her daughter is the one asking why. The Triple Cs do not agree on the answer to Black parents’ school choice. A viral New York Times Magazine essay set Black parents' group chats on fire this month, "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" Dr. Marjo...

An AI researcher at Anthropic resigned this month and told the internet that the people building this technology believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. The industry keeps building anyway. In Episode 86, Dr. Michael Steven Williams and Dr. Marjorie Dorimé Williams take on three questions: what it means when the people building AI are the ones sounding the alarm, what is really being...

9 degrees & no steady income. Black women in the economy, the no-eye-contact doctor, & why sponsorship beats mentorship. This week, Dr. Marjorie Dorimé-Williams and Dr. Michael Steven Williams spend the full hour centering Black women. A thread went viral this month: a group of Black women, nine degrees between them, and not a single steady paycheck. The replies split down the middle. Half...

Tuskegee dress code. Black back-to-school spending. Respectability politics . Two PhD professors finally weigh in — and they don't agree. A new poll found Black parents expect to spend $447 per child on clothes and shoes this back-to-school season — nearly double what white parents spend. Dr. Marjorie opens with a simple question: what's happening there? This is the annual back-to-school e...

Co-Parenting After Divorce: What Type Are You? 9 Years In and We Still Can't Agree | Episode 83 Co-parenting after divorce. Nine years. Two households. Two kids almost in college: one remarriage, one new baby, one long-distance relationship, a business, and a podcast. And one question they still cannot answer: are they perfect pals or cooperative colleagues? In Episode 83, Dr. Marjorie and Mic...

Black child safety. Black children in white spaces. Raising Black kids in America in 2026. This is the conversation the Nolan Wells case forced every Black parent to have. Dr. Marjorie and Michael are not speculating about the case. They are having the conversation underneath it. You did everything right. The degrees. The job. The house in the good school district. And then you look up at the open...

What starts as parenting advice becomes a much bigger conversation about race, education, self worth, and the pressure parents carry. In Episode 80, Dr. Marjorie and Michael react to Julie Lythcott-Haims' viral TED Talk on overparenting. They agree with its core message: let kids build independence through real responsibility, stop measuring love by achievement, and stop turning childhood into...

What starts as a simple question— is parenting an identity, a responsibility, or both? —turns into one of the most honest conversations we've ever had. Dr. Marjorie Dorimé-Williams shares how divorce reshaped her fear of being seen as "a stereotypical single Black mom." Dr. Michael Steven Williams unpacks stereotype threat for Black fathers and explains why he would never take a six-...

A British CEO worth a reported nine figures told the Wall Street Journal she's a "max three-hour mom" on weekends. A "high-impact, core memory" parent who opts out of what she calls over-parenting. Black women online had thoughts. So do we. This is not about mom guilt or work-life balance. It is about class privilege and who actually has the resources to opt out without con...

Dating After Divorce: What I Actually Want in a Partner Two Years Later | Episode 77 Dating after divorce in your 30s or 40s? Two years ago, Marjorie made a list of everything she wanted in a partner. Now she and Michael audit it, and what changed might surprise you.  The list included respect, chemistry, culture, a passport, and even traditional masculine representation. In this retrospective, sh...

On May 28, 2023, 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack Belton walked into a store in Columbia, South Carolina. Minutes later, he was running for his life down the street. Two grown men chased him. One shot him in the back. The sheriff confirmed he stole nothing. The coroner confirmed the fatal wound was to his lower back — consistent with someone running away. On June 1, 2026, a jury found the man who killed...

It is about what happens after the divorce papers are signed, when you are trying to build something new, when you are afraid to be vulnerable again, when you have been hurt, and you are wondering if you can trust someone with your whole heart. This is Part 3. In Episode 73, they covered institutional trust. In Episode 74, the parent-child relationship. Now they go to the most intimate place of al...

A student died by suicide. A freshman. Neither his parents nor teachers knew he was struggling. Not even his friends. It is the question that haunts every parent of teenagers and the foundation of teen mental health: Do my kids actually trust me? Would they come to me if they were in crisis?  Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of youth suicide and mental health crises. If you or som...

When a White House shooting is met with memes and NBA highlights, it signals a historic collapse of the social contract. As trust in government hits a record low in 2025, we analyze Pew Research data and apply Gottman Institute relationship repair techniques to understand the rise of American apathy. Someone shot at the White House. The public reaction? Jokes. Memes. A quick scroll, then back to t...

Someone threw a fit at family game night last week. Multiple someones, actually. What started as a parenting moment nobody planned for became the conversation we didn’t know we needed: What to do when you make decisions while angry and what happens when your emotions are running the show in your home, your divorce, and even your politics?  [Content Warning: This episode discusses murder-suicide, d...

Coming out of the Lenten season, Dr. Marjorie and Dr. Michael dive into the conversation we usually ignore until it’s too late: faith, identity, and the massive cost of religious incompatibility in partnership and parenting. Dr. Marjorie describes the isolation of Easter Mass, feeling like a "fly in the milk" as a divorced Haitian Catholic in a sea of traditional families, while Dr. Mich...

You know how everybody says, " Don't feed the trolls "? But what if they materialize IRL, from a digital ghost to the person sitting across from you at Sunday dinner?  In this episode of Parents and Professors , Dr. Marjorie and Dr. Michael decapitate this cliche befitting these real-life trolls who, if blocked, would make that dinner even more awkward. This is not your regular discu...

In this episode, we explore why we often date the wrong people first and how that is actually part of discovering who we are. What begins as a light conversation about spring break quickly evolves into a deeper discussion about identity, relationships, and the psychology behind the choices we make in love. We start with the cultural evolution of spring break. From the early days of MTV Spring Brea...

In this episode, we tackle one of the biggest challenges modern families face: raising financially responsible kids in a world where everything feels more expensive. From rising gas prices and grocery bills to increasing tuition costs, we break down how today’s global economy directly impacts your household budget—and what that means for the next generation. We begin by connecting the dots between...

In this episode, we explore why conflict resolution may be the most important life skill nobody ever teaches. We start with a firsthand story from Mexico, where cartel violence turned an ordinary day into a moment of fear and chaos. From there, we zoom out to global tensions, including the Iran–U.S. conflict, tariffs, and political theater, and ask a simple question: why do so many conflicts begin...

The algorithm is getting fatter while our children pay the price. Dr. Michael and Dr. Marjorie reveal how manufactured outrage is engineered to bypass your boundaries and why you must protect your kids from the dark side of social media. In Episode 66 of the Parents and Professors Podcast, we move beyond the headlines to expose the social media algorithm's predatory nature. We discuss the &quo...

Is Big Tech actually helping our kids learn, or is it a trap? Dr. Michael and Dr. Marjorie expose how social media addiction and AI tools are fundamentally changing student brain development. In Episode 65 of the Parents and Professors Podcast, we dive into the massive lawsuits against Meta, ByteDance, and Google. While families fight for accountability, these same platforms are being pushed into...

Does the government lie about what we see with our own eyes? Dr. Marjorie breaks down the reality of ICE raids in Minneapolis and why community resistance is the only way forward. In this heavy but necessary episode of the Parents and Professors Podcast, we move beyond the headlines to discuss the state-sanctioned violence currently impacting our neighbors. We dive deep into the Black survival str...

Built by Snubs: What Being Overlooked Actually Teaches You | Episode 63In this episode, we talk about what it really means to be overlooked and why being snubbed often teaches lessons recognition never does. We start with Ryan Coogler’s Golden Globes snub and connect it to familiar experiences like academic rejection, professional gatekeeping, and doing excellent work without acknowledgment. We ex...