Conversations with Parents

Marcus O'Laoire is best known for his photogenic cooking on social media. On this episode he opens up about the journey to fatherhood, and discusses the fertility tests he underwent en route to becoming a dad. He believes male fertility is not spoken about openly, how his friends reacted to hearing he was undergoing fertility tests, and discusses how the immediate suggestion following his sperm an...

Dr Suzanne Crowe doesn’t even try to separate being a doctor from being a parent anymore. The president of the Irish medical council is a paediatric intensive care doctor and a busy mother. And she admits that sometimes taking care of extremely sick children has led to her feeling a strong need to check in with her own children. “I have rung home on occasion to just check everyone’s ok. They’re ki...

It’s said when someone in the house is sitting the Leaving Cert, the whole house is sitting the Leaving Cert. And with the State exams almost upon that’s a lot of people feeling the stress. But fear not because Conversations with Parents is bringing you a special episode with an expert panel to help parents and students navigate the whole experience in the least frazzled way possible. Yes, we’ve m...

Coleen Nolan has always had a very open relationship with her children. When it comes to having conversations with them, nothing is off the table, explains the TV personality and member of  The Nolan Sisters . When her son told her he had sex for the first time, it was possibly a more personal sharing of details than many parents are used to when it comes to their teenagers’ lives, but Nolan...

Dec Pierce has had a tough couple of years. The Today FM presenter and creator of Block Rockin Beats – his dance music and live gigs show - had a brain haemorrhage in 2023 and last year was diagnosed with breast cancer. On the latest episode of the Conversations with Parents podcast he tells host Jen Hogan about the shock of learning he had breast cancer while on holiday with his wife and young da...

Oisin McConville was destined to get involved with Gaelic football from a young age growing up in Crossmaglen, Co Armagh in the 1980s. “The Troubles is something that played a large part in my life, because bombing, shootings, killings were common place day in day out when I was growing up”, he says. His dream was to score the winner for Armagh at Croke Park. And sure enough, he was the star of th...

Colman Noctor is a well-known child and adolescent psychotherapist, so you’d be forgiven for presuming with all this expertise at hand that he always gets it right when it comes to parenting his own three children. Not so, the father-of-three says on the latest episode, explaining his children “slam doors” and face the same “trials and tribulations” as the everyone else’s children. He shares the “...

Sarah McInerney is known for her self-assured, cool and calm approach to interviewing politicians, but on the first episode of the brand new season of Conversations with Parents podcast she tells host Jen Hogan, about the anxiety that plagued her second pregnancy. In a revealing and personal interview, McInerney discusses best laid plans and shares how becoming a mother of two children wasn’t as s...

Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times and parenting journalist Jen Hogan is coming back with a new season.  Season three will feature another group of interesting people with new parenting stories to tell. Find us wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is brought to you in association with Avonmore...

Former footballer Richie Sadlier is now better known for his career as a psychotherapist and working with young people in the area of sex education and wellbeing. Knowing what he knows about young people's lives, Andrew Tate and the manosphere, he's well equipped to deal with the thorny issues that many other parents actively avoid discussing. But he admits he might be the last person his young ch...

Miriam O’Callaghan says she understands that having eight children is a source of fascination for people. And where once she might have been bothered by the double standards (i.e. how male broadcasters don’t seem to be defined by their parental status), she is now as happy to talk about her brood as she is about her TV career. The current affairs presenter has just released her memoir “Miriam: lif...

Sophie Ellis-Bextor wasn’t expecting to have a baby so soon into her relationship with her now husband, but she says there was a part of her that felt really good about it. This was in the early 2000s when it was not the done thing for a female pop star to start a family. 21 years and five boys later she’s managing to juggle family life with a successful singing career, having just released her ei...

Chris Hadfield has a granddaughter in China and, as of earlier this year, another granddaughter here in Ireland. But despite the distance, the retired astronaut says they are very much in each others lives. And after all, "I've been around the world in 90 minutes, it's just a little place," he jokes. In this episode, the world's most famous living astronaut sits down with Jen Hogan to talk about h...

Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin says she and her husband would have had a fourth child, but for her debilitating pregnancies. The scientist and broadcaster says her births went without a hitch, but she was chronically ill with hyperemesis gravidarum on each of her three pregnancies - a complication that causes persistent and extreme vomiting. Her third child, her daughter Doireann, was born at home; som...

Ciara Kelly was on in a bar on a sun holiday when she found out she was pregnant. 1999 was a time when Ireland was becoming more liberal, but being an unmarried mum "wasn't without some stigma," and no allowances were made on the gruelling 60-hour shifts that were common for junior doctors then. Though motherhood came early she took to it so well that she ended up having a family of four. In 2017...

Being a hormone doctor wasn’t actually much help when it came to parenting three girls, according to Donal O’Shea. He’s an expert in how hormones affect the body but he admits his wife handled ‘the talk’ when his three daughters were teenagers. However, he goes on to say he will be advising them “if I’m around when they are post-menopausal, that they need to be going on HRT.” O’Shea is a consultan...

Do fathers get a raw deal? Are men complicit in the detrimental effect that having children can have on women’s careers? And what exactly is an afterbirth fridge? In this episode Jen Hogan sits down with renowned political commentator Fintan O’Toole to talk about his arrival into fatherhood at a time of profound social change in Ireland. The pair discuss changing nappies, breastfeeding and why he...

Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is coming back with a new season.  Last year Jen Hogan spoke to interesting people about the hardest challenge of their lives: raising kids. Season two will feature eight brilliant guests with new parenting stories to tell. So stay tuned, wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is b...

Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is coming back with a new season.  Last year Jen Hogan spoke to interesting people about the hardest challenge of their lives: raising kids. Season two will feature eight brilliant guests with new parenting stories to tell. So stay tuned, wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is b...

Does parenting with the seemingly never-ending juggle of work, home-life, and trying to be everything to everyone, actually get any easier? What about if you have a child struggling with anxiety, where do you begin in the search for meaningful support? Siblings; ready-made friends, or sworn enemies - how do you manage sibling conflict? And does it really matter if parents share pictures of their c...

Séamas O'Reilly is an award-winning writer who shot to fame for his story of accidentally serving drinks to former president Mary McAleese while high on ketamine. He went on to pen his memoir "Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?" which netted him an Irish Book Award, and a place in the Irish annals of meme fame; after rugby icon and TV presenter, Tommy Bowe, was inadvertently light-hearted about his "ten sibl...

Black Paddy wants to teach his children self-acceptance; to love their bodies and their skin colour. The comedian and social media star is best known for his viral videos which gently poke fun at the culture shock of moving to Ireland from Africa. But he won't be including his children in his antics, preferring that they grow up with a 'strong mind' before they're ever exposed to the opinions of o...

Author, broadcaster and chairman of The Communications Clinic, Terry Prone, may live a quiet life now but she's faced the kind of challenges you could expect to see in a Netflix drama. From an against-all-odds love story (she met her husband Tom Savage while he was still a priest), living on the breadline, raising their son Anton Savage while they worked, to surviving a catastrophic car accident t...

Ivan Yates is known for his controversial views on all manner of issues, and parenting is no different. The broadcaster admits the number of nappies he has changed in his time are in single digits and that 'learned helplessness' served him well. But Yates shares a more thoughtful side to him in this conversation with Jen Hogan. He speaks about how a lack of emotional warmth in his own childhood in...

Victoria Smurfit believes to get by in life, "you need kindness, comedy and grit." The Hollywood actor, writer and producer has three children and tells them they must lead with kindness, find the funny in every situation and be prepared to work hard. She tells host Jen Hogan about the huge challenges that have come her way on her parenting journey including; her eldest daughter Evie's bid to save...