Growing Pains

You grew up on ’90s diet culture. And now you are the one setting the tone at your own dinner table. Black plastic? Non-stick pans? Superfoods? On this episode of Growing Pains, we speak with accredited nutritionist Charlotte Mei, who says you can have your laksa and eat it. And she’ll tell you how. Charlotte has spent over a decade in nutrition, and she will tell you exactly what she thinks. Her...

Her wedding portrait appeared on an outdoor stage in Singapore, faces cut out, as a Hari Raya decoration. She never agreed to it. She spoke up, and it became a national story. Most people saw the headlines. They did not see what came after: the harassment, the smear campaign, the friends who disappeared. Sarah Bagharib has never told that part in full until now. She has spent her whole life being...

Some children walk into a room full of toys and say they don't know how to play. Loveleen Walia hears it more than you would think. She is a certified Play Therapist in Singapore, using figurines, clay, art, sand trays instead of questions. She gives no instructions. She doesn't interpret, yet children tell her things they have told no one else, which is why friends call her Mary Poppins. (She doe...

Every clinic in Singapore has a TikTok now. Every influencer has an opinion on your pores. But there is one aesthetic doctor known less for what she sells and more for what she refuses to do. Dr. Rachel Ho built her name talking women off the ledge, literally saying no to procedures they were sure they wanted. This week she sits down to talk about the treatments millennial women can't stop asking...

At twenty-something, she promised her mother a private jet by the time she turned fifty. Instead, she walked away from a safe accounting career in Malaysia and got on a plane to London with no job, no plan, and a rattling old house by the sea to show for it. What came next took her through years of IVF, a husband who carried his own grief in silence, and a phone call on Valentine's Day that change...

Too Strict? Too Soft? Which Parenting Style Actually Works? Three parenting philosophies just went head to head, live, in front of an audience, and nobody left the stage unscathed. Gentle parenting says emotions come first. Tiger parenting says the world is hard, so prepare your kid for it. Authoritative parenting says it is the golden mean. But when three experts actually had to defend their corn...

Something Crystal Lim-Lange said about why Singaporeans don't speak up went viral, then landed her a cover story in The Straits Times. It touched a nerve because it wasn't really about confidence. It was about what happens to people who take a risk in a room where risk isn't safe. She says the same idea shows up at home, in a much smaller room, every time a child throws a tantrum and a parent lose...

Faz Gaffa says something most parenting platforms will not: it is okay to sit in a car park and scream before you walk back inside. She is the editor of Honey Kids Asia, a journalist known for opinions that make people uncomfortable, and a mother who has been rewriting what she owes everyone else since her father's cancer diagnosis gave her 89 days to say goodbye. In this conversation, Faz and Ste...

She was topping charts across three countries before she could vote. Then the industry that made her famous told her to shrink, and she nearly disappeared trying to do it. Ming Bridges gained forty kilos, lost herself for five years, and reached a point where she didn't want to be here anymore. What turned it around took her by surprise, and it happened faster than she ever expected. Now she's a m...

She had four children, two marriages, and once lived in the same building as her ex-husband while married to her current one. Christine Amour-Levar built a life most people would call impossible: mother of four, social entrepreneur, climate investor, and leader of thirty all-female expeditions to some of the most extreme places on earth. But ask her which comes first, being a woman or being a moth...

She built one of Singapore's most awarded agencies. She dressed the biggest names in fashion. She raised two boys. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she stopped recognising the person in the mirror. Tjin Lee, founder of Mercury and co-founder of Crib Society talks about what actually happens when motherhood and career quietly swallow your sense of self, and what it takes to hold on to it....

Sharon Wong walked away from a high-flying corporate career with zero retail experience and built one of Asia's leading mother and baby brands across four countries. Twenty-eight years, one pandemic after another, and an expansion into China that started with doors slamming in her face. She calls it insanity. She might be right. Now, at 60, she's not slowing down. She's scaling faster than ever, a...

Your brain takes in 11 million bits of information every second. You consciously process about 50. The rest gets filled in by beliefs, and those same beliefs, the ones you don't even know you have, are quietly shaping your children right now. Nir Eyal is a former Stanford lecturer, New York Times bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, and the kind of person who will tell you that your to...

Every self-help book tells you to love yourself first before you can be loved by anyone else. Yana Fry, founder of the Academy of Love, says that advice is a trap, and she has watched it keep high-achieving women stuck in the same loop for years. Her own work traces back to a single moment at age 8: her parents' divorce, a dog-eared relationship book, and a promise she made herself in a notebook....

Krystal Clavier-Choo is an applied psychologist and two-time TEDx speaker who once built a tech company, then one day, things changed. A brain cyst erased her Type A identity overnight, on top of eight years of clinical depression that began in childhood. What she found on the other side became a framework she now uses with CEOs, mothers, and teenagers who look fine on the outside and are quietly...

The Happiness Scientist Who Stopped Pretending to Be Happy Sha-En Yeo spent her teenage years being bullied in a girls' school, quietly asking herself "is this it?" A teacher left a note on her desk that changed something. Twenty years later, she's Singapore's first happiness scientist, trained under Martin Seligman at UPenn, and the author of an upcoming Penguin book called I Miss Feeling Like Me...

Maggie Dumra films her family for content and after over 78,000 followers later, she still won't let her own daughters near social media. The contradiction sits at the centre of this episode. She spent twenty years in marketing, watched K-pop idols starve themselves to be on camera, and knows exactly what the algorithm does to a girl's body image before it happens to her own kids. Ange and Maggie...

Every parent in Singapore thinks about it. Not everyone says it out loud. The pressure our kids are under to perform, to get the grade, to stay ahead, starts earlier than most of us realise and shows up in ways we don't always recognise. A child reaching for the eraser to hide a mistake. A kid who looks fine on paper but is quietly falling apart inside. Greg Wilde is Head of Primary at Sir Manasse...

Why Women Become Angry in Their 40s — And Why That's Not A Bad Thing 46% of women aged 40 to 54 face the highest burnout risk of any age group. More than half screen positive for depression and anxiety. Over 60% of later-life divorces are initiated by women. In this conversation, Ange sits down with Amanda Lim and Jasmin Dhillon, hosts of The Forties Formula, who’ve had the conversations about “mi...

Dr. Elaine Kim spent years in palliative care sitting with people in the last days of their lives. What her patients kept saying at the end changed everything about how she thinks about the beginning. By age seven, a child's trajectory is already largely set. 90% of brain development happens in the first five years. And 250 million children around the world never get access to quality early educat...

Most parents wait for belonging to happen. James Sweeney says that's exactly the problem. James is the head of One World International School's Nanyang Campus, with students from over 70 nationalities. He's also spent his whole career watching children walk into rooms where they don't know anyone and figuring out how to make that okay. In this conversation, he unpacks what schools that get this ri...

What do you do when everything falls apart at once and nobody's coming to save you? Shireen Jones has lived a version of that question most of us can't imagine. She was one of Singapore's first 200 COVID-19 cases. She lost a nine-year teaching career weeks after discharge, for a reason that has to be heard to be believed. Then came a pregnancy that broke her, a baby who wouldn't stop crying for th...

Welcome to Growing Pains by Honey Kids Asia! I'm Steph Dickson, a mother of one with another on the way, and this is the podcast for the conversations parents actually want to have. We're diving into things like: Am I accidentally gaslighting myself with my own beliefs? Is telling my kids to "think positively" actually making things worse? Why does my partner suddenly forget how the washing machin...

From the workplace to our children’s schools, AI is gradually becoming the norm in our daily lives. But how young is too young for children to be using AI? Our latest episode of Parenting Playbook discusses the use of AI in preschool classrooms with Wu Jing, CEO and co-founder of House on the Hill. Jing will touch on the pros and cons of using AI in early childhood education, share best practices...

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas — and gift panic season is here! In this episode, Syaz and Andrina unwrap their favourite Christmas gift ideas for the whole family. From DIY craft kits and cuddly toys for the little ones, to gadgets and gift cards for teens, and spa-day treats and festive sleepwear for parents, they’ve got every name on your list covered (even dads!). Tune in to this f...