What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making Life Better, with Two Funny Moms

Take our listener survey! Here's the link: https://bit.ly/whatfreshhellsurvey The best way to handle our children’s anger is to equip them with the tools to handle it themselves. You don’t have to smother children's emotions in order to calm them down; as your kids get older, you really can't. But you don’t need to throw up your hands and accommodate their anger and everything that comes with it,...

Each week Margaret or Amy tackles a listener's most pressing question. This week Margaret answers the question, "How can I get my kids to care about things I think are important?" Submit your questions at questions@whatfreshhellpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of our very favorite things to say on this podcast, “back to one," is a term you'll hear dozens of times a day on any television or film set. It means resetting everything about a scene-- the cameras, the actors, the extras, the dollar bill that gets handed over, the coffee cup that gets picked up-- in order to do another take of that same scene. There's never any sense of disappointment or wh...

Each week Margaret or Amy tackles a listener's most pressing question. This week Amy answers the question, "How can we teach our three-year-old son that he has to share his toys with his soon-to-crawl baby sister?" Amy mentions this article by Sarah S. MacLaughlin for Zero to Three- it's full of great suggestions on this topic: http://https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/1964-helping-young-childr...

Each week Amy or Margaret tackles a listener's most pressing question. This week Margaret answers, "How do I handle splitting time between my parents and my husband's parents at the holidays?" Submit your questions to info@whatfreshhellpodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Experts say happiness is often purer in the anticipation of an event. The reality can be a little more messy. And at no time of year is that sentiment more true than during the holiday season. We asked our listeners to tell us their holiday worsts, and in this episode we discuss them all, plus a few of our own. Hams glazed with norovirus! Toddlers sleeping in airports! And of course, everyone's fa...

FOMO, or the “fear of missing out,” was a term coined around 2011 to describe the feeling you get when you see friends on social media posting about lives just a little more exciting than your own. Behavioral researcher Dan Ariely calls it "the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds, set off by the fear of regret." It's a feeling definitely made worse by the constant ability we all have to ch...

Do you respond to the idea of "practicing" gratitude with a heavy dose of nope? In this episode we discuss the science behind the gratitude>>happiness>>more gratitude>>more happiness loop. Studies have proven that regularly expressing gratitude actually changes the structures of our brains to make us healthier and happier, thanks to something called "positive recall bias." In other words, if you s...

Whining is what experts call a “low-power strategy of dominance.” Kids do it because it’s what’s available to them. Since it drives parents bonkers, it’s remarkably effective. And it turns out whining really is as annoying as we think it is. A recent study tested whether adults (non-parents and parents both) were more distracted by whining than other sounds. The result? Everyone in the study, whet...

Each week Amy or Margaret answers a listener's most pressing parenting question.  Today Margaret tackles the question, "Should I throw away the diapers to encourage my kiddo to commit to potty training?" Submit yours! questions@whatfreshhellpodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's hard not to be a little nervous when your kid is the only one still crying at preschool dropoff. Or the only one still spelling everything wrong in third grade. Sometimes it turns out to be a late bloomer situation, nothing to worry about. Sometimes it's an early indicator of something your kid might struggle with for a long time. How do we move beyond our own stress about what our kids are a...

We asked the listeners to tell us their extremely minor annoyances of motherhood-- the smaller and more seemingly inconsequential, the better, because it turns out those are things that really make us loco. From soggy bath toys, to pushing swings, to the toddler who spins around and offers the wrong arm to be put into the held-up coat sleeve, here are many of the teeny-tiny things that drive moms...

Anyone old enough to remember TV antennas and New Coke usually says that things were way better in the free-wheeling, simple-living, “don't come home till it's getting dark outside” days of our childhoods. But were they really? And what about for our parents? From maternity clothes to snow days to school nights to movie nights, in this episode we decide whether the things that loom largest in our...

The "invisible workload" has become shorthand for the never-ending to-do list that moms keep in our heads-- because much of that work is invisible to the people we do it for, let alone the larger world. That work falls to us because moms tend to be the default parent, whatever our outside-the-home workload (or that of our spouses) might be. Are you the one who leaves work when the baby throws up a...

No matter what ages our kids are, when they need rescuing, they look to Mom. And whether we rescue them or not, we’re left second-guessing whatever it is we just did.  Did you bring that forgotten lunch to school? Nice helicoptering, loser!  Did you leave your kid to figure out his own way home from baseball when it was getting dark? Really, how can you live with yourself?  In this episode, we tal...

Have you ever felt coerced into parenting in a way you usually wouldn’t because you were in public? Does the tsk-ing disapproval of Aunt Joan feel even worse than eyerolls from strangers? Do you discipline your kids differently in front of friends who might hold a tighter line, even if it's in your house? Do you ever give a "now you listen to me, young man" lecture to one of your kids primarily fo...

What is it about the kid who throws sand that other kids find so irresistible? How do we keep our kids away from bad influences in their lives, especially as they get older? And why do parents sometimes peg exactly the wrong kids as good influences? In this episode we discuss what age groups are most susceptible to peer influence (good and bad), how to approach the parent of a suspected bad-influe...

We asked the members of our Facebook group for your "hot takes"- that is to say, the things you feel insanely strongly about while the rest of the world is seemingly indifferent.  From athleisure to mayonnaise to french-fry consistency to the enduring fame of Coldplay, these are your extremely fervent hot takes and unpopular opinions.  Should pizza ever, under any circumstances, be topped with pin...

What should we as parents do when the well-meaning grandparents in our lives are overindulgent of their grandchildren? Or undermine our parenting choices? And what do we do with our own hurt feelings when our parents don't seem very interested in our kids at all? In this episode we talk about how to create a grandparent relationship that works for everyone. It's worth the effort. Take it from our...

Kids don't usually seek to lose their dependence on us as parents- and why should they? Doesn’t a grilled cheese taste so much better when Mom makes it?  So it’s up to us to teach our kids independence, and that means showing them how an ATM works sometime before they leave for college. How do we start the nest-leaving process early and often? Our guest is Lisa Heffernan, co-creator of the parenti...

Helicopter moms, snowplow moms, tiger moms, free-range moms… we usually define all of these parenting types in the negative: well, at least I’m not THAT. But are there useful takeaways from each of these parenting styles that we can combine cafeteria-style to create our own? Can we reject some of the judginess of free-range parenting, or the tyranny of tiger momming, and still find things to love?...

We asked you to tell us your spouses’ most unacceptable-- and also extremely minor-- household infractions. 356 of you responded. Whether it’s turning off the AC because it's "too cold" at 75 degrees, creating a Sock Mountain of not-quite-dirty-enough laundry, or pausing Netflix to point out plot holes, this episode explores everything spouses do that is trivially horrible. It must also be said: w...

Most little kids have an ironclad sense of right and wrong and are most happy to report on whoever might not be sharing in the dress-up corner. But as they get older, the stakes get a lot higher- for them, for us, and for the kid being "told on." When should kids tell? In this episode we discuss: the difference between "tattling" and telling, and whether telling kids "no tattling" is causing other...

Is there such a thing as a too-imaginative kid? Parenting experts say no. Dr. Paul Harris, professor of education at Harvard and author of The Work of the Imagination, says that kids’ active imaginations are “essentially positive” and represent cognitive work, the way that children make sense of the world.  But if you’ve got a kid who prefers her imaginary friend to making real ones— or who terror...

Most of us have been (for better and for worse) recipients of the “only Mommy” level of attention from our little ones-- the sort of singular devotion that leaves our partners decidedly out in the cold. Many of us have also been on the outside looking in, with "Daddy’s girl" giving us none of the love, just eye rolls and the distinct impression that we rank not only second, but dead last.  Why do...