The Content-ification of Caregiving, 'Yesteryear' & 'Rugrats'

Anita and Zara discuss the evolution of media representation of caregiving. From 'Leave it Beaver' and other depictions of 1950's suburbia, to the social media-driven landscape we're currently navigating, representation of caregiving has evolved...but has it really changed all that much?

The hosts dig into their opinions, share thoughts on the buzzy tradwife novel Yesteryear, reflect on the cartoon that raised us (Rugrats!), and end with a rapid fire round of "which social media mom archetype would our nostalgic TV faves embody today?"

00:00 Navigating the Millennial Media Landscape
03:06 The Evolution of Parenting Media
05:49 The Impact of Social Media on Caregiving
08:15 The Performance of Motherhood
10:50 The Double-Edged Sword of Social Media
12:54 The Role of Women in Modern Media
15:26 The Intersection of Caregiving and Mental Health
17:05 The Challenges of Aging and Caregiving
19:41 The Importance of Sharing Caregiver Experiences
21:53 The Shift in Conversations Around Women's Health
24:16 Rebranding Aging and Longevity
25:45 Rethinking Longevity and Functionality
28:45 Driving Independence and Safety in Older Adults
29:10 The Impact of Media on Aging and Family Dynamics
31:05 Navigating the Sandwich Generation
37:23 The Influence of Nostalgia and Social Media on Parenting

Topics covered: Social media, millennial motherhood, media representations of motherhood, sandwich generation caregiving, intergenerational conflict, tradwives, tradwife content

Thanks for listening to The Millennial Sandwich! Don't forget to follow, subscribe and connect with us on social media 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Millennial Sandwich, a space for real conversations about millennials in the middle. Not just of our own lives, but also of a caregiving sandwich. I'm Dr. Anitha Chandra, a geriatrician and expert in elder care.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

And I'm Zara Hanowalt, a parenting journalist and expert in American motherhood. And even we don't have all the answers. Join us as we figure out life in the middle. Hi everyone, welcome back. It's just Zara and Anitha today. And we were talking a lot about this, and we feel like you can't have a conversation about being a millennial in any stage of life without talking about media, social media, the evolution of media, because we are the generation that grew up without social media. And now we are very much learning what it is and how it affects us in real time. And that is hard. And that is a defining aspect of our generation is that we are all trying to figure out social media as adults when we had childhoods that were filled with completely different media landscapes. So we want to talk about that and we want to talk about how it's affecting us. And one of the things that we have been feeling is like we don't even know what our feelings truly are because there are so many messages all around us, literally in our faces, that are essentially telling us how to feel. And so we wanted to have a conversation about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Yeah. Are our feelings really our feelings? Or are they someone else's? Or are they content that has been brainwashed? It's sort of like when you listen to the radio and you don't like a song at first and you're like, I don't like that song, but you hear it so much and suddenly you know all the words and it's your favorite song. Is that how is that how our feelings around caregiving has become? I don't know. You've been in the you've been in the parenting media space for years. What have you seen?

SPEAKER_01 1:53

So, okay, I've been in parenting media for 11 years now. I have only been a parent for seven years. And the fact that I was even hired to work in parenting media, I think tells you a lot about what it was like in that era. I was always having people be like, wait, wait, you work in parenting, but you're not a parent. And I was like, Well, I don't have to be. I'm a journalist. I know how to report and research and take myself out of the story. And all that's true, but obviously I didn't understand what it actually felt like to be a parent. But the thing is that parenting media at that time was not about what it felt like to be a parent. It was about child development. It was about what you should feed your kids, it was about, you know, tips on how to actually parent children, but it was never about the identity shift of being a parent. There was no distinction made between moms and dads, which I think was a huge miss. I remember even at the time, there was this big talking point around parenting media that was like, why do we ever ask a mom how she balances it all? Because that's not something we would ever ask a dad. And so that's like a sexist question and it's a lazy question. It's actually not because, and I remember even at the time feeling like, well, I just feel like the expectations are different on moms, the experience of actually having a baby and being postpartum and all of that. I think it's different. When you talk about motherhood, even in the most equal partnerships, it's things like figuring out how to pump at work or how to go back to work when you're still bleeding, or, you know, and I and now we're finally talking about that. We're finally talking about the fact that motherhood is a completely different experience than fatherhood. I remember in 2017, I think there was this massive sort of shift. And we were having conversations about this, about how in order to cover parenting well, we need to be talking about what parents are actually experiencing in their real lives. And the prompt for that was social media.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

So I have a really complicated relationship to parenting content on social media because I think it's incredibly necessary. I also think it's it has gotten a little problematic, and I think it's just hard to escape now.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yeah. And if we think about the history of how caregiving in general has been represented in the media over decades, since, you know, TV has been so present in our lives. If you think about it, okay, before everybody was caregiving, women were caregiving silently. You had the people around you, whatever was normal in your space, the people you see, that's what you did. And it wasn't really talked about. Then in the in the 50s, 60s, we saw families on TV think like Leave It to Beaver or like good housekeeping. This idea of caregiving or the way that it was portrayed, the way women were portrayed caregiving was they were content. They were so happy to be doing this domestic work. We didn't see the struggle. We saw if you are happy as a woman, you are happy doing this domestic work, including caring for everyone around you. And then in the, I think when we grew up in the 80s and 90s, the media that we grew up with is shaping how we are caring for those around us because what we saw when we were growing up was having it all, right? That was such a shift that we saw glorified working motherhood and super mom, and even just, you know, self-help TV and the idea of like Oprah talking about emotional culture. That was not something that the previous generation had. And we grew up with that. And then when we were become you know, becoming professionals, that's when we saw like mommy blogs, and caregiving became more of a confessional. And that's when we started to see it shift from this is how you raise your children to become this person to this is my emotional experience as a parent. And that resonated so much. And we're still sort of that's still how we're viewing caregiving, right? Would you say we're still in caregivers' heads? That's what our content is shaped by, is like the internal monologue and emotional framing of what people are experiencing as caregivers.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Honestly, no. I don't think it's about the internal monologue. I think it's about these trend buckets. I think it's honestly not that different because when you watch media from pre-social media days, moms were not characters. They were tropes. There were the moms, there was like the Amy Matthews, you know, the good mom who is just like a regular gal and she's just a mom. And then there were like the, like you said, the kind of like super mom, high-functioning, like busy busy, like the home alone mom. And then there were the bad moms, like Sean Hunter's mom, right? Who was so bad that we couldn't even give her a redeeming quality of even, was she even on the show, or was she just a talking point? That's all we saw is you are either this bucket or that bucket. And there were maybe like three or four buckets for moms to fall into. I remember watching Seventh Heaven as a kid, and you know, Annie Camden is totally in that good mom bucket. And there was that one episode where she kind of cracks and she goes away to the beach on her own. And I remember being like, What is she doing? And now, of course, as a mom, you're like, Oh yeah, she wanted to run away. Yeah. Yeah, because like this entire series goes by and she doesn't even get to like go get her nails done in peace. So yeah, of course, she's gonna have a breakdown and like go away for a week to the beach.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Yeah. When we grew up, any complications or difficulty with a mom was resolved within 22 minutes and was comic relief. Just before we were on this episode, I sent you a real Zara. I don't know if you saw it, but it was a clip where Jill is listing all of the things she's gonna do between 3 and 6 p.m. And it's like, I'm gonna drive the kids here and then I'm gonna go to this appointment. I'm gonna go to talk to this teacher. And Tim is just staring at her, and the audience is laughing, and the invisible labor that she's naming out loud is the joke. That is the joke. Yeah, and that's that is how we grew up seeing parenting and motherhood. Like, oh, that's just motherhood. It's hard not to internalize that when you're eight years old, seeing families on TV.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, and people think we've come such a long way, but we haven't because we're still doing this thing of you're either a trad wife or you're a girl boss. We are still saying things on social media. By we, I mean I would never, but there are a lot of people on social media who are saying things like the miserable mom trend is over. We are happy, we're hot, we're loving our husbands. You are telling people how to feel when you do that. You are telling them that if they don't feel like they're as hot as they used to be, they're miserable. You're telling them that if they're not happy all the time, they they're out. They're out of style.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

And let's take a step back. When people are saying this is in and out, when creators are saying that, they mean that this is the content that's resonating. I don't know if people who aren't creators, if you're just if you just follow some of these parenting influencers, the way that content is made is by looking at algorithms and content gaps and looking at what your followers searched for. They're not sharing their inner thoughts. They're not making groundbreaking observations most of the time. Most of the time, they're looking to see how I can get people to watch this and like it and share it and engage, and maybe it's rage bait. I definitely want to talk about Tradwives, because I know we've both read yesteryear.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, I mean, it's it's really not that different when you think about it. It's still, we're still making everything extreme. Even the experts, I mean, I interview a lot of experts, and I can tell that a lot of them are just influenced by these trends. I remember, I mean, this is kind of a small example, but I remember covering, or I don't think I covered it. I think someone I worked with covered something about how we really need to be making the distinction between a snack and a treat with our kids. And you need to teach them about how certain things can be a snack and certain things are just like an occasional treat. And then maybe like a year and a half later, the messaging was all like never label anything a treat. Food is neutral. And the same people are are doing both of those things, but it's just about what is in the culture at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

It is their job to hook you and make you feel like you're not doing it right or that they have the secret to being the best at this thing. If you don't look at it with that lens of, okay, this person is this is how they make their money, including trad wives. They're touting this idea of motherhood that they're not providing and they're letting their husbands provide. Girl, you have a camera and you have two million followers, and he's probably your assistant. Yeah. Yeah. You are providing. Own it.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

You're work, you're a working mom. Yeah. And it's also frustrating that people don't have the media literacy to pick up on that. It's there was a post on my feed from this one influencer who doesn't have kids yet, but it literally says paid partnership on the screen. And she's talking about finding a provider man and how she's encouraging other women to not go to college because it's a waste of time and you're gonna go into debt and you're never gonna use your degree because you're gonna find a provider man. It says paid partnership, guys, and the comments are like not getting it.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

It's also with our parents, too. That's another part of our job is to figure out what to believe and not believe on the internet and make sure we understand that, our parents understand that, our kids understand that. It's like constant filtering and it's all just flooding our brains all the time. And it's it's just shifted, like we've said, so much, including we now we talk about mental health and therapy language, and I think we're getting to that point where people are like, okay, not everything is not everyone's a narcissist. Yes, exactly. But okay, this is a very specific, but let's just talk about rugrats for a second. Obviously very important in terms of parenting. So there's a lot of I mean, we could do a whole episode on rugrats. We were just talking about like working moms, and Jelica's Jelica's mom was totally that like clickety-clackety. I think we were supposed to feel that she was like not engaged with her kids and she was always on the phone. And I don't know if that was supposed to be a bad mom. I don't know, but that was definitely an extreme of motherhood. And then we had Dee Dee. She talked about Dr. Lipschitz constantly. She swore by him. He was a psychologist. And one, okay, on one hand, she was getting parenting advice from a psychologist. That the the that was the joke. They called him Dr. Lipschitz, right? Even as kids, I think that wasn't lost on us. We were referring to psychiatrists as quacks and shrinks and making fun of and mocking mental health. And now this pendulum has swinged so far that every human emotion has been broken down in infographic form for us.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

And there has to be a middle ground.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Well, I think also, like in terms of the media literacy piece, I am seeing, and if you guys haven't read yesteryear, I think we can probably keep this spoiler-free, but I am seeing all this commentary about how people think Carol Claire Burke, who wrote yesteryear, is right wing and like this is her internal monologue, what we're reading from Natalie. And I'm like, guys, come on.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

That is I can't even I can't even like reading the whole thing and thinking back, I I know.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

And it every every piece of promotion around the book says satirical, says a word. Of course it does.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

You can tell within the first paragraph of the book. Yeah. And that's what makes it so I was instantly hooked because I was like, okay, yeah, this person who's writing this is very aware.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

My favorite part of yesteryear, and I think the smartest scene is where she calls her mom when she is struggling in new motherhood, and she says, How did you do it? How did you keep the house clean? How did you get yourself together? And her mom says, I used to pretend I had an audience. And I remember I read that and I was like, Ohy shit, have we always been doing this as women? Before we had social media, were we performing motherhood? Were we performing caregiving, womanhood, all of these things? Like, has it always really been a performance at the end of the day? And I I think it has, and I think social media has just amplified that. Isn't womanhood a performance? It's a performance. When you start to think about it, you're just like, What what are my feelings? And what are the feelings that the world is telling me to have?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Yeah. And it's really important to note that when you go online, the posts that perform really well are vulnerability, raw emotions. I'm using air quotes because you know, raw honesty is a business tool.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Performing relatability, right? Yes. You're not being relatable, you're performing relatability.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Even if they and we are creators and we are I feel like we are genuine, but even sincere creators understand the system. It's not like, oh, they're tricking you and they're lying. They it's a business.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

And if you want to grow a platform, you need a niche. You need a hook. You need to say something that's a little I mean, rage bait is how creators get engagement. If you don't realize that though, if you're outside the machine, that's where it gets scary.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Because yeah, that's how that's how you're shaping your thoughts. But you know what's really interesting to me is there are so many men on social media. There's one person I think of immediately who's a pediatrician, and I love him. I think he's so kind and empathetic and reassuring. He never posts anything controversial and he has a massive following. And I don't know, Dr. Tommy Martin. Yes. Yeah, love him. Yeah, he's great. And it's I love that he has such a big following because I think people need to see what he's putting out. But I don't think you can get there as a woman without leaning into the controversy of it all.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

And now there are men in these spaces who are absolutely capitalizing on being the, you know, female, the male advisor. Yeah. Yeah. They're saying all of these things that these women who have done the research, who have spent the time, who have done all of the work, have already said for years and years and now just spitting it out. And it's like, oh my gosh, you're a man and you get it. And then they immediately get, it's exhausting. It is exhausting. And on one hand, it's great that men are hearing some of this because it is really important. But I don't know. I'm always a little bit skeptical when I see a man in this space making money off of repeating and regurgitating women's work without crediting the women who have already done the work.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

It's frustrating. You know, you and I keep sending each other stories that we see about the sandwich generation and about caring for aging parents. And these are new stories, but they're still in that place of where parenting media was when I started, where it's about these larger trends, it's about the stats and the numbers and the economics, but nobody's really talking much about what the experience of being a caregiver is like. And I think that is something we really need to be doing here because caregiving is not just about the person you're taking care of, it's also about you as a caregiver. I was listening to more about you. Yeah. I was listening to The Lady Gang. Do you ever listen to that podcast? No. One of the hosts who I would actually love to talk to her, she takes care of her brother. And she was, she's writing a book now, and she was saying that she ran the story by her brother. And she's like, I just want to make sure you're comfortable with me talking about this specific story. And he was like, I don't want to look at it because this is not my story. This is your story. And there are so many people who are in my position, but there are also so many people who are in your position who are caregivers, and they are allowed to be the center of that story, and they should read what you write and feel seen by it. And I was just like, wow, that's that's beautiful, and that's important.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

And with dementia, I see so many dementia caregivers, and that's kind of the hallmark of dementia, right? The person who with the disease doesn't think anything is wrong. Dementia is very much a disease of the caregiver and the family. So that's really important to be able to share your experience because it's not it's very different than other diseases and caring for somebody who is sick in another way. So that on the flip side, that's the really good thing about the internet, right? It's it's totally yeah brought us so much awareness to things like carrying culture for mental health. What else is now something that is talked about openly and relatively without stigma because of social media? Miscarriage, miscarriage, yes, postpartum depression, infertility, burnout, mental load, all of these words that we all know because millennial women started saying them into a microphone.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah, totally. I mean, I went through fertility stuff and I had a miscarriage in 2017. And I remember that was the moment where people were really starting to talk about it. I would say it was 2015, 16, somewhere in there was when it started. And I had so many people say to me, like, Oh, I just learned that infertility is really common, or I just learned that miscarriages actually happen pretty frequently.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

And that's not new. That's not new. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

I really have felt like every phase of my life that I've gone through as an adult is the talking point in media and in culture because women of our cohort are the ones who are talking about things for the first time. And we don't get enough credit for that. I mean, millennial women, say what you want about how cringe we are and how we overshare and how we like make ourselves the main character and everything. There's a lot of good that comes from that too.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

We're not framing social media as evil or like terrible, because there's obviously a lot of really good parts in terms of connection, bringing awareness to things, um, even like neurodivergence. There's so much in the parenting space and the things that were happening still that people just didn't talk about and didn't know where to turn to get information. And on the flip side, we have so much information. There's so much information.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

And I'm sure you, as a doctor, see this double edged sword all the time, right? Because I've written stories about people who have gotten endometriosis diagnosis because they were in Reddit forums and they were talking to people about their symptoms and they had the tools to advocate for themselves to get a diagnosis because of that. At the same time, people are probably coming to you and saying, like, well, I saw this online and you're wrong, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And that is probably more common than finding that misdiagnosis. Yeah. But you can't blame people. Healthcare is very broken right now. There's a lot of issues. So I totally understand why people have to look on the internet for answers. Because it's go it's expensive going to the doctor, and not all of us have the time. Even as a doctor, I I get it. Yeah. As frustrating as it is, on the other end, what are they supposed to do? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

Do you feel like we're getting into that space now where women are age, anything we're experiencing is kind of dismissed as perimenopause? Yes. Yeah. I was talking to a friend about this, and she's like, I just feel like anything now. It's like, oh, it's probably perimenopause. It's everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

It's everywhere now. Like, it's that is like one of those. Is it the new anxiety? Yeah. That's the thing. Like, millennial women are in perimenopause now. Some of us are still having children. You go straight from being postpartum into perimenopause, but also not everything is perimenopause. Like it's just like maybe you're tired because you're doing a lot of stuff and you're not sleeping well.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. I interviewed Dr. Newar, who I think we should have on at some point too. And she said so many women dismiss their signs of perimenopause because they're taking care of aging parents and young kids. And they're just like, I have to, you know, I just put myself at the end of the list because that's what women do. And then it's easier to give us a simple answer than it is to like dig around for the question, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

It's interesting that that's the default is to say it's your hormones and not it's that you're doing too much.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Well, it's kind of like the nervous system thing, right? We talk a lot about how it drives us crazy when people throw around the term nervous system for everything. I gotta say, as a doctor, it gives me the ick.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Yeah. Oh my god, I can't stand it. If you can't, if you don't understand the nervous system from like a pathophysiologic standpoint, just don't say nervous system. That's like one of the things. That's like a driver, right? It's a buzzword, it's a tag. You even experts are using it and using it incorrectly. Absolutely. I mean, I had a whole conversation on my on my geriatrics page, like geriatrics is kind of dying as a specialty, unfortunately. I mean, it never really was thriving, but we don't have that many geriatrics. More now than ever? Yes, because the population is aging. Yeah. But people, when you say geriatrics, they're out. Like, ew, I'm not geriatric. That's like a negative term. But if I say longevity, I have rebranded into like wellness territory and we're going like we're age maxing. How crazy is that, right? That is a medical specialty, if I switch the language, even as yes, a professional with a degree, if I get on my phone and say I'm a longevity expert, oh, now I'm interested. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

I was gonna ask you about that actually, because one of the people I work with in the media space is she loves that we're going away from anti-aging to longevity. What's the difference? I mean, I think that it's it's probably one of those things that in a lifestyle capacity maybe makes a positive difference. Instead of talking about beauty in the sense of anti-aging, we're talking about it, you know, it's aging as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

To me, when I hear longevity, hear long adding years to your life. And in the geriatrics world, that is not what we look at.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

It's not always the goal.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

No, and in fact, I as a geriatrician don't really care about the chronologic age of my patients. It does not matter to me if you're 95 or 75. If you're geriatric, I care about function. I want to know what you're doing for yourself, what you need help with. I want to know if you're driving. I want to know if you're seeing your friends, I want to know if you're taking your own medications or if somebody helps you. That tells me so much more than your age ever could.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

So which is so interesting, right? Because we have all these rules about like, oh, when you're you can't be a pilot after what, 65. That's why, yeah, people all the time are like, oh, when you turn this a yet, our president, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

But yeah, driving is one of those things that is such a marker of independence in this country. You you turn 16, you start driving until somebody physically takes your keys away. It is very hard to get people to stop driving, which is also insane, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Insane parents who are gonna have 16-year-olds in not that long.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

I know, and on the road with 95-year-olds who have been driving for this long. And people will be like, oh, you should have to take a driving test again when you turn 85. I don't think that that would be helpful. I don't think that the age is really telling you anything. Um one hand, we'd say, be don't, don't become isolated, be independent, keep seeing your people, maintain your social circles, but also you have no way to get there. And we're not going to provide you any resources or any help to do these things. But good luck. Give me your keys.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

How as a child do you do that? I mean, because as we've talked about, like you are your parents' child in some ways, even when the role reversal happens.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

That is the even driving are basically probably the hardest. I always tell my patients' families when they're a couple of things. One, I ask them, would you feel comfortable with them driving your children? And if they say no, that's automatic red flag. It doesn't matter why it is. It doesn't matter if you think they're gonna get lost. It doesn't matter if you think it's because they can't see. If you do not trust your children in the backseat of your parents' car, that is a red flag. And I always tell them to let me be the bad guy. You don't want to be the person to tell your parents that they can't be independent in that way. It's really hard. So I think as doctors, not just geriatricians, like somebody who can even your primary care doctor should be able to say, these are my concerns. I'm gonna be the bad guy and say you can't do this, because preserving that parent-child relationship even at like 95 and 75 is really important. Yeah. We should also talk about how media affects daughtering and it is affecting our parents. Because I don't know about you, but the news is constantly on in my parents' house. And every time I go into a patient room in the hospital, they don't watch anything but the news. And it's just like constant information, information. And it's interesting because it'll be one polarizing news station versus another. And that is all they're watching all day long. I feel like the parent sometimes being like, this is too much screen. Get off the screen, get off your phone, get off of these ridiculous chain messages about how Facebook is gonna take your identity and take all your money and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Yeah, I mean, I'm seeing all this stuff now that's like, I don't have iPad kids, but I have iPad parents.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

The amount of times I've had to say to my mom, stop looking at your phone. My kid is talking to you. Is insane. Like, can you they're they're asking you a question. And that my kids will even be like, oh, she didn't listen. She was looking at her phone. It's like managing screen time in both directions. Like, I wish that I could have a screen time limit, like a downtime on my mom's phone because it's too much.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

It's it's all of these things, right? Like we've talked about we want to get someone on to talk to us about what it's like when you're thinking about what your kids are eating and what your parents are eating. At this point in our lives, pretty much everything we're worrying about with our kids is also something we're worrying about with our parents.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

And nobody's eating enough protein, apparently. Nobody's eating enough protein.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

I'm not eating enough protein. I'm certainly not. And I I need to because I'm probably in peri menopause, apparently. I'm always telling my parents to move more and they don't listen. It's just everything that I'm thinking about with my kids, I'm thinking about with them too. And I think that is the defining piece of being in the sandwich generation. Like we've said, even if you're not changing and feeding your parent, just like we've come to a place where we recognize that like researching summer camps is the work of parenting, researching something for your parent to do on a Saturday so that they're not sitting in front of the TV all day long or like encouraging them to go and see a friend. Yeah. That's the work of daughtering or sunning.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

Like respond to this email. We're always in the background of everyone else's life. Yeah. We're just background on all the time. We're in standby mode all the time. We can never be off from everyone around us, our partners, our kids, our parents, we're always in standby mode in case someone needs something. I mean, I I have a really hard time putting my phone in Do Not Disturb. Same.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

I got a massage like a year ago and I couldn't enjoy it because I was away from my phone for an hour and I'm like, what if my kids need me? What if my parents need me? Honestly, what if my parents need me was more of what was on my mind than what if my kids need me.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Yeah, it is anxiety and it's absolutely addiction to my phone. But also we're managing everything. Yeah. So it's easy to say, like, just unplug that's like everybody talking about having a 90, giving their kids a 90s summer. Are the moms getting a 90s motherhood?

SPEAKER_02 32:09

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

No. Like that's not part of it, is it? Because I would love a 90s motherhood for a summer.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

I would love to give my kids a 90s childhood, but unfortunately, the backdrop is gone. And no amount of me like telling them to go play outside is gonna change that because there are still there's no blockbuster.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

I can't they take them to Blockbuster on a Friday night. And uh, they're not just gonna go play in someone's basement without me. Like, we just know too much for that to be a thing now.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Yeah, they're not having a sleepover. Yeah, no, they can't get dropped off at your house until I ask you about your policy on guns and medication.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Do you have a pool and what's the protection from how and like, yeah, it seems like we're crazy, except for we've all been online and this is the information that is good and bad. I'm not sorry that I asked those questions. I'm definitely that mom who asks those questions. If I don't know you, my kid is not going to your house. Maybe that means that my kids are missing out on a 90s summer. But not too much now. Should we do any kind of rapid fire?

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Yes. I have a you're prepared. Prepared a few questions for you. If you think about nostalgic TV characters, I'm gonna feed you a bunch of social media archetypes, and I want you to tell me who comes to mind first. Social media mom archetypes. Type A mom. And it doesn't have to be people who were moms when we were watching them on TV. Any character, yeah. It can be any character that we can now be a type A mom. Definitely dependable.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

I said Blair Waldorf.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Oh yeah. That's a good one.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Type B mom. Kimmy Gibler. Oh yeah. I was thinking Rachel Green. Yeah. Type C mom.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

I should have saved Kimmy Gibler. You're chaos. Type C mom. I feel like we didn't even see that sort of I'm saying Lizzie Maguire. Huh. Interesting. Why? Wait, tell me more about why you think Lizzie's a type C mom.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

Because she was a little bit chaotic, but not that chaotic, like Kimmy Gibler. And I I feel like Lizzie Maguire would crush it on social media, first of all. I think she would be like totally that relatable mom influencer who makes that cute type C mom content and it's actually feel good because she's just so cute and so like not controversial. I think she would be that that person.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

That's a yeah, I wouldn't. I don't think I would have ever thought that on my own, but yeah, I totally see that. The butter mom.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Remind me what that is. So butter mom is kind of the opposite of the almond mom. She is like, she cooks from scratch, she uses real butter, she's baking cookies and she's making pies, and she's just like that, you know, I'm in the kitchen with the apron mom, but she's not gonna give you an eating disorder.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Oh, you know who I would say? It Myra from Family Matters. Do you remember her? I never watched Family Matters. Oh my gosh, it was so good. I I would still watch it again today. But she was, I think I can see her being that mom. Also, can we just say all of these mom labels? Just being a real mom. Like Yeah, I think that this was this the fact that we know different types of moms, like almond mom, crunchy moms, like all of all of these moms. Can we just be moms? I mean, just like I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

I mean, departmentalized, right? Is like, where do you fall? Who are you? Where do you land?

SPEAKER_00 35:36

What box do we put you in? It's not it's not even about your preferences in terms of parenting, it's about your resources. It has nothing to do with how you want to parent. It's just about your resources and the time you have and the the climate that's shaping you. It's not like you look at a chart and you're like, I'm gonna be a crunchy mom. I'm gonna be a grenade. Like, no, this is.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

But I think at this point it kind of is. I think, especially for the moms who are coming up behind us, I do think it it has become like that. Like, am I gonna be the black SUV mom or the white SUV mom? And I'm going to make sure all of my actions and all of my approaches align with that. I've ruined the rapid fire. This is not rapid fire. Who do you think would be the almond mom?

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Also to Penga.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Interesting. I actually think she gives more butter mom to me, but I said for almond mom, I said who did you say for almond mom? Becky from Full House. Do you remember the episode where she's like, just eat grilled chicken and lean fish and steamed vegetables? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Because only the women could talk to DJ about her body image issues in which she fed the dog half a sandwich and spent too long on a on a stationary bike, so now she has an eating disorder. But it's fixed. This is not funny, but it's really not. And it really messed so many of us up.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Listen, as much as we are nostalgic for the 90s, it wasn't all good.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

It was absolutely not all good. We got so many mixed messages about how life was supposed to be, especially because we were not counteracted with the intentional parenting that. And I I I do think that's a really important piece of the social media part of this, is that many of us are parenting intentionally and understanding the effects that what we do and say to our kids has, which is beautiful. And I'm really glad about that. And not every single thing, every single thing is not going to leave a lasting impact on our kids. Not every interaction is gonna be this big core memory as we're saying.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

All right. I feel like we've unpacked everything there is to say about everything.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

I mean, there's gonna be so many more things to talk about relating to the media piece. Yeah. Um but if there's anything you guys were especially interested in hearing us talk about more, let us know.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Okay. Well, thanks for listening.