let's talk about parenting, baby

the natural sequel to 'let's talk about sex baby' get it?? + the top comments from this week's essay on parents and phones

Well golly gee whizzickers here we are once again on what I am being told in the USA is a Friday which, believe it or rot, was originally spelled Frydai.

I’m okay thank you for masking.

Surely I’ll delete a lot of this before posting. No way it’ll make it into the final cut that goes out to millions.

Anyway

The response to this week’s essay (above) has been nothing short of very tall actually.

No seriously tho everything people have been sharing and commenting has made my heart grow big like almost the normal size of a normal guy and for this I thank you.

Welcome to the Parents’ Lounge

Feels like a ton of BAT readers are veterans of the parenting game while others are n00bies or parent-curious or whatever, and I was thinking it’d be cool to just create a lil space for people to share and ask questions. Sooo….for our weekly MAYA / YAMA (me ask you anything / you ask me anything) thread today, I’d like to continue the discussion and open things up to a more broad Parents’ Lounge vibe.

TO BE CLEAR: I’m not asking people to give ‘parenting tips’ as much as share their own hard earned wisdom and thoughts and whatever. And also allow people to ask questions like for example I have one about Screen Time that I’d like to ask and probably will in the comments to get other people’s thoughts on it.

But much like eating a reese’s peanut butter cup, there’s no wrong way to parent (except for like the obvious cases in both, like you can’t stick a reese’s pb cup up your butt and then take it out and and give it to your friend and say ‘here have this’ that’s NOT okay just like there are plenty of not okay ways to parent probably). But that’s not what we’re talking about!

God why is this caveat so long it doesn’t need to be y’all are smart lil stinkers we’re gonna be okay!

Is this a bad idea? Surely! But I think given the emotional intelligentsia of the BATheads, we’ll pull it off.

Some prompts:

1. What’s something you wish you could tell your younger parent self?

2. Would you do anything differently?

3. What are you most freaked out about right now as a parent (or grandparent)?

4. What are some dumb fun games / things to do to pass the time with these little idiot blobs of chunk and dimple?

5. what questions am I not asking?

6. What else do you wanna talk about i dont care what it is let’s do it.

Whoa look at the comments

I’d also like to highlight the top comments from the essay so far - these were each amazing and beautiful in their own way and hey look at that, two of them specifically talk about becoming / being paid subscribers that’s so funny I had no idea that was the case too late to remove now.

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Some prompts:

Ok back to the real show here are the prompts again!

1. What’s something you wish you could tell your younger parent self?

2. Would you do anything differently?

3. What are you most freaked out about right now as a parent (or grandparent)?

4. What are some dumb fun games / things to do to pass the time with these little idiot blobs of chunk and dimple?

5. what questions am I not asking?

6. What else do you wanna talk about i dont care what it is let’s do it.