Elimination communication. Child-led toileting. Pullups. Incentives. Potty training books. Pee everywhere. Poop smeared on walls. Kid and parent meltdown. What are the visions floating around in your head when you think of potty training? As Susan approaches potty training time, Jeanette and Kate talk through their experiences (the good and the fails) and give a real-life perspective on potty training your child in the modern age.

What our parents expect of us in their retirement is one thing. What we expect of our kids in our own retirement is another... or is it? In the second part of this episode, we ponder what we expect of our kids in our own retirement. Financial help? Emotional companionship? Occasional Popeye chicken drop-off at an aging hippie commune? (ok that last part only applies to Susan). Join us as we take a moment to look farther out into the future and share how we think our kids might play a role in...

It's one of the main markers of Asian filial piety - supporting your parents in their old age. Except historically, women shouldered most of that burden and were also shut out from working outside the home. Except historically, very few people lived for years and decades with severe chronic illnesses. Except historically, no one had much of a choice. And except historically, we were expected to expect it from our old children.  In this episode of our FOR REAL THO series, we ponder a...

This was our Episode #18 from Christmas last year that was a surprise hit. We recorded it on a lark and it ended up being one of the most popular episodes of 2021. Reposting it for the enjoyment of fans new and old! Having kids brings a whole slew of questions, stresses, and joys around the end of year holidays. What do you actually believe in (Santa, Jesus, Buddha, any others???) and want to tell your kids? What kind of holiday memories do you want to make with them? How do you handle...

A lot of listeners have asked us about our mental health journeys - what prompted us to seek mental therapy, how we dealt with the stigma of seeking therapy, how we found a therapist that was a good fit. In this next episode of FOR REAL THO, we answer one listener's question about our mental health journeys, how we think it's helped us and our thoughts on finding the right one for you.

We are SO excited to introduce a new series of episodes called FOR REAL THO where we discuss questions and topics that our listeners have submitted to us through our website. We will periodically release these short episodes where we give you our straight-talk about what we think about your question. Have a question of your own? Submit it through our website modelminoritymoms.com. Our first FOR REAL THO episode, we talk through a submission by Carol, a first-gen Vietnamese-American who...

There's a lot of talk today amongst millennials about cutting ties with the people who hurt you, bring you down, disagree with you - our show wades into that territory quite often as well. And while that route might be the wiser one at times, the fact is that we will have disagreements at some point with almost everyone in our lives and we can't cut ties with all of them. Not only will that hurt us and our families, but arguably it has contributed significantly to the deep political...

It will happen to almost everyone. One day, you will react to your kids' behavior in a way that you aren't proud of. What does that look like and how do you handle the aftermath? Well, it probably is heavily influenced by how your parents dealt with (or didn't deal with) the ruptures in your relationship with them. We started this episode intending to just have a frank conversation about dealing with challenging behavior from our children, and how we try to repair the relationship if we...

Fighting over toys/parental attention/who gets to talk/who picks the next song or TV show. Crying over mean words and hurts, real and perceived. Competition with your sibling to be the smarter/cuter/funnier/stronger/more interesting one. On the other hand, we melt when our offspring get along with each other. Welcome to the world of parenting siblings!!! 

When you have your first kid, your discretionary time goes from 100 pre-kid to 50. When you have a second, it goes from 50 to 5 (but it feels like -50). When the options go from "do you want to take our kid or go for a run?" to "do you want to take our 2 year old to sing-along or watch our infant?", the challenges of life (and sanity) management increase to a whole new level. Join Kate, Susan and Jeanette as we share how we try to manage life after having the second child, and of course, all...

We're only half-kidding. There's no actual PhD in infant feeding that you can get (that we are aware of). But after having learned about the intricacies of latches, lip ties, tongue ties, lipase, craniosacral therapy, breast milk banks, pumps, flanges, let-down, expression, just to name a few topics in infant feeding... don't you think we deserve at least a master's degree? :) Send this episode to an expecting friend or someone who recently gave birth just so that they don't feel alone in...

'Nap when your baby is napping' they say to exhausted moms... but what if this is your second baby and you have a toddler running around 24x7? What if your baby is sleeping fine but your toddler is suddenly experiencing a sleep 'regression'? Or God help you if both of your children are waking up multiple times a night.  With Kate five months into being a mom of two, we re-visit the sleep question... do we still believe in sleep training? What if our child was sleep trained but is now...

Thinking about having a second kid? Or already have more than one? (or you have none but just curious?) A newly minted mom-of-two, Kate shares how her experience with her second baby has been so different from the first... and how a lot of common advice for transitioning to life with two children just hasn't worked thus far :( Take it as inspiration, birth control, commiseration -- these stories are the unvarnished, hard and hilarious truths about becoming a mom of two.

In the final episode of our food series, we try to get to the bottom of this question: Why does 'fusion' food make us so mad? Is it because it's bad? Is it because it's ignorant? Not authentic? Not respectful? Is it ever good? Isn't all food fusion anyway?? Susan, Kate and Jeanette have a frank conversation about why 'fusion' food provokes so many strong feelings.

As Asian-American first-generation women, we were marinated in all the unspoken rules of food throughout our childhoods. And even though almost nothing was taught explicitly, those food rules are still very much alive and well within us, kicking us to do certain things in a certain way, holding others to certain expectations, taking us on guilt trips when we opt out. We feel this doubly as we operate in a world where many others don't share (or even know about) those unspoken expectations,...

Did you know that you have to feed kids (and adults) every day? Multiple times a day, it turns out. And each meal made at home involves some sort of plan, grocery shopping, prep (washing, chopping, measuring, mixing), cooking and clean up. Though it might have been a hobby or an afterthought in pre-kid life, the logistics around feeding the family becomes a whole system of tasks in and of itself post-kids. 75% of American women report being their household's primary food preparer and they...

We are starting an episode series on food and looking at it through the lens of our families, Asian-American culture, our situation as working moms, gender and everything else. For all three of us, we grew up with food as our 'sixth love language'. But it also came loaded with its own baggage of gender expectations and time costs. And now we're operating in a completely different context than our parents' and grandparents' generation in terms of how we want to spend our time, how we want to...

What does "American" mean in "Asian-American"? Does it mean legal status, shared culture, shared language, shared benefits, shared commitment and sacrifice? How does that differ for our parents' generation vs ours? How do we reconcile that with the fact that despite being Americans, we as people of Asian descent still face discrimination and more recently even violence at the hands of other Americans? Take a listen as Susan, Jeanette and Kate all bring their different perspectives and...

So how do you really really feel about abortion? And do you have anywhere you can talk about it? With Roe v Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, we dig into where we stand with respect to abortion rights and how we got there. Wherever you are on the issue, we can all agree that it's important, especially for women. At the same time, our cultural and political environment feels super-polarized right now, eliminating spaces to voice different views in a civil and safe space. In this...

For those of us coming from families with deep dysfunction and/or trauma, we often choose different ways of coping - achievement, power, money, control, even addiction. Anything but despair right? For poet, writer and artist Shin Yu Pai, she chose the path of self-expression through language as a way of making sense of her past, present and future. Her experience of growing up in 1980s Riverside, California as the child of Taiwanese immigrants has profoundly shaped her projects, as well as...

Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired? Between COVID and flus/colds/random GI virus raging through our communities, it can feel like moms just can't catch a break. When your kid is sick home from care, how do you manage to care for them while keeping a toehold at work and keeping everything running in the household? We get real about what life looks like for working mamas when their little ones get sick.

Capping off our series on career decisions as Asian Americans, working parents, immigrant kids and products of elite schools, we talk about finding meaning in our careers and how that has evolved from our teens into our thirties. What does meaning in a career even mean? Our discussion took us to a somewhat unexpected destination that perhaps will resonate with you too.

Matchmaker, co-founder of a magazine for Asian-American teenage girls, co-founder of the Gold House collective (a leading AAPI organization for advancing media representation and commercial success), former management consultant, former chief of staff to Tony Hsieh the founder of Zappos, now a venture capitalist with Andreessen Horowitz... Maggie's career has been interesting and impressive to say the least. On this episode, she shares her career management philosophy with typical MMM candor...

What's money got to do with your career? Is it everything, nothing, somewhere in between? How does the level of compensation influence how you feel about your job? What was your parents' message to you? What's your message to your kids? We tackle these questions and more in our episode on career and money, and our experiences trying to navigate these sometimes treacherous and confusing waters.

What's your strategy for managing career decisions with your spouse? Do you take turns prioritizing one person's career over the other? Do each of you have a defined role? What does money have to do with it? How do you factor in risk/passion/other contributions to the household? In this episode, we talk about how we have managed - or not! :( - career decisions with our spouses and what we've learned so far.