Stay ConnectedWelcome to Model Minority Moms where we reckon with the myth of success in career, family and life. We’re Jeanette, Kate, and Susan – Harvard classmates and Asian American working moms who get real about the pressures of fitting in while standing out.
Model Minority Moms is a project of Real Life Media LLC.
Copyright: © Kate Wang, Susan Lieu, Jeanette Park
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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Let us explain. No, we haven't bought a red convertible, had an affair or gotten a divorce. But reaching this stage of life, what we once looked as a somewhat baffling, even humorous, stereotype of modern American life... makes a little more sense to us. Or at least we feel like we could see how someone landed there. We take a deep-dive into what we think counts as a mid-life crisis, what we think causes it and how maybe, just maybe, we can channel it into more productive ends. Or to justify that basement pottery studio that you've been dreaming of :)
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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As we turn the corner into mid-life, we're talking about the questions we're wrestling with at 40 - Am I living a "successful" life? How am I doing with my complicated family of origin? What the f is going on with my body? Midlife crises, anyone?
In the first of our series, we tackle a big question: what does it mean to live, and die, successfully? It leads us to some weird places - Gene Hackman, Bryan Johnson who wants to live forever, Lady Gaga and how "success", contentment and happiness might be closer than we think.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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Kindergarten…you think it's far away until it's not. All of a sudden you're faced with a myriad of decisions that you have to research. You may also experience intense anxiety as you worry if you're setting your kid on the right path. What makes for a good elementary school anyway? Is it a warm environment? Diversity? Test scores? How selective it is? Bilingual? Convenient? A PTA vibe that jives? Is this really about your kid or about you?
We're going through it now and whether it's pretty or not, we give you the real talk on where we are landing on the big K-question.
For some of us, we always knew we wanted kids, no matter what. For others, that was never in our vision for life but nearing the end of the biological clock, we're revisiting that question. For still others, we may have started one way but ended up another because of relationships, biology, logistics, costs, better understanding of what parenthood entails, the-world-is-ending-feeling, etc.
In this episode, we bring back Justine Ang Fonte because she and her partner went through a long journey of trying to decide if they wanted to try to become parents or not. But beyond just the normal internal wrestling, she kind of took it to the nth degree by building massive spreadsheets and even going through a structured decision-making process with a psychotherapist who specializes in helping people make this decision.
If you or someone you know is wrestling with this decision, this episode is for you. If you're already a parent and thinking about more, this may be helpful too.
For many millennials, sex education was about awkwardly passing around a banana with a condom on it in PE class or carrying around a sack of flour pretending it was a baby. We want to do it better for our kids, OBVIOUSLY, but... do we really know how to do it better?
We are excited to welcome Justine Ang Fonte on the show. She was featured in the New York Times about her work bringing sex ed to New York City's private schools (as well as the controversy she encountered with some parents). She is also the voice and author of the Audible Original How to Talk to Your Kids about Sex. Drawing on her 15 years of experience teaching kids about safety, affirmation and joy in their emotional and physical relationships, she offers some tangible tips for parents who are dreading "the talk" (psst - one tip is that it actually turns out it's not just one big talk, it's a series of mini talks over time).
In true MMM fashion, we are releasing our look-back conversation on releasing our 100th episode... on episode 108 X_X. We talk about what keeps us going with the show (psst - its not the big bucks), what our partners think of it, what topics we've considered but decided NOT to do, what our listeners have shared with us, our favorite episodes (it's so hard to choose!), our controversial name, what our pie-in-the-sky dreams for the show would be, and more. Hope you enjoy and sending <3 <3 <3
Trying to keep career momentum as a mom of young kids can be really tough. On top of all the demands of being a parent, wife, and daughter, going hard at the office can start to feel like a slog. Moreover, being a parent and approaching middle life can surface a lot of questions about your priorities and your choices, including about work. And of course, all your baggage from being a women, Asian-American, child of immigrants is still showing up at the office and not helping you get to the next level in your career.
We discuss these issues and more with Minal Mehta, the founder of the executive coaching firm The Ineffable Leader. Educated at Stanford and HBS, Minal worked as a product leader across several leading tech companies such as Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and others. She was born and raised in India and Singapore and is a mother of two tweens in the Bay Area. In her words, Minal’s mission is "to empower leaders who’ve achieved external success from a place of exhaustion and burnout to achieve even greater success from a place of flow."
We're so excited to share with you our first collab with another podcast - Add to Cart! Susan was a guest on the show to discuss her book, her love of Costco and her grumblings about the rising price of matcha lattes :)
Listen to the trifecta of the Asian Aunties as Susan Lieu joins SuChin Pak and Kulap Vilaysack on this episode of Add to Cart. Susan talks about writing her first memoir, “The Manicurist’s Daughter,” which chronicles her search for answers after losing her mother to a botched tummy tuck. It’s an emotionally raw conversation that will leave you hopeful that generational healing is just as real as the trauma. Then, the Aunties dive into her cart, which is truly an ode to Costco and its generous return policy. Susan also shares her solution to inflating matcha latte prices.
Lemonada has teamed up with Apple Books to bring you the Lemonada Book Club. “The Manicurist’s Daughter” by Susan Lieu is our audiobook of the month! Listen here.
To hear more episodes, follow Add to Cart wherever you get your podcasts or head to: https://lemonada.lnk.to/atcfd
If you've been with your partner for awhile now, you may realize that there are certain conflict patterns that happen over and over. He does something that pisses you off, you bring it up, he does X, you do Y, so on and so on, over and over again. Or vice versa :p Or you guys are just so tired from parenthood, work, continued disappointment or dealing with things from the past that you have just settled into a pattern of burying feelings. Have you ever considered marriage counseling? :/
On today's show, we talk to Jessica Sather who is a Filipina-American mom and licensed marriage and family therapist trained in the Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) modality. We talk through the common issues she sees in couples and the EFT approach in trying to get a little deeper into the reasons underlying our conflict patterns and reformulate them for (hopefully) a better relationship with our partner where we feel mutually seen, understood and supported.
To contact Jessica, please see her website: www.mabuhaytherapy.com She is a fully-licensed MA, LMFT therapist who can see patients in Washington State and California.
Do you remember watching MTV as a teenager and noticing that one of the hosts was kick-ass Asian-American young woman named Suchin Pak? Well, guess what - WE HAVE HER ON OUR SHOW TODAY and we go deep on her unexpected path to MTV, what it was like to work that job for over a decade, what life is like for her now as a mother of two, and the winding journey she's been on with her husband who has been battling a severe and mysterious auto immune disease for the past several years. It's a doozy of a conversation and we hope that you enjoy it and that it brings back memories of seeing Suchin rocking so many cute outfits on MTV in the early aughts.
To get more about Suchin, check out:
- Add to Cart podcast, which she co-hosts with Kulap Vilaysack who we also recently had on the show
- IG: @suchinpak
- Men's Health article penned by Suchin's husband Mike Bender about his health journey
Do you ever wonder why it's so hard for you or your partner to stick to a budget? Or organize your finances? Or even talk about money? Do you read tons of financial advice but struggle to actually do it? Or do you tend to stick your head in the sand and hope it will all work out?
In this episode (our first *video* episode!), we talk to Shang Saavedra, the author of the recently released book called Wealth Is A Mindset. She has coached over 200 households into a dignified retirement and taught over 8,000 individuals on how to achieve financial freedom through her courses. We talk about how our upbringing and our mental health are so intrinsically tied in with how we manage (or don't manage) our finances.
To learn more about Shang's work, please check out the following:
- Book: Wealth Is A Mindset
- IG: @savemycents
- savemycents.com
We talk a lot about mental health and we thought it was about time to bring on a real mental health expert on the show, preferably someone who also has personal familiarity with the Asian American experience. What do you think of psychiatric medication? Do you ever see any Asian-Americans who are our parents generation (and what is THAT like???) What do your parents think about what you do? How do you deal with the stigma of mental health treatment in the Asian community?
We discussed these questions and more with Grace Liu, a Stanford-trained psychiatrist and Chinese-American mom. She brought a very thoughtful and frank take on all of these questions and we loved having her on the show! If you are interested in following up with her after listening to the episode, she can be found here:
Have you ever wondered why the term "hysterectomy" sounds so similar to the word "hysteria"? Well it turns out it's because the ancient Greeks thought that the root of all of emotional troubles for women were due to a uterus that just wandered around the woman's body if it wasn't kept busy with enough sex and pregnancies. Tune into this hysterical (pun intended) interview with author and OBGYN expert Dr. Karen Tang as we discuss her new book "It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (but were never told)". We ask her about the OBGYN questions we still don't have answers to, the challenges facing women's health research and care, and why all of us know the word for penis in our mother tongue but none of us know the word for vagina. To learn more about Dr. Karen Tang's work:
- Get her book at Amazon
- Follow her on IG @karentangmd
Kulap Vilaysack is a bit of a unicorn. She's a Laotian-American actress, comedian and show creator who has directed and produced hit shows like Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. She even has a real DC Comics superhero inspired by her, Katharsis! She also created a documentary about her family called Origin Story, where she tells the story of her father who she learned wasn't her biological dad when she was 14, her complicated mother who fled Laos as a refugee, and her biological dad whom she does not remember.
She's also a mom who went through a long and arduous fertility journey. If you can't tell yet, she's a bad-ass 2nd generation Asian-American woman who tells it like it is. We are so honored to have her on the show to talk about what it was like to face her family's secrets and how that has connected to her journey of becoming a mother herself.
To learn more about Kulap and follow her work, check out the following:
- Watch Origin Story on Amazon Prime
- Check out the Add to Cart podcast, where Kulap and her co-host give their "subversive take on consumerism."
If you weren't worried about climate change already, don't worry! Becoming parents will surely increase your climate change anxiety. From the very real concern of leaving behind a burning and unlivable planet to your children, to the very real concerns now of protecting your young ones from excessive heat, wildfire smoke, floods and storms, parenthood is **guaranteed** to give you greater climate anxiety.
But in all seriousness, we break down this very real, very concerning issue through the lens of parenthood. We also recorded this episode back in the summer so... there might be some summer references.. sorry/ not sorry?
Most of our listeners (and us) grew up in a pretty traditional education system. There were lessons, there was a lot of practice, there were tests and if you got a A, someone asked why it wasn't an A+. For many of us, it also was layered with a ton of stress and constant anxiety. It was all supposed to lead one day to admission to a top tier college and then a rather hazy happily-ever-after. Now raising our own kids, we are often conflicted on how to approach education - how much should we care about test scores? Should we just let kids do whatever they want because it should be all kid-led? What if they don't learn how to read or do math?
We break it down with Susan Yao, a veteran educator, school leader, mom of two, and founder of the Vermont Village School, an independent experimental school centered around the UnSchooling movement. We get real about the benefits and concerns of traditional and less-traditional schooling approaches, and what questions parents can ask themselves to form an educational approach that best serves their family.
WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Bridgerton (seasons 1, 2 and 3), Queen Charlotte, the Kdrama Crash Landing on you and C-Drama The Double.
In this episode, we're talking about the Golden Hour - the time between roughly 9pm-10pm, when the kids finally have fallen asleep, the house is decently cleaned up, and you finally have a little time to do something that *you* want to do. Sometimes, a great TV show is just the ticket - something that's interesting but also a little fantasy. We bring you what we've been loving watching lately and break down our thoughts for each show.
Tells children "doe" means "small deer" (that's wrong). Bops sideview mirror from minivan for the nth time. Cannot remember garage code that you've had for the last two years. Having more trouble finding phone than usual. Maybe thinking about putting kids' cereal in a timed pet food dispenser. Maybe.
If you can relate at all, this episode is for you mom/ parent of young children. If you're just confused, join the club and listen anyway - it's a funny episode, albeit scattered. (See! We remembered the word 'albeit' - we are definitely not having early dementia).
We humbly present to you, our mini-dad-bootcamp in podcast episode form. If you're thinking about being a dad, listen to it now. If you're already a dad, listen to it before it's too late. If you're a woman in a heterosexual relationship, send this to your partner. What we say isn't easy but it's real, and we hope our 15+ years of experience parenting in the context of a marriage can help you, your marriage and your family survive (dare we say even thrive) in the throes of raising little human beings.
It's your birthday, it's your birthday, we're going to partay like it's your birthday... ok maybe it looks a little different when you're nearing 40 with young kids. In this episode, we hash out our feelings around our birthdays - the expectations, the disappointments, the meltdowns we're not proud of and Susan's dream birthday... a FUN-eral.
In the part two of this interview, we dive deeper with Peipei into the impact that her mental health journey has had on her relationship with her partner and her children, and ways she has tried to rebuild from the toll that her struggles have taken on her relationships.
In this episode, we sit down with Peipei Fiore, a former television executive and mom to three girls, who was forced to confront her long-running anxiety and depression when she unexpectedly became a mother and wife. She's also an OG MMM listener who was gracious enough to share her story with us. In this two-part series (second part to be released in two weeks), we dive deep into Peipei's journey of wrestling with eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and the pressures of keeping up in school, work and social dynamics, and the milestone events along the way that finally convinced her to seek the help she needed to get better.
Kat Lieu is the mastermind behind the popular Subtle Asian Baking IG/FB account as well as the cookbooks Modern Asian Baking and Modern Asian Kitchen. While her food content has found a rapidly growing audience going from zero to over 150k+ followers in just a few years, she actually spent the first decade of her adult life in a totally different career path that was chosen for her by her parents. Her career and family journey has been full of twists and turns and all the while, she kept her passion for food, writing and storytelling alive. We were inspired by Kat's philosophy of living a creative life, and how that affects her parenting outlook as well. Bonus cooking tips included!
You can find Kat's cookbooks and IG for further inspo here:
Need we say more? Most moms - we daresay every mom - is familiar with burnout. How can you not be when you are meeting the demands of helpless, emotionally unregulated littles 24/7 for years? Especially when people around you often seem to minimize, not notice and/or actively criticize what can feel like an endless trudging sacrificing juggle. Here in true MMM fashion, we feel our feels and put out some real talk about why it is, does it need to be this way and what can we do to may be make it better.
When us first-gen Asian-Americans become moms, one journey in particular starts looming in the horizon: introducing our kids to our mother country, with all its foods, sounds, customs. When is the right age? What should we expect? Should we bring a car seat? Is it even possible to take your young child to another country when normal daily life can feel like a struggle? Well, Kate has just taken her girls to Asia for the first time and she's here to give us the good and the ugly of it all.
Another totally under-discussed issue in popular culture: what happens to love between spouses after the kids come. In rom coms, it's always happily ever after right? The end. Talk about over-simplification. The truth is that your relationship with your partner WILL change after kids - for better or for worse. In this episode, we talk about our expectations vs the reality of relationship with your spouse after you have kids, and our thoughts on how to get through parenthood with your relationship stronger, not destroyed.
Being female, Asian-American, and a parent - that's a triple whammy right there for a bad case of the considerate-ness. Do you struggle with feeling like you are considerate but it's not reciprocated, resulting in rage, burnout, and disappointment? Do you feel like you are playing by rules of considerateness that you alone are playing? Are you right or is everyone else? If these questions resonate, this episode is for you.
Our listeners are in Seattle, of course, but also heavily in SF, LA, New York, DC area... the usual suspects. When we talk to people in these cities and beyond, the topic of moving to Seattle often crops up. People are Seattle-curious, we often find. So... is the Emerald City all that it's reputed to be? We take you beyond the Space Needle and give you an insider's look at what's it really like to live in the Pacific Northwest's largest city.
In this final episode of our mini-series on divorce, we interview Diem Chi Nguyen, a Seattle-area attorney who focuses on family and divorce law. She walks us through the basics of the divorce process - how long it takes, how much it costs, different paths to take, how custody of children are handled, how assets and debts are split - peppered with anonymized stories of how things can turn really weird, emotional, irrational in these often highly-charged life events.
In this very special episode, we interview an anonymous guest about her experience going through a divorce - what led to the separation, how she and her ex handled things with their kids, all the extremely messy and hard ups and downs of the process and how she survived it all. Whether you are considering a divorce, want to support a friend going through divorce, or just want to hear a real-life, in-depth accounting of navigating the entire process, this episode is for women everywhere.
No, the other D-word (guess who wrote that one! :)
In the first episode of this mini-series, we are talking about divorce. Hurtling into middle age, divorce seems to be popping up, silently but more frequently around us. We talk about the how we saw divorce in our own families growing up and how we think about divorce now. When do we work through it? When is enough enough? Where are our bright lines and non-negotiables? And what about the kiddos? Even though we are all thankful that divorce is a more viable option for many women (and men) in terrible relationships, deciding to get divorced and actually getting divorced seems anything but straightforward.
Since we were little girls, we got all kinds of messages - both direct and otherwise - about how we looked and how we should look. Even as full-grown women, those messages still echo loudly in our minds. We've had to evolve - sometimes painfully - to grow our confidence and embrace our appearance. As with so many issues, becoming moms has forced us to re-examine what we say to ourselves and our children about appearances, standards of beauty, and how to reconcile it all.
Does any other mom experience blinding anger on the regular? Anyone? Anyone? Ok, so no one right? Then this episode is for us (and for you if you know what we're talking about). We break down why the heck do we get SO mad sometimes, is it normal, is it bad and how to handle it when the anger pressure is building and we're about to blow.
In this very special episode, we bring you an exclusive interview with Susan Lieu, the author of the forthcoming book, the Manicurist's Daughter, available in bookstores on March 12th and available for pre-ordering now! It is already getting rave reviews from top outlets, including Publisher Weekly, Kirkus, Elle and Goodreads! Of course, if you listen to our podcast, you will know that Susan is also the co-host of our podcast and that's why we have this amazing opportunity to talk to her in an intimate and familiar forum. We are so so proud of this milestone for Susan and it's been an honor for us (Kate and Jeanette) to walk with her as she has been going through this 3-year journey of meeting her literary agent through her shows, writing a book proposal, selling it to Celadon/MacMillan, and writing draft after draft of her book to get it ready for the world.
If you are a fan of our pod, please please place your pre-order today and enjoy the tidbits about the book in this episode.
Sending hugs,
Jeanette, Kate and Susan
As a mom, it can feel like you're running 24/7 and sometimes even that's not enough. If you can afford it or have people in your life who are available, many moms need help - help with childcare, help with cleaning, help with meals, help with laundry... heck, sometimes just an extra pair of hands to go get towels while your child is throwing up is invaluable. But getting help - whether paid or unpaid - is often more complicated and loaded than is generally acknowledged. Here, we deliver our honest take on getting help that we all desperately need.
Taking forever to put on shoes. Leaving toys on the floor. Refusing to come to dinner. Fighting with siblings. Sneaking a piece of forbidden candy. When the inevitable need for discipline crops up with our children, how do we react? As is frequently the case, so much of it is informed by how we ourselves were parented. Join us for a discussion of how we were (or weren't) disciplined growing up, how we are (trying) to approach discipline with our own children, and the struggle to reprogram our brains to react in a better way when the inevitable misbehaving happens.
What makes a good husband, a good boyfriend, can be a little different from what makes a good baby daddy, in our opinion. Combining our 15 years of child-rearing experience (don't ask us how we calculated that!), we share our highly non-expert opinion on what's important in a baby daddy.
Bloody, leaky, crampy, moody, inconvenient, embarrassing, painful... yet it's what allows us to create new human life. Yes, we are talking about our periods - what has been our relationship to Aunt Flo throughout our childhood, our teenage years, our young adulthood, trying to get pregnant, being pregnant, post-partum, up until now. How have we interacted with our parents, friends, partners, society at large and now, our kids with this messy yet vital part of life?
Invites, venue, food, cake, activities, goody bags. Presents or no presents? Invite whole class or just a select few? What's the budget for a three-year-old's birthday? Yup, we're talking about the thing that at a certain point in your parenthood journey, starts taking over your social calendar - kids' birthdays.
Providing better for our children than we had is a no-brainer. But how much is too much when it comes to the endless types of activities we can sign up for? How much of our intention to provide exposure and opportunities is more of a projection of our own insecurities? Are we talking about T-Ball or are we talking about trauma? And what’s even the point of all of these activities? All that juice and more.
If you were an overachieving child/ young adult, does it ever leave you entirely? What are the costs (and benefits) of being a perpetual overachiever? Do we secretly want our kids to overachieve though we're trying our best to present a chill demeanor? We bring the honest talk at a live recording at our beloved alma mater and poster child of overachievement, Harvard.
Ok, we are going there. You’re a working mom who is highly competent, driven, ambitious, well-credentialed and… you’re going to switch to a more flexible, lower-intensity career? Whaaat? It's a common and significant shift among many moms we know, but glossed over with shrugs, shame and a little chip on the shoulder. In MMM style, we unpack all the feelings around choosing to downshift your career as the lead parent–without gaslighting you.
Language is loaded. Preserving our mother tongue with ourselves and the decision (and labor!) of passing it down to our children is super complicated. We talk about what it means to feel like a “cultural orphan,” our aspirations for our kids when we were first pregnant, and the honest reality of how it’s going.
How do we actually know if a school is a “good” school for our kids? How do we actually get a spot? (spoiler: banana bread yields mixed results). How to manage transitions from a situation you and your kids know to something that is new? What if we feel like we made a mistake moving our kids to the new school at the first dropoff :( Here are the real stories and the real feels behind the happy first-day-of-school pics on IG.
So yeeeah… we were talking and we are back together. Nope, not with our exes, with our show. Why we disbanded, why we came back, and unpacking how restarting a thing is twisted in the fear of failure. Plus, a live recording opportunity in October!
Yep, you read that right. After publishing nearly 70 episodes over the last 2 years, we are wrapping up our show with one final episode. Tune in to hear how we came to this decision and our parting words to our dear listeners.
The show is ending but you can still keep track of us. Feel free to follow us at:
Jeanette: Instagram @acanary0 and website https://acanary.com
Susan: Instagram @susanlieu and website https://www.susanlieu.me/
Kate: Instagram @wonderfulkatewang and website https://wonderfulkatewang.substack.com
Monosyllabic answers. Slammed doors. Huge messes. No, we're not talking about toddlers. We are talking about the other "t" word... teenagers. Believe it or not, like it or not, our chubby little angels will turn into angsty, horny, grumpy teenagers one day. We talk to Dr. Emily Kline, author of "The School of Hard Talks: How to Have Real Conversations with your (Almost Grown) Kids," about an important new book she's just written about the mindset and tools that parents should embrace to have maximal influence on their older children.
If you liked the interview, you can order the book here: https://a.co/d/7TWaw3F
Are there any vacations any more post-kids? Or are there only trips now - a thing you do where you're not in your own home, where you don't have all the things that you've bought to make life a little easier, where your kids will sleep and eat less well? Do you need a vacation from your vacation? In this episode, Kate, Susan and Jeanette talk about the mindset shifts that have helped us enjoy 'vacations' more and how we think about them now with young children.
Do you miss those days when you could breeze into the airport 45 minutes prior to departure in your Uber and carry-on-only luggage? With diapers, pack n plays, strollers, wagons and more traveling with kids is different now, to say the least. In this episode, we share our learnings and tips of making traveling with kids a little less stressful (with the usual healthy dose of humor and occasional f-bomb :)
Some of us may have heard about the au pair program, considered it or even participated as a host family. Is it a Mary-Poppins-dream-come-true or is the reality having a foreign teenager live in your house, driving your car and not being of much help? Susan, Jeanette and Kate bring our honest perspectives of participating in the au pair program as well as channeling some of the anonymous au pair stories we've received on the DL over the years.
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 our golden years.
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 listener's question about supporting parents in their old age. What would it actually look like? If your parents have enough or not enough savings to retire? If your relationship with your parents is/ isn't complicated? In the usual MMM fashion, we get into it.
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 potentially triggering family gatherings? In this episode, we discuss Susan’s urgent parent dilemma: what do you tell your almost-two-year-old about Santa? Do you say he's real? If you say he exists, is that a lie? Do you take him to see an Asian Santa? Is that a healthy alternative to the mainstream white Santas or is that like, as Jeanette puts it, serving up a bulgogi sandwich?
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 experienced body shaming by her mother growing up, and who is seeing her mom say similarly damaging comments to her young daughters. Argh, sadly we could relate on too many levels. Listen in as we commiserate and share our own thoughts on what's helped navigate similar experiences.
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 dysfunction we see in the US today. We talk to our guest Mónica Guzmán who is a mom, journalist, author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, and a Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels which is the largest nonprofit in the US tackling political polarization at the grassroots level.
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 responded in a way we wished we didn't. But... we started talking about how our parents did/didn't deal with rupture with us as children and that got really real.
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 the emotional/cultural/mental hang-ups that make a challenging situation even harder.
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 this strange and confusing universe of infant feeding.
'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 un-trained? Did we damage our kids for life by sleep training them? Will Susan ever have a decent night of sleep ever again? Join us as we try to answer these questions and more with clarity and hilarity that only comes from being sleep deprived for months.
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, which can lead to disappointment, resentment and dare we say occasional rage? Join us on this episode where we get explicit about the unspoken rules of the last bite rule, and other things to know about eating with Asian ladies
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 spend an average of 1 hour per day just making and cleaning up the food, which doesn't include grocery shopping, meal planning and cleaning out the fridge. If you have a full-time job, that's 12% of your outside-of-home work, non-sleeping hours. So realistically, how does this work? The three of us lay out the current realities of managing the feeding of our families, day in and day out.
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 relate to our spouse, our own ambitions and the cultural context. How do we navigate all of this? Listen in as we unpack our love/frustration, joy/tiredness, and devotion/confusion around that central pillar of Asian-American life: food.
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 personalities to this sometimes uncomfortable but important question of what being American means to each of us.
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 podcast episode, we seek to reclaim that in our own way... by creating a space for three smart but supportive friends to talk openly about this critical, timely and sensitive issue.
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 her relationship to her son. We got to know her as the creator of The Blue Suit, a limited-series podcast from Seattle's NPR station KUOW that features the stories of Asian Americans through the lens of every day items. Join us for this thoughtful conversation about her choice to choose the creative professional path, how her life experiences have shaped her work, and what makes her choose the work she does every day.
For more on The Blue Suit podcast and Shin Yu Pai, check out these links:
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 and how parenthood and career have influenced each other. Listen for some great inspiration for anyone's career journey.
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.
In part 2 of "What do your parents think of your career?" Susan shares her reflections on how her parents and family have shaped her career decisions. Susan says that her dad was a "tiger dad in a foreign land" - can you immediately relate? Have no clue what she's talking about? Tune in to hear how Susan has tried to keep her performative streak alive while trying to keep her parents happy.
Ah parents... Some of them have strong opinions about your career but have no clue about the actual reality you face. Some of them might have a clue but offer no support. And for some reason, they always seem to say the wrong thing about what you do. If this isn't your experience, we are happy for you. For those of us who feel a small stab to the heart whenever our parents say something about our work, this episode is for you. In this episode, Kate and Jeanette share how their parents have influenced the career choices they've made so far, as well as the good things and the struggles that have come with that experience.
From human right NGO work in Vietnam, to starting a boutique chocolate company, to working as a consultant to the world's largest tech firms, to producing a national one-woman show about her mom, Susan's career has taken many twists and turns. Through it all, she has asked herself the questions 'Who am I and what am I supposed to be doing in this world?" In this episode, Susan shares the many hilarious and often moving stories of her career journey as only Susan can.
Forget the mid-life crisis. For many in our generation, we've been going through major career questioning since our mid-twenties. What do we want to do 'when we grow up'? What are we supposed to do with our lives? Careers take up so much mindspace and time in our lives but it can still feel like a struggle. In this first episode of a series on careers, Jeanette and Kate talk through their sometimes winding career paths, what they learned and where they are now.
So many more unmarried women in their 30s and 40s are choosing to become a mother without a partner, but it still feels taboo to discuss. You might be one of these women yourself and if not, you probably have a friend who is considering this. We are so honored to have our friend Tamar on our show this week, to walk us through her decision to become a single mom by choice with so much openness and honesty.
Mom Judgement is the cherry on top of the huge mountain of responsibilities we have to manage as parents. Why is there so much Mom Judgement in the world? From family? From friends? From society? Even other... moms?? In this episode, we discuss times when we felt Mom Judgement in our lives and try to get to the bottom of why it exists and what we can do about it.
What's your sugar, screens, salt policy for your kid? Like Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until your kid finds the snack bag or walks into a birthday party. We talk through our approaches and how they work out in real life.
Kate, Susan and Jeanette walk down memory lane and reassess their dating histories (including that time that Susan thought she was going to marry a cult leader). Predictably, we all had really different dating experiences but we all learned some common lessons that we wished we knew when we were starting out.
How did parenthood change your perspective on your career? Did it force you to buckle down so that you could provide the kind of life you wanted for your kids? Pull back so that you could have more time and energy for them? Switch tracks so that you could work on something that inspires you and may be also your kids someday? In this episode, we talk about how becoming moms changed (or didn't change) the way we approach our work.
It's an open secret - getting reliable, high-quality childcare as a working mom/dad is tenuous at the best. Even with full-time care, managing a professional career that often demands more than 8 hours a day with kids and home responsibilities is really hard. At its worst, you're paying a whole lot of money for childcare while you're trying to juggle work and a sick toddler staying home. In this episode, we talk openly about the elephant in the room for working parents - the reality of childcare.
Perhaps our #1 fan, Jake joins us on our podcast to talk about why he loves our show (even if it sometimes makes him a bit uncomfortable), what he really thought when Jeanette gave him a book about bombs for Valentine's Day in college, and what it's like to be a white guy living with your Korean mother-in-law.
Tell-all about how to get your kid into Harvard…JUST KIDDING. Some people think a Harvard degree guarantees you wealth but it’s a double-edged sword, especially for children of immigrants.
We dish about applying, getting in, and how the degree sprinkled some fairy dust on our professional and personal lives. We cast off the rose-tinted lenses and give you our unfiltered take on the H-bomb.
Doctor, Entrepreneur, Dad - Nirav, Kate's husband wears many hats. In our interview we found that he has worn many different hats in his life. He shares about his journey growing up as an only child of Indian immigrants in small town America, dropping out of medical school to try photography, marrying a type A Chinese-American and becoming a girl dad.
Sometimes it’s easier to let friendships fade away when there’s conflict or just put up with dysfunction without saying anything. It’s easier that way to avoid the drama. And tbh, we almost broke up ourselves–but then we fought to keep us together. It was superrr scary, but we did it. Because…we’re supposed to be a role model to our kids right?
Sometimes it’s easier to let friendships fade away when there’s conflict or just put up with dysfunction without saying anything. It’s easier that way to avoid the drama. And tbh, we almost broke up ourselves–but then we fought to keep us together. It was superrr scary, but we did it. Because…we’re supposed to be a role model to our kids right? And also, we wanted to keep doing the podcast together.
By listener request: we tackle two giant elephants that loooove to populate Asian American lives: shame and guilt. Both are seemingly built into many traditional cultures, and we have all been traumatized by these feelings. As adults responsible for creating a healthy emotional environment for our own kids, we discuss why we experience these emotions, the impact on our kids, whether they are valuable, and how to let them go when they don't serve us.
Based on listener feedback, we did it! We wrangled our husbands to be on the show. In this episode, Susan’s husband Marvin reveals what he thinks of the podcast, supporting Susan’s dream to become an artist, and what it’s like to be married to your complete opposite. Meet Marvin: a Canadian- American-Hong Kong-Korean who doesn’t feel like an outsider and loves to mountaineer.
Navigating the emotional rollercoaster and hairy logistics of COVID has taken over our life at times. In this episode, we talk about the challenges of life as a working mom during COVID, how it's different now vs the beginning of the pandemic and what we hope the future will hold.
Whether or not to have a second kid is a looming decision for many of us. The “2 Under 2” plan seems good in theory but a nightmare in practice. Does 1 plus 1 equal 2? 1.5? 11?
What do you get your kids, nieces and nephews who might already have a ton of stuff? Are you stressed by everyone else’s Instagram-perfect holiday decorations that appear like magic right after Thanksgiving, when you’re still lying around with your pants unbuttoned? On this episode, we discuss our real thoughts about and experience of the winter holidays, and provide our own survival tips. Hint: at least one of us is a grinch and at least one of us loves Christmas.
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 potentially triggering family gatherings? In this episode, we discuss Susan’s urgent parent dilemma: what do you tell your almost-two-year-old about Santa? Do you say he's real? If you say he exists, is that a lie? Do you take him to see an Asian Santa? Is that a healthy alternative to the mainstream white Santas or is that like, as Jeanette puts it, serving up a bulgogi sandwich?
Our families of origin are often the source of the deepest love and the deepest hurt. Even in our mid-thirties, we struggle to break the cycle of hurtful interactions with those closest to us. With kids, figuring out some way to do it better seems even more urgent. We're told to set boundaries by our therapists, but how do you do that with an older generation that doesn't know what boundaries mean? Spoiler: We haven't found any magic bullets but we share some ideas that have helped us better manage our relationships with family.
As young girls, we all struggled with body image issues or eating disorders, so how did pregnancy and postpartum affect how we see our physical self? How have conflicting messages about beauty and body image from our Asian elders and the influence of pop culture influenced how our self-confidence? And how can we develop a more grounded sense of our own beauty and pass that on to our mixed-race kids?
Hate it or love it, "tiger parenting" has become a byword for Asian-American moms in the last decade. We share our opinions on what we think tiger parenting actually is, and how it differs from other parenting philosophies, like "free-range parenting". We dig into how racial and socio-economic dynamics impact people's perceptions of parenting philosophies, and how we struggle to define what it means for our children to "succeed".
Link to the resources mentioned in this episode are here: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-6-free-range-tiger-parenting-is-our-thing/
Confessional time - we go into the deep recesses of our childhood to evaluate how safe we felt with our parents, and whether we were emotionally attached to our parents in a healthy way. We talk about attachment theory, which says that our childhood relationships with our parents impact our whole lives. Does being poorly attached as a child ourselves doom us to a poor attachment relationship with our kids?
Link to resources we mention in the episode: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-5-so-whats-your-attachment-style/
Motherhood can be really hard. Like tired-to-the-bone/cry-in-the-bathroom/scream-into-my-pillow hard. So, why have kids at all? It wasn't our dream-since-forever to have kids, and yet, now that we're moms, we can't imagine not having our children. We share stories about how parenting our kids teaches us to live fully in the present, gives us moments of matchless delight, pushes us to grow, and allows us to experience a love we've never known - cliche but absolutely true.
Fertility can be kind of a paradox - sometimes it seems like getting pregnant is so easy (it even happens by accident!) but sometimes despite our very best efforts, it can take a ton of time, money, and our emotional and physical energy with no guarantee of a baby. With more and more women choosing to delay motherhood to make time for careers and other interests, complex fertility journeys are becoming more common. We share our own fertility journeys and talk to Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of M.M.LaFleur, a company she founded in 2013 to help women take the work out of dressing for work. Sarah previously talked to Marie Claire's Editor-in-Chief Sally Holmes about her multi-year fertility journey and discusses it with us on this episode.
Our striving for achievement keeps us functioning most of the time but we've all experienced times when we've approached meltdowns. In this episode, we talk about our breaking points that led us to therapy, the stigma of meds, and the critical role our partners play in our well-being. We share ways we get unstuck, fears of how our kids will perceive our low periods, and ways to befriend the inner critic when it all seems too much. We may never *not* feel overwhelmed and anxious, but we have come up with small steps that help get us moving again.
We reference a lot of books and other tools that we've found helpful - we've provided more details here: https://modelminoritymoms.com/season-2-episode-3-mental-health-im-fine-until-im-not-fine/
The obsession about putting our kids in the "right" school so they can have the "best" outcomes can put us in dangerous territory real fast (with a nerve-wracking spreadsheet!). Our immigrant parents wanted better for us so is it wrong to want better for our kids? And what is the end game in all of this? Early childhood education can heavily influence a kid's future so the pressure is on to choose the "best" school.
In this episode, we share what we're thinking about as our kiddos start formal schooling in a few years. What environment will make them the most resilient, secure in their non-white identities, and not be hypocritical of our social justice values? How do we decide what is "good" for our child without too much navel gazing and expensive tuition? And perhaps most difficult and most important, how do we balance being supportive parents without pushing them to the edge?
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Do you have an episode suggestion or want to partner with us? Send us a short note at modelminoritymoms@gmail.comhools
Our embarrassing turn-our-cheeks-pink first name snafu and how we landed on our podcast name today.
Cautiously unpacking anti-blackness with our Asian parents, microaggressions we get as Asian women, and remembering the Atlanta Spa Shootings. We're tired of being Othered -- within our families and in the world.
We scream into a pillow about the invisible labor of running the household, the impossible standards of instagram moms, and the confusion of being a good feminist. The social contract of women is messy with a capital M.
Deconstructing our white guy tendencies, hating our hyphenated selves, and taking on the extra labor of raising our kids with complicated identities. Not to mention in-laws. We love our multicultural family, but this shit is hard.
As immigrant kids, we're really triggered by money. TBH, it controls us sometimes. We rethink our relationship with money to add real value, mental sanity, and metaphorical bagel chips to our lives.
Cult leaders and Chinese literary fantasies are no match for the real work (and endearing moments) of long-term partnership.
Kiddo, follow your passion, but don't live in my basement. Figuring out how to teach grit with privilege when our parenting philosophy is light years from where we came from.
The insurmountable envy, loneliness and exhaustion as a newborn parent.
Our deliveries were as different as our personalities: Kate prepared for it like a PSAT National Merit Scholar, Jeanette was on laughing gas, and Susan took selfies with her placenta.
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