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PODCAST

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

Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson

When you"re a parent, every day brings a "fresh hell" to deal with. In other words, there"s always something. Think of us as your funny mom friends who are here to remind you: you"re not alone, and it won"t always be this hard. We"re Amy Wilson and Margaret Ables, both busy moms of three kids, but with completely different parenting styles. Margaret is a laid-back to the max;Amy never met a spreadsheet or an organizational system she didn"t like. In each episode of "What Fresh Hell" we offer lots of

kids & family parenting

All Episodes

48:36

Randomest Claims to Fame

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/21

What Fresh Hell Podcast is going on tour across the Northeast US this fall! Join us for a live version of the podcast and bring all your mom friends. We can’t wait to go back on the road! https://bit.ly/whatfreshhelltourWe asked our listeners for their randomest, most tenuous claims to fame, and as usual, they delivered. Whether it's first place in a two-person pie-eating contest, or dating someone just four degrees removed from the Real Housewives of New Jersey, here are their stories. Join our

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47:06

DEEP DIVE: Rule Breaker Or Rule Follower: Which Are You?

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/19

This month's Deep Dive series is about flouting parenting rules and advice that don't work for us. Listen to a Spotify playlist of all the episodes in the series here. Are you a rule breaker or a rule follower? Are you married to your opposite? We're both rule followers, and when one builds a life with someone who sees the "NO DOGS IN THE LAKE" sign as an invitation to let the golden retriever go for a swim, one is caught between two bad choices: swallow the horrible anxiety that others might think

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37:51

BEST OF: Judith Warner on What Grownups Get Wrong...

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/16

Judith Warner’s book AND THEN THEY STOPPED TALKING TO ME: MAKING SENSE OF MIDDLE SCHOOL investigates what can be a truly painful period in any adolescent's life. Warner explains that our "personal fable" is deeply affected by our own experiences during that developmental period, even if our memories may rely on flawed or incomplete information.That matters because it can affect how we parent our tweens as they enter the middle school stage themselves. Are parents sometimes inadvertently reinforcing

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46:53

Helping Kids Face Their Fears

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/14

Every kid is afraid of something. Sometimes their fears make sense; sometimes their extreme anxiety over every ant that crosses their path can seem a little excessive. But our job isn't to make sure our kids never see ants; our job is to help them learn to navigate those feelings on their own.In this episode, Amy and Margaret discuss: Why kids facing their fears is an appropriate part of their emotional development Why just our presence, when they're feeling fear, can be a great support How more

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50:15

DEEP DIVE: Advice We Totally Hate

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/12

This month's Deep Dive series is about setting aside the parenting rules and advice that just don't work for us. Listen to a Spotify playlist of all the episodes in the series here. As soon as you become a mother, unsolicited advice-givers are everywhere, telling you to “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Or “it gets easier.” Or “enjoy every moment.” Out of all the advice (parenting and otherwise) that we and our listeners have ever received, here is a selection of the very worst. What Fresh Hell Podcast

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34:55

Fresh Take: Amy Betters-Midtvedt on What No One Tells...

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/09

You hear that parenting teens is a wild ride. But as Amy Betters-Midtvedt, author of the new book YOU'LL MAKE IT (AND THEY WILL TOO), says, it can also be baffling:“So much weirdness comes when they go back-and-forth between staying their old selves and becoming their new ones. Conflict will suddenly flow out of nowhere over nothing.” But you'll make it. And they will too. Amy Betters-Midtvedt is a Today Parenting contributing author with more than a million readers and twenty-five years of

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48:35

Comparing Without Despairing

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/07

It's easy to compare our parenting—often as measured by our kids' achievements—with their peers' achievements. As in, how other parents might be doing it better.This week, we're talking parenting tips for resisting “mompetition”— and how we can use comparison to create healthy perspectives instead of "compare and despair." Amy and Margaret discuss: Why competition is a biological imperative The effects of social media and other societal forces on parenting How to know if we're putting too much

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45:06

DEEP DIVE: Admitting Things Aren't Perfect

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/05

This month, we're doing a deep dive series into letting things go—arguments, unattainable standards, you name it! You can find the playlist with all of the episodes in the series here. It's hard to admit things aren't perfect. It's especially hard for moms. Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett described three types of perfectionism in the 1990s: self-directed (I must be a size 2), others-directed (do that piano exercise again until you get it right), and "socially mediated" perfectionism,

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27:23

Fresh Take: Debra Hendrickson on What We Can Do About...

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/08/02

We know climate change affects not only our children's health but their future. So what can we as individuals do?Debra Hendrickson is a board-certified pediatrician practicing in Reno, Nevada, and a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. She is also the author of the author of the new book THE AIR THEY BREATHE: A PEDIATRICIAN ON THE FRONT LINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE. In this interview, Margaret and Debra discuss: How climate change is affecting the health of

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48:02

Sibling Spacing: Close Together or Far Apart?

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/31

What are the best things about having closely spaced siblings? What about farther apart? Siblings' closeness, amount of conflict, and relationships as adults are all affected by the age differences between them.In this episode, the listeners with closely spaced children tell us why that has worked for them (constant playmates) and not (constant bickering), while those with kids with larger age differences point to the unexpected connections that can still result. Here are links to some of the

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49:58

DEEP DIVE: How To Stop Having The Same Fight

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/29

This month, we're doing a deep dive series into letting things go—arguments, unattainable standards, you name it! You can find the playlist with all of the episodes in the series here. Having the same fight doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. But it is totally annoying. In this episode we discuss the modes of negativity at play when we repeat the same conflicts- and what we can do to break the cycle, whether it’s our partners or kids. Conflict may be unavoidable- but it can be at least a

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46:37

Fresh Take: Erin and Stephen Mitchell, "Too Tired To...

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/26

Do you and your partner find yourselves talking past each other when arguing? Erin and Stephen Mitchell, authors of the new book TOO TIRED TO FIGHT, discuss how parenting can impact relationships (including their own!) and strategies to manage conflict and stay connected. Erin and Stephen Mitchell are the cofounders of Couples Counseling for Parents, a company focused on providing access to research-informed, psychologically sound online education for couples. Amy, Erin, and Stephen discuss: Why

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44:12

Are We Helping or Are We Helicoptering?

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/24

Is "helicopter parenting" actually a definable thing? Or is it just what we call parents who are being annoying? Overparenting is something that it's easy to be judgey about in other people, and a lot harder to identify in ourselves. Parents have to help. It's what we're there for. So how do we manage without micromanaging?In this episode, we discuss: The conditions that trigger parental anxiety (probably the true cause of overattentive parenting) Allowing struggles and disappointments to be part

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43:51

DEEP DIVE: Let's Stop Caring What People Think

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/22

This month, we're doing a deep dive series into letting things go—arguments, unattainable standards, you name it! You can find the playlist with all of the episodes in the series here. What if we didn't let other people's judgments change our game plans—as women, as mothers, and as humans? We're wired to pay attention to what other people think. There's a reason those judgments can be painful. Are there ways we can break free and care less? In this episode Amy and Margaret discuss... Why our

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49:37

Fresh Take: Emily Cherkin on Tech-Intentional Parenting

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/19

Is screen use a daily battle of wills in your house? Emily Cherkin, author of the new book "THE SCREENTIME SOLUTION: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family," explains how to model a healthy relationship with tech for our kids.Emily Cherkin, MEd., consults with parents, offers school presentations and professional development training, and brings her tech-intentional approach to as many people as possible. Emily and Margaret discuss: What "tech-intentional" really means and how

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47:02

When Mom Leaves Town

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/17

Does it seem like just as much work to leave your kids behind for a couple of days as not to go in the first place? Do your instructions for family operational procedures during your absence run more than five pages? Getting away from our kids—for work, for the weekend, for a friend’s 40th—isn’t just good for us. It’s also an opportunity for our kids to realize that “only Mommy” stuff they pull when we’re around is not as necessary as they might have thought. Margaret and Amy discuss: Why our kids

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42:36

DEEP DIVE: Dropping the Rope

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/15

This month, we're doing a deep dive series into letting things go—arguments, unattainable standards, you name it! You can find the playlist with all of the episodes in the series here. When you're locked in a battle of tug-o-war it can be extremely exhausting to keep up the fight. But there is a solution: dropping the rope. It may seem counterintuitive, but when you're in the middle of a conflict you've had many times before—when you're fighting for something that seems very important, or at least

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36:11

Fresh Take: Jo Piazza

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/12

Jo Piazza wears a lot of hats: author, podcast host, award-winning journalist, mom. In this episode we talk about them all!We're big fans of her sexy thriller THE SICILIAN INHERITANCE and her podcast Under the Influence (now part of Adalyst Media!) Jo's interests are wide-ranging and so is this conversation. We cover: How Jo's experience solving a century-old murder in her family inspired her book Why Jo and Amy are apparently cousins Jo's advice for parents who are just entering the world of

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45:32

BEST OF: Super-Awesome Mom Hacks

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/10

Time for some easy wins! Here of some of our (and our listeners') favorite hacks fornaptime diapers laundry kitchen sibling squabbles and General Sanity Preservation. This stuff really works! The Lazy Genius (Kendra Adachi's) principle: Decide Once What Fresh Hell Podcast is going on tour across the Northeast US this fall! Join us for a live version of the podcast and bring all your mom friends. We can’t wait to go back on the road! https://bit.ly/whatfreshhelltour We love the sponsors that

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45:44

Keeping Our Families' Traditions

What Fresh Hell: Parenting, Relationships, and Making... ·

2024/07/08

Danielle Friedman's recent New York Times article says it all: "The Constant Work to Keep a Family Connected Has a Name." That work is kinkeeping.Sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal defined kinkeeping as "someone who works at keeping family members in touch with one another." Every lucky extended family has a kinkeeper, and yes, it's usually a woman. Perhaps that's why the work of kinkeeping can be dismissed as silly and unimportant, even by the same people who reap its benefits. Margaret and Amy

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