What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood | Parenting Tips From Funny Moms

Toddlers are the great equalizer: no matter how strong you think you are, the short fat dictator has what it takes to break you.If you're in the throes of toddlerhood, we salute you. Knowing that it won't last forever can help. Knowing that tantrums are a biological imperative also helps. Still, it's a good thing their adorable faces and fat little dimpled hands activate pleasure and reward regions in literally every human brain, cause they BETTER be cute, is what we're saying.In this episode, we commiserate and troubleshoot life with toddlers with guest Clint Edwards, author of Silence is a Scary Sound: And Other Stories on Living Through the Terrible Twos and Threes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each week Amy or Margaret answers a listener's most pressing question.Today Amy answers the question, "How can I deal with this fussy baby?"Submit your parenting dilemmas to questions@whatfreshhellpodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Take our listener survey! Here's the link: https://bit.ly/whatfreshhellsurveyThe best way to handle our children’s anger is to equip them with the tools to handle it themselves. You don’t have to smother children's emotions in order to calm them down; as your kids get older, you really can't. But you don’t need to throw up your hands and accommodate their anger and everything that comes with it, either.We talk at length in this episode about an excellent book for kids on this topic: “What To Do When Your Temper Flares: A Kid’s Guide To Overcoming Problems With Anger.”by Dawn Huebner. The book is aimed at grade-schoolers, but there’s much to learn in here for kids of all ages (and their parents)! Whether your kid is 4 or 14, this episode will help you stand outside their storms and get your calm house back a little sooner. If you’d like a transcript of this episode, you can find it here: https://www.whatfreshhellpodcast.com/2020/01/angermanagementtranscript/,If you’d like to do a deep-dive on anger management for parents, check out our “Sometimes We Lose It” episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each week Margaret or Amy tackles a listener's most pressing question.This week Margaret answers the question, "How can I get my kids to care about things I think are important?"Submit your questions at questions@whatfreshhellpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of our very favorite things to say on this podcast, “back to one," is a term you'll hear dozens of times a day on any television or film set. It means resetting everything about a scene-- the cameras, the actors, the extras, the dollar bill that gets handed over, the coffee cup that gets picked up-- in order to do another take of that same scene. There's never any sense of disappointment or whose-fault-was-it judgment involved in doing a "back to one." It's just a reset so you can try it all again.We apply "back to one" to all areas of our parenting lives that need a reset, whether it's twice a month or once every ninety seconds (take that deep, cleansing breath). And as we look to a new decade, we're making this new year's goals "back to ones" as well. We're skipping the part where we feel bad that we didn't read all the books we said we would last year. We're just saying "back to one" and resetting that intention for the coming year.Here are what our listeners told us their "back to ones" for the new year are, plus a few of our own. We'll be resetting a lot, including what it means to have resolutions and goals for the new year in the first place. A reset is not a failure. It’s just what happens next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each week Margaret or Amy tackles a listener's most pressing question.This week Amy answers the question, "How can we teach our three-year-old son that he has to share his toys with his soon-to-crawl baby sister?"Amy mentions this article by Sarah S. MacLaughlin for Zero to Three- it's full of great suggestions on this topic:http://https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/1964-helping-young-children-with-sharingSubmit your questions at questions@whatfreshhellpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each week Amy or Margaret tackles a listener's most pressing question.This week Margaret answers, "How do I handle splitting time between my parents and my husband's parents at the holidays?"Submit your questions to info@whatfreshhellpodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Experts say happiness is often purer in the anticipation of an event. The reality can be a little more messy. And at no time of year is that sentiment more true than during the holiday season.We asked our listeners to tell us their holiday worsts, and in this episode we discuss them all, plus a few of our own. Hams glazed with norovirus! Toddlers sleeping in airports! And of course, everyone's favorite Yuletide treat: The Vomiting Christmas Baby!And yet those are the holidays we remember best. Which makes it (almost) all worth it.Think your holiday season has been a little crazy? Hold our eggnog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FOMO, or the “fear of missing out,” was a term coined around 2011 to describe the feeling you get when you see friends on social media posting about lives just a little more exciting than your own. Behavioral researcher Dan Ariely calls it "the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds, set off by the fear of regret."It's a feeling definitely made worse by the constant ability we all have to check in on what other people are doing. According to a 2016 survey, three-quarters of parents use Facebook; 61% of those parents check it several times a day. "We get online to check on what everyone else is doing on a wonderful summer afternoon," writer Susan Narjala explains, "and it takes about ten seconds to feel worse about ourselves and our lives."But even when we succeed in unplugging, FOMO can rear its head in real life. And once we become parents, the FOMO we feel on our kids' behalf-- the party invites that don't come, the Disney World vacations we can't afford right now-- can seriously interfere with our happiness.In this episode, we discuss when we've felt FOMO in our own lives, why we tend to feel more envious of our neighbor's house than, say, Beyoncé's, and how to stop the compare-and-despair when it all gets to be a little too much.Here are links to research and other writing on the topic that we discuss in this episode:Jason Goldman for Scientific American: Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver WinnersSusan Narjala for Motherly: Five Ways To FOMO-Proof Your ParentingJenny Evans for Scary Mommy: We Have FOMO For Our Children, And We Need To Get Over It ASAPJenna Wortham for The New York Times: Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It's Your Facebook Wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you respond to the idea of "practicing" gratitude with a heavy dose of nope?In this episode we discuss the science behind the gratitude>>happiness>>more gratitude>>more happiness loop.Studies have proven that regularly expressing gratitude actually changes the structures of our brains to make us healthier and happier, thanks to something called "positive recall bias." In other words, if you start looking out for yellow cars, you'll suddenly see them wherever you go.Wouldn't we all be better off living in a happier, yellowier-car world? And what if getting to that point was 1) not that hard and 2) kind of fun also?Our guest this week is Nancy Davis Kho, author of the new book The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Nancy's book is a lovely meditation on gratitude, and also a how-to guide to starting your own thank-you-letter-writing project. We loved this book!If you'd like to hear more about raising grateful kids , we've got an episode for that too! Just click the link- or if you're not seeing a link, go to bit.ly/WFHgratefulkids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices