75 years ago, parents faced a deadly threat to their children which, today, most people never have to think about. Lisa and Aaron Miller dive behind the scenes of the March of Dimes, an effort fueled by ordinary people who collectively changed the world and saved millions of lives. Bethany Brady Spalding shares the movement in her community that stemmed from a conversation with her kindergartener about candy. Lisa identifies six different types of helpers (because who doesn't love a personality ...
May 07, 2024•32 min•Season 2024Ep. 12
Whether our kids are two or twenty-two, conflict is a normal part of family life. How do we make sure our relationships of love grow through these inevitable clashes, especially for kids? Lisa, Marlie, Kylie, and Brandalee explore the way conflict shows up in different stages of life, and in various scenarios-- in blended families, between spouses when kids are listening in, and with kids in the middle of those developmentally appropriate (but still awkward) transitions into higher autonomy and ...
May 03, 2024•27 min
Have you ever avoided eye contact with someone holding a cardboard sign? Or felt a twinge as you skipped a YouTube ad asking for charitable donations? Help is needed everywhere, and good people want to help. But those good intentions can quickly turn to paralysis, overwhelm, and a lingering sense of shame for not "doing more." Meanwhile, experts in helping (that's a real thing!) know that making the world a better place isn't compatible with shame. Lisa tours The Other Side Academy to learn how ...
Apr 30, 2024•29 min•Season 2024Ep. 11
Do you ever see your teenager making bad choices, and you have to grit your teeth to keep from saying something? We don’t want to be helicopter moms, but we also don’t want our kids to ruin their lives. As parents, it can be a tricky balance to let our kids fail and learn from their mistakes while keeping them out of serious trouble. Lisa joins Lindsay Clark, Amy Sunderland, and Cassie Barger for a Council of Moms about when to let our children mess up and when to intervene.
Mar 29, 2024•26 min
Lisa sits down with Scott Martin, who shares his journey redefining himself and finding purpose after a dramatic illness reduced his mobility and upended his life. They discuss the courage to start over, what resilience looks like, and how to learn from various kinds of new beginnings in life.
Mar 26, 2024•24 min•Season 2024Ep. 10
How do I get my spouse to help out around the house more? How do I manage my kids better? The answer is connection! Join Lisa and guests Heather Frazier, Lavonne Wells, and Melanie Call as they discuss how to better connect with your children and spouse, as well as how to take personal responsibility for that connection.
Mar 22, 2024•26 min
Join Lisa for a candid conversation about sacrifice, gratitude, and reshaping family visions when life's path takes unexpected turns. Our special guests Sanjay and Rahul from the Area 51 podcast share a laughter-filled perspective on navigating the challenges of immigration.
Mar 19, 2024•29 min•Season 2024Ep. 9
The eternal, unavoidable struggle of parenting: after planning out a week of meals, making sure they're nutritious, finding foods that the kids will like, grocery shopping, and mustering the energy every day to actually make those meals, the end of the week rolls around and we have to start all over again. How do we keep up? How do we keep pushing the boulder of feeding a family up the hill week after week, especially if we don't particularly love cooking in the first place? In this episode of T...
Mar 15, 2024•27 min
Entering a marriage with kids on one or both sides can be a scary and difficult thing. How does one go about it anyway? Turns out a little bit of support, communication, and understanding can go a long way. In this episode Brittney Phillips shares her story of how she blended her family following her marriage, and all the pains, complexities, and joys that came with it.
Mar 12, 2024•35 min•Season 2024Ep. 8
For a mom who decides they are ready to go back to work after being home with the kids for a long time, there can be a lot of complex emotions involved with that transition. They might think, will this hurt my relationship with my kids? Will they think I'm a bad mom? Am I being selfish? In this episode of The Lisa Show's Council of Moms, Lisa sits down with friends and fellow moms Clarissa Greenwall, Lindsay Clark, and Alison Faulkner to discuss what experiences and advice they have for people i...
Mar 08, 2024•27 min
After a devastating loss, starting over might be the last thing we want to do. What does it even mean to “start over” after the death of a loved one? When Dr. Sonya Coley Pitchford lost her 34-year-old daughter, Tanieka, to a sudden heart attack, her whole life changed. In this episode, Dr. Pitchford shares how she managed to keep going and eventually find hope after a crushing loss.
Mar 05, 2024•31 min•Season 2024Ep. 7
Moving to a new place presents both new opportunities and new challenges. How can we set our kids up to thrive during this time of transition? In this episode of the Lisa Show’s Council of Moms, Lisa is joined by Cree Taylor, Alison Faulkoner, and Anna Ek for a conversation about helping children through a big move.
Mar 01, 2024•28 min
In the midst of the 2008 housing crisis, KariAnn Parker and her husband made the hard decision to look their financial situation in the face. This decision kicked off a years-long process of evaluating their priorities and making hard choices as a family. KariAnn Parker joins Lisa for a conversation about sacrifice, gratitude, and redefining your vision for your family when things don’t go according to plan.
Feb 27, 2024•35 min•Season 2024Ep. 6
When financial struggle comes, there are few conversations more difficult to have than having to tell your kids about how their life is going to have to change in order to make ends meet. As parents we don't want our kids to have to bear the burdens of adult life, but we also don't want them to be surprised or hurt when we aren't able to afford things that we used to. In this episode of the Lisa Show's Council of Moms, Lisa talks with friends and moms Anna Ek, Trina Celeste, and Cree Taylor abou...
Feb 23, 2024•25 min
For many women, there is no version of starting over more difficult and overwhelming than unexpected childlessness. Many plan on being parents, and even base their identity around that plan. So when unforeseen circumstances make having children impossible, they have to start over--not just with their life plans, but with how they see themselves. In this episode of the Lisa Show's series on Starting Over, Lisa talks with Sarah Roberts about her journey.
Feb 20, 2024•35 min•Season 2024Ep. 5
As a parent, it can feel like every waking moment is dedicated to taking care of the people who need our help. There's always another diaper change, or soccer practice, or choir recital, or meal to make, and there doesn't seem to be any time left over for ourselves. So how can we make and keep friendships with anyone other than our partner? In this episode of the Council of Moms, Lisa is joined by friends and fellow moms Liv Mendoza, Whitney Call, and Allison Dayton to talk about their experienc...
Feb 16, 2024•28 min
For many full-time parents, starting a family may have cut short plans to finish a degree or pursue the career we'd always thought about. Or maybe, we realize decades later that the career we chose isn't what we want to do anymore. Whatever the reason, going back to school later in life can be intimidating, unknown, and downright expensive. So what does starting over look like as a non-conventional student? In this episode of The Lisa Show' series on Starting Over, Lisa talks with Morag Kawasaki...
Feb 13, 2024•28 min•Season 2024Ep. 4
We're constantly surrounded by horrible, heartbreaking news from around the world. There is so much war and cruelty that it's hard to avoid. But for our kids, their often hearing about these things without being old enough to truly understand what they're hearing about. And not to mention everything else a kid is dealing with while trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be. So as parents, how to we broach these complicated conversations? And how much should we say? In this episod...
Feb 09, 2024•24 min
When Ashlynn Mitchell’s husband came to her and said he wanted a divorce, her whole life turned upside down. Suddenly her goals, dreams, and hopes for the future changed, and she didn’t know if she could go on alone. Ashlynn shares how reevaluating her life goals, rebuilding trust in herself, and nourishing self-love helped her along on her long journey of reconnecting with herself after divorce.
Feb 06, 2024•25 min•Season 2024Ep. 3
As parents it's not uncommon that we spend so much time focusing on taking care of the kids, putting food on the table, and making sure life doesn't fall apart at the seams that we don't find time to work on our own social circles. So what do we do when the kids are becoming independent and we have a little more free time, but it's been years since we tried making a new friend? In this episode of The Lisa Show's Council of Moms, Lisa talks with Heather Frazier, Melanie Call, and Whitney Call abo...
Feb 02, 2024•29 min
In November 2008, Lara Love Hardin was arrested in her suburban home. Her habit of pretending to have a perfect life had led to an opioid addiction, which had imploded her life completely. Now, she’s a bestselling author who has worked with Oprah and the Dalai Lama—and most importantly, she no longer has to pretend. In this episode, Lara shares her story of starting over after drug addiction.
Jan 30, 2024•36 min•Season 2024Ep. 2
In this week's Council of Moms, Lisa is joined by Lavonne Wells, Shari Lyon, and Brittney Phillips to answer a listener-submitted question: What do you do when your teenager doesn't seem to care about school, and you can tell they're heading down a difficult path?
Jan 26, 2024•25 min
Whether we like it or not, almost all of us will find ourselves in the position of wanting to start looking for love at some point in our lives. Maybe it's after a summer fling as teenagers, or maybe it's after the end of a decades-long marriage. For Shannon Jenkins, host of the Starting Over podcast, it was after deciding to leave a toxic marriage with her young son. In this first episode of The Lisa Show's new series on Starting Over, Lisa talks to Shannon about how so much of starting over fo...
Jan 23, 2024•29 min•Season 2024Ep. 1
In this holiday edition of the Council of Moms, Lisa sits down with Kacy Faulconer, Gina James, and Katie Craig about intentionally creating and maintaining holiday traditions. They discuss Christmas music, making memories, and family time.
Dec 22, 2023•32 min
Whether we hear about it or not, lots of parents are very judgmental of the way other people raise their kids. We're all trying our best, but that looks so different from family to family, and it can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking everyone else is doing it wrong. So what do we do when someone criticizes the way we're parenting? And how can we be better at not doing that ourselves? Lisa chats with Brooke Hoopes, Emilie Campbell, and Gina James about their experiences and advice.
Dec 08, 2023•32 min
In the last episode of The Lisa Show’s caregiving series, Lisa explores a topic inseparable from caregiving: spirituality. How does caregiving change relationships with God? How can we reconcile faith in a loving God with the suffering of our loved ones? Lisa talks with Sheila Welch, Kara Ryska, David Schenck, Aisha Adkins, and Jillian Benfield about how caregiving can reveal miracles and change our vision.
Dec 05, 2023•24 min•Season 2023Ep. 34
Lisa is joined by Jillian Benfield and Usha Tewari in a conversation about how to find community, how to build community, and how to leverage the strength of a community to make life better for all caregivers. Featuring Billie Short, Elizabeth Miller, and Shana Jones.
Nov 28, 2023•28 min•Season 2023Ep. 33
We’re putting the finishing touches on the last two episodes of our Caregiving series, and we want to make sure we’re telling those stories exactly the way they deserve to be told. So while we’re making our final edits, we wanted to share with you a special caregiving story from our sister podcast, Constant Wonder. Prem Jauhar was a world-class agricultural scientist—an inspiration to his son Sandeep, our guest, who became a cardiologist. When the elderly father Prem started behaving oddly, Sand...
Nov 21, 2023•59 min
Every year it feels like there's a new kind of phone, a new social media app, or some new tech that our kids want to try. And as parents, it can feel impossible to keep up with. What is safe for them to use, and at what age? Is it even possible to protect them from the harmful influences on the internet? In this episode of The Council of Moms, Lisa talks with Gina James, Emilie Starr, and Julie Taylor about their experiences. If you want the Council of Moms to answer your question, reach out to ...
Nov 17, 2023•32 min
Any caregiver will tell you that maybe one of the harshest realities of taking care of another person is just how much time you spend dealing with the "system"--meaning meeting with doctors, making calls to insurance providers, emailing pharmacies, working with government programs, and handling all of the logistical pieces necessary to support someone who needs it. It can become a full-time job in and of itself, and at times that "system" can feel cold and uncaring towards the people it's ostens...
Nov 14, 2023•44 min•Season 2023Ep. 32