I’m really excited to welcome my guests for this episode, Nikita Stanley and Aleksandra Jassem. Aleks and Nikita are the women behind the popular blog The Rebel Mama, which has been described as “everyone’s favourite anti-mommy blog.” Of course they’re not really anti-moms, but they are pro real talk about the tough stuff that comes with new motherhood. And they’re speaking to a cohort of young urban moms who appreciate their relatable, raw and often funny writing. And Nikita and Aleks have just...
Jun 25, 2018•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Given this episode is coming out right around Father’s Day, it’s fitting that I’ve got an awesome dad on the podcast with me today. Frank Lowe is the funny guy behind the wildly popular Twitter feed Gay at Home Dad. He has developed a massive following there speaking candidly and humorously about being a gay stay-at-home father, and now about being a single gay dad, too. Frank’s also got a great YouTube Channel by the same name, as well as a brand new book called Raised by Unicorns , already an ...
Jun 18, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m delighted to introduce my guest for this episode, father of two Matthew Rippeyoung. Matthew wrote a very compelling 1,000 Families post for The New Family recently. In that post, and in this episode, Matthew shares about his transition into single parenthood, and also a little about entering into a same-sex partnership later on. As it happens, Matthew is a therapist, but he’s with us on the podcast to chat mostly about his own lived experience, including those evolutions in his family. Matth...
Jun 11, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we welcome back guests Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook. We first heard a little from these two a year ago in a Pride-month episode called Growing Up with Same-Sex Parents , a special collaboration with TVO and the documentary Gayby Baby . But there is so much more I want to share with you from those conversations. And now these two friends have co-edited a book called Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing up with LGBTQ+ Parents . We get into the complicated ph...
Jun 02, 2018•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m joined on this episode by John Allcock. He’s the founder of a prep school called Sea Change Academy and the author of a great little book called Forty Things I Wish I’d Told My Kids . Mindfulness is the underlying theme here, and John’s book presents it in practical, simple principles for living that you can communicate to your kids on the stuff that really matters. Show Notes Love our work? Please check out our Patreon Campaign! Become a patron of the show for as little as $1 per month...
May 28, 2018•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast In a world of entrenched positions and prescribed roles, expanding our definitions of gender requires the courage to dive deep into understanding and acceptance. On this episode, we meet the subjects of Christina Willings’ new documentary Beauty , which explores the lives of five gender-creative kids, each uniquely engaged in shaping their ideas of what it means to be fully human. For these kids, claiming their own sense of gender when everything around them insists that they comply and conform ...
May 21, 2018•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our culture, we don't like talking about death. Most of us will do almost anything to avoid broaching the subject, and when we do we use a lot of euphemisms to avoid words like dead or dying, preferring terms like “passed away” or “gone” instead. But my guest on today's show really wants to help us get over our qualms about discussing this important aspect of the human experience. Dr. Kathy Kortes Miller has devoted her professional life to death and dying. She's a leading expert on end of li...
May 14, 2018•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast You know my guest, acclaimed comedian and actor Jessica Holmes, from her work on The Royal Canadian Air Farce or CTV’s The Holmes Show . She’s even opened for Jerry Seinfeld and for Ellen DeGeneres. But Jessica is here to day to talk about something that isn’t much fun to go through, but from which she still manages to find some good material. You see, as Jessica’s career was really taking off, she was privately wrestling with depression. She’s now chronicled that experience in a great new book ...
May 07, 2018•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast There’s a reckoning underway that’s calling attention to ages old pattern of systemic sexual abuse and harassment. The #MeToo movement is simply bringing it to light. While a lot of the conversation we’re having about this centres on the organizations — the companies, the industries — that have either turned a blind eye or simply not done enough to address the issue, we haven’t talked a lot about the role of families in all of this. My guest for this episode has some very clear ideas about how w...
Apr 30, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Could you go a year buying only consumables? You know, just the food, medicine and toiletries your family needed, replacing items like, say, outgrown snow pants, but otherwise opting out of those routine purchases many of us make without really thinking? Here’s another question: Could you give away 70 per cent of your belongings, and if you could, how would it make you feel? My guest for this episode can answer those questions with a resounding yes. Cait Flanders is a freelance writer and person...
Apr 23, 2018•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is fun one because I get to speak with a dynamic husband-and-wife team who are not only award-winning journalists but smart and funny people. Sue Allen is a journalist, yoga teacher and hockey mom who now works for a non-profit. Her husband Scott Feschuk is the author of three previous books, including How Not to Completely Suck as a New Parent and has written for publications like Maclean’s, Sportsnet and The Globe and Mail . Scott and Sue have two kids, but they’re latest colla...
Apr 16, 2018•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast My guest for this episode shares my mission to promote positive co-parenting. Karen Kristjanson is the author of a new book called Co-Parenting From the Inside Out: Voices of Moms and Dads . In addition to being a writer, Karen is a life coach who has more than 30 years experience supporting adults while they tackle change. She writes candidly about her own co-parenting experience and the personal growth it inspired. She’s here to talk to us about how families can not only survive a separation, ...
Apr 09, 2018•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast While we know that we are living in a time with more opportunity for women than ever before, we can’t pretend that the playing field has entirely leveled. Women still earn an average of about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, and are still woefully underrepresented among high-ranking executives. A significant part of that picture, of course, is motherhood. As my guest on this episode points out, about 43 percent of highly qualified mothers off-ramp or leave their careers for a period of t...
Apr 02, 2018•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode we welcome child and adolescent psychotherapist, Katie Hurley, back to the show. We first heard from Katie way back on episode 31 when we discussed her insightful book, The Happy Kid Handbook: How to Raise Joyful Children in a Stressful World . Her new book is called No More Mean Girls: The Secret to Raising Strong, Confident and Compassionate Girls . Katie explains that she’s seeing a pattern of Mean-Girl behaviour we typically associate with high school or middle school croppi...
Mar 26, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is a unique one, recorded on site at Lillian H. Smith public library in Toronto where a book club called A Room of Your Own has gathered to talk with bestselling young adult fiction author Jennifer Niven, who is in town from Los Angeles. This book club, founded by Tanya Marie Lee, is just for teen girls from under-privileged communities. At each event members get in a room with the authors of the books they read, which are supplied ahead of the time by the authors and their publi...
Mar 19, 2018•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast It takes a lot of bravery to defy the expectations of the people around us in our families and places of origin. My guest for this episode has a beautiful story to tell about grappling with her small-town upbringing, busting away to explore the world and finding love in a very unexpected way. Natalie Appleton first shared her story with The New York Times ’s popular Modern Love column. It was such a hit that readers began asking where to find her book. She’s now written a gorgeous literary memoi...
Mar 12, 2018•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Life is an unpredictable ride and sometimes we find ourselves — and our families — in really difficult times. You might be dealing with a death in the family, a job loss, a divorce, a natural disaster or a bankruptcy. Or maybe your family situation has not ever been a peaceful and happy one and you need to move all of you to a healthier place. As some of you know, one of my mandates is to help people find their way to a happy family life after going through a major transition related to separati...
Mar 05, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast All around us there are signs of a city bursting at the seams. Migration to major urban centres sees this playing out in metropolitan areas all over. Cranes dot the sky line, and everywhere you go there’s another billboard promoting a new development, promising a toe hold in a real estate market that’s become out of reach to most people. But where those developments are replacing rental housing, what happens to the families that call those places home? This is a special episode that explores the...
Feb 26, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast This podcast and The New Family website are all about the many forms that families take, which includes the way those families are created. We’ve discussed the surrogacy on a number of occasions. It’s a compelling topic, especially given that Canada has become what some call a medical tourism destination for surrogacy. Yet there are a lot of misconceptions about surrogacy and a lot of grey area that my guest on this episode wants to see change. Leia Swanberg is the founder and owner of Canadian ...
Feb 19, 2018•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast My guest for this episode is one of the most popular we’ve ever hosted on the show. Sexuality expert Amy Lang helps parents talk to their kids about sex, love and relationships. She first joined us on to tell us how to talk to our kids about where babies comes from. Amy has a great website called Birds and Bees and Kids, and I invited her back to answer a question that crosses a lot of people’s minds: Is there sex after kids? She and I take a look at what’s involved in having a sex life through ...
Feb 12, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Like many parents of boys, I’m sure, I’ve noticed that — while globally there’s a long way to go to level the playing field for girls — here at home boys are more likely to be medicated for attention deficit disorder and more likely to drop out of school, while the girls are the more likely to be the ones standing at the front of the assembly collecting most of the academic awards. And young women are now out-graduating men from university at considerable rates and have been for some time. It se...
Feb 05, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast My guest on this episode shares my passion for expanding narratives around what a happy family can look like, especially in co-parenting and blended-family situations. Colleen LeMaire is a writer, author and stepmom. She writes kid-friendly books on grown-up topics in her I Have Series, starting with I Have Two Homes , I Have a Stepmom and I Have a Stepdad . Colleen and I talk about how stepmoms are portrayed in everything from fairy tales to pop culture, and why those sorely need an update. Col...
Jan 29, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m so delighted to have my friend and colleague Rick Clemons back on the show this episode. He was first with us way back on Episode 91 for an episode about his process of coming out later in life. Rick is a father of two and the author of a book called Frankly My Dear, I’m Gay: A Late-bloomers Guide to Coming Out . He’s also the host of a great podcast called The Coming Out Lounge and he’s a life coach. One of his specialties is helping people through their coming out journeys. Today Rick is b...
Jan 22, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode I speak to a couple of women with a remarkable personal story to tell. You see, Lindsey Phillips and Jesse Enander are best friends who many people would assume couldn’t be friends at all. Indeed, they were once married to each other’s husbands, a complicated love story that started out with the four of them as couple friends. Lindsey and Jesse are here to tell me about how this unique situation has come to be, and about how they managed to make what could have been a difficult ...
Jan 15, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m really delighted to open the year a discussion that's insightful in setting intentions for what we want to accomplish during the year as parents. And I’m not talking about tidy mudrooms or perfect photo albums. I’m talking about the approaches we take to cultivating the traits in our kids that are going to help them steer themselves well in a changing world. My guest for this episode is Amy Morin, a therapeutic foster parent, a social worker, a psychotherapist with a specialty in family and ...
Jan 08, 2018•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you listen to the show regularly, you’ll know that almost every episode ends with the question, “What is the best piece of parenting advice you’ve ever received.” As you can imagine, over the course of a year we gather a lot of sage words from parents just like you and me. My team and I have gone through all those pearls of wisdom and put together this round up of some of the best parenting advice we heard in 2017. We thought that would be a good way to look back on the year we’ve had while h...
Dec 18, 2017•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m joined today by a woman who has a very personal story to share about her daughter’s journey with the school system. Leslie Gavel’s daughter began to disengage from the school system when she was in Grade 7, and eventually dropped out. She and I talk about the school system’s role in this and about how Leslie's daughter eventually found her way again. Leslie writes about this in a new book called Dropout: How School Is Failing Our Kids (and What We Can Do about It). Show Notes Love our work? ...
Dec 11, 2017•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a special episode exploring some concrete ideas for simplifying the holiday season. I asked a bunch of different people to tell me what they’ve done to adapt their holidays to be less stressful and more meaningful. We hope you’ll find something here that you can adapt to your own holiday routines. Sometimes it’s just about giving ourselves permission to take something off our plate or make some aspect of the holidays less elaborate. So let’s all give ourselves permission to keep the cale...
Dec 04, 2017•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the second in a two-part series that’s taking a look at what feminism means for families in 2017. We’re taking a look at where feminism stands today and what it means for raising great kids. In this episode we explore a bit of a perplexing issue related to raising girls. My guest, writer Devorah Blachor, is a committed feminist who was surprised to find herself the mother of a princess-obsessed toddler. Deborah wrote about this experience in an article for the New York Times that went vi...
Nov 27, 2017•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this week and next, we’re taking a look at what feminism means for families in 2017 in a two part series called the Modern Family’s Guide to Feminism. We look at where feminism stands today and what it means for raising great kids. For this episode, part one, I’m joined by accomplished business person and mom of two Paulina Cameron, author of Canada 150 Women: Conversations with Leaders, Champions and Luminaries . Although Paulina has done so much for the advancement of women through her adv...
Nov 20, 2017•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
