My guest on today’s show has an interesting personal story to tell about differentiating her own parenting experience from the fundamentalist religion she was schooled in growing up. In fact, Cindy Wang Brandt has written a book on how to treat children with justice as well as how to encourage them to develop their own sense of what’s right and wrong. It’s called Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy and Kindness . Cindy also hosts a podcast called Parenting Forward. She’s...
Feb 11, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast At just 15 years old, Campbell Baron has run a successful social media video production company and rubbed shoulders with A-list entrepreneurs for his new podcast and video series, The Ones Who Succeed. He’s also cold emailed, called and pitched his way to a full sponsorship for his show, a coup for an independent content producer at any age. We wanted to know what motivates a young person to start their own entrepreneurial ventures, so for this episode, we talk to both Campbell and his parents ...
Feb 04, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode it’s my pleasure to have a very wise woman back on the show. Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, social worker, therapeutic foster parent and the world’s leading voice on the topic of mental strength. She’s the author of the international bestselling book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do , which was born from her own remarkable personal story of mental strength, as well as a viral article by that name that has since gone on to be read 50 million times. We had Amy on the sho...
Jan 28, 2019•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode I had the enormous pleasure of chatting with Catherine Reitman, creator and star of the hit CBC show Working Moms, now underway with its third season. Working Moms manages to be hilariously funny while offering an unvarnished version of modern-day motherhood. Catherine and I dig into topics like why no one asks if dads can “have it all,” why we carry so much guilt for pursuing our own dreams and the importance of finding a community of other parents to share the journey. Show no...
Jan 21, 2019•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast As you know, it’s so critical that we address the fact that kids are far too sedentary these days. Today I’m joined by Amy Tepperman, founder of Moving EDGEucation. Moving EDGEucation works with teachers across Canada to integrate movement and social-emotional learning methods into daily curriculum, such as math and literacy, in order to improve student well-being and academic engagement. They provide resource and tools for teachers to keep students physically active, creative, expressive and in...
Jan 14, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast We try our best to prepare for parenthood while we await the arrival of our first-born babies, but there’s really only so much we can know until we’re in the trenches with our wee ones. Until then we plan as best we can for our baby’s birth, endeavouring to exert some control over a process that can’t really be controlled. When baby arrives we become laser focussed on baby’s care and feeding. But what about the care of the ones doing all that feeding, comforting and changing? My guest on today’s...
Jan 07, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast I don’t think I’ve met a parent who doesn’t feel — at least some of the time — that the 24 hours in a day are insufficient. With the year coming to a close the day this episode goes live on New Year’s Eve day, it seemed like a perfect time to examine how we spend our time and how we can get more fulfillment out of our days as our families enter the new year. That’s why I’m so delighted to have snagged an interview with New York Times bestselling author Julie Morgenstern for this episode. Julie i...
Dec 31, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this special episode, we look back on some of the best parenting advice shared on the show in 2018. It is definitely hard to choose from among all the wisdom shared here over the 50 or so episodes we did this year, but we think this round-up of 10 gives us a lot of good stuff to think about. For links to the full episodes from which these audio clips come from, be sure to visit our show notes! If you’ve enjoyed listening in 2018, we’d dearly appreciate it if you’d consider supporting our Pat...
Dec 17, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this special holiday episode of The New Family Podcast, I asked listeners to send me voice messages about their favourite holiday traditions, old and new. Tune in for a fun and inspiring round up of fun and poignant holiday traditions that you may want to make your own. Show notes Love our work? Please check out our Patreon Campaign! Become a patron of the show for as little as $1 per month...
Dec 10, 2018•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Women talk a lot about emotional labour — carrying the mental load of things that need to be arranged for their families and the weight of worry about how everyone’s needs are being met. We’re joined today by marriage and family therapist Jeremy Schneider for a conversation on what it takes to be an emotionally available dad and a partner who shares that emotional labour. Jeremy has written about parenting topics for a number of publications around the world and now in his book Fatherhood in 40-...
Dec 03, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Those of you who are regular listeners will know that I’m a big advocate for positive co-parenting. It’s becoming less and less unusual to see coparents working happily together to raise their kids, easily able to cohost their kids’ birthday parties, divide and conquer on busy extra-curricular days and sit comfortably together on the sidelines at the arena or soccer field. But alas, there’s still a lot of very difficult relationships between former spouses. Naturally there can be a lot of hurt a...
Nov 26, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast For years my guest for this episode and his former wife lived in a mixed-orientation marriage. Matt Nightingale had shared with his wife, Luanne, that he was gay, but — for various reasons, including that he was a pastor at a fundamentalist church — they stayed together for 15 years. During this time Matt undertook all kinds of efforts to turn himself straight, including conversion therapy. Matt has since done some writing about his experience, and he and Luanne have given a powerful TedEx talk ...
Nov 19, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast A big part of being able to take care of a family is also looking after your relationship with your partner. My guest for this episode, New York City psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Grant Brenner, has some interesting insights about how the experiences we hold on to from the past and can stand in the way of having truly great, well-connected intimate relationships. But this isn’t just a matter of old-fashioned onion peeling of therapist sessions past. It’s about the concrete steps you can tak...
Nov 12, 2018•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Everyone asks kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But what if that’s the wrong question? My guest for this episode, Dr. Rumeet Billan — an award-winning entrepreneur, learning architect and humanitarian — has an insightful way of looking at this topic. Given career anxiety is on the rise — and that anxiety disorders are now the most common illness to affect children and youth — she says we should instead be asking kids not whether they plan to be a doctor or millionaire athlete, but...
Nov 05, 2018•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Part of my reason for starting the website, and later, this podcast, was because I didn’t see families like my own — an usually amicable post-divorce family with co-parents living next door for years — reflected in mainstream media. When she was growing up, my guest for this episode, Paulina Lagudi, had a similar experience comparing her own family to the ones she saw on TV and in movies. Well, today she’s able to do something about that. Paulina is a filmmaker who has created a movie called “Ma...
Oct 29, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast At dining room tables and homework desks all over the place, math can be the source of a lot of drama and frustration. Approaches to math curriculum have shifted since we were in school, complicating our efforts to help our kids when they get stuck. The new math? The new new math? I’m not sure which we’re on now, but it does seem as though kids are may be missing some of the basic building blocks that help them tackle some of the trickier concepts and equations. To help us sort this all out, I’m...
Oct 22, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are few among us who are aren’t plagued by a feeling — at least some of the time — that the pace of life is a little out of hand. You probably experience this to some degree whether you’re raising kids or not. But if you’re parenting you’re doing so during a period where raising kids is done in a more time-intensive way than ever before. Between 1975 and today, mothers have nearly tripled the quality time they spend with their kids (while dads have more than doubled theirs). And this is ha...
Oct 15, 2018•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s said that something like one in five people will be affected by some level of mental illness at at least one point in their lifetime. There have been times when I’ve wondered if that figure might not be a little low. In many cases, family history plays a part, and that was certainly the case in the family of my guest for today’s episode, Lindsay Wong. Lindsay is a writer with a distinguished academic career including an MFA in literary non-fiction from Columbia University. But as you’ll lea...
Oct 08, 2018•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast For a lot of us, there are some tricky dynamics around schoolwork, with parents often in an unfortunate role of homework police. Many of us can relate to frustration that our kids are capable of much more if they’d only get organized and apply themselves a little. My guest for this is episode has an insider’s track on what makes the difference between kids who do well in schools and others who don’t manage to achieve to their full potential. (Hint: It’s not that the kids with great grades are ge...
Oct 01, 2018•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast As you know, I love telling you the stories of people who are defining family in interesting ways. My guest for this episode has found a wonderful way to meet one of the challenges that’s reshaping the way we live. The cost of housing, especially in major cities — but increasingly in medium-sized ones as well — is making it incredibly difficult for people to put decent roofs over there heads. Austin Graff, who works for the Washington Post, where he contributes to On Parenting, is raising a todd...
Sep 24, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this very special milestone episode of the podcast, we’re getting a little personal. For the first time, the whole family joins in as we share the first week of school in our house. Join host Brandie, the boys’ dad, Derek, stepmom, Amy, 15-year-old basketball enthusiast Cameron, skateboarding fiend Alister, 11, and some other very important people in our lives as we share the everyday experience of the return to school, the juggle between work and family, the quest to get the right mix of ex...
Sep 17, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast As you know, this show and the website are on a mission to explore family in all its many, many shapes and forms, as well as the issues shaping family life and society in 2018 and beyond. So when I heard about the project my guest for this episode has undertaken, I knew she was a kindred spirit in celebrating family diversity. Elisa Binda and her partner Mattia Perrego have created Unconventional Fairytales for Unconventional Families , a book of children’s stories that organically weave diverse...
Sep 10, 2018•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode explores an uncomfortable truth, and that’s that alcoholism is on the rise among moms. One study found that problem drinking — the kind that adversely affects other areas of your life — rose a staggering 83.7 per cent among women between 2002 and 2013. My guest for this episode is writer and mom Dana Bowman, who has written frankly — and with humour — about her personal experiences with alcoholism and recovery, first in her acclaimed memoir Bottled , and now with How to Be Perfect L...
Sep 03, 2018•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode tackles something many of us would like to have in more abundance: sleep. Most of us know we’re likely not getting enough, and we may feel guilty when our kids’ sleep falls short of the recommended amount, too. But it can be challenging to squeeze all of life into more reasonable hours, especially when we’re juggling commutes home from work, pick-ups, extra-curriculars and homework. My guest, Alanna McGinn, is a respected sleep consultant and founder of Good Night Sleep Site. She an...
Aug 27, 2018•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you’re listening to this around the time the episode goes live on August 20th, it won’t have escaped you that it’s back-to-school shopping season. So while the wisdom here applies any time of year, I thought it would be a great time to have Rebecca Saha on the show to talk about how to approach all of this in a more sustainable way. Rebecca is a mom of three, a teacher-librarian, the co-owner of an online kids’ resale shop called iSpy Clothing. She’s passionate about educating other families ...
Aug 20, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Too often the everyday experience of being a parent feels like a race against a clock you didn’t set. We frantically hurl ourselves through morning routine, drop-off, work, pick-ups, kids’ activities, grocery shopping, dinner, housework and homework duty. My guest on this episode of the podcast asked herself what it would take for this whole thing to suck a little less so we can get more joy out of the life we’ve chosen with the children we love. I’m joined by esteemed parenting writer and edito...
Aug 13, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode we’re joined by Jana Girdauskas. Jana is a mother of two, a special education teacher and the founder of an amazing charity called The Period Purse, which provides menstrual hygiene to people who are experiencing homelessness. Learn about the ah-ha moment in her car that led to Jana learning about the issue of menstrual equity, plus the incredible way her two young sons have become educated about menstruation by helping package supplies for The Period Purse. Show Notes Love our ...
Aug 06, 2018•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Surrogacy is a topic we’ve explored in a few ways on The New Family, and it continues to be more and more important as a method for forming families. My guest for this episode, Stephanie Plante, took some of the tough stuff that was going on around her — the breakdown of her marriage, difficult events in the news — and found a way to create something magical by being a surrogate. Hear how helping a couple become parents brought her joy and purpose, and continues to expand her own family through ...
Jul 16, 2018•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m delighted to welcome my guest for this episode, Olivia Fogel, programs manager and camp director at The Ten Oaks Project. Ten Oaks is a charitable, volunteer-driven organization that engages and connects children and youth from LGBTQ+ families, identities, and communities. Although it has a number of initiatives, Ten Oaks is perhaps best known for the summer camps it offers, which make kids and youth at home, whether they’ve got LGBTQ+ parents at home or identity as part of one of those grou...
Jul 09, 2018•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast My guests for this episode, Molly Murphy and Clare Kenny, are members of an organization called The Mudgirls Natural Building Collective based in British Columbia on Canada’s west coast. This all-woman group builds eco-friendly housing called Cobb Houses, for customers and for each other. They work in a patriarchy-busting, non-hierarchical manner, and get this — childcare is included in all their projects so that women can find employment opportunities that don’t come with the usual strain of fi...
Jul 02, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
