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- [00:00]
Mo
Hey, it's Mo from the MO News Podcast. The news never stops. Constant headlines, endless updates. It's a lot to keep up with.
- [00:07]
Jill Moshe
And this is Jill Moshe's co host. And that's where the MO News podcast comes in. We read all the news and we read between the lines so you don't have to.
- [00:15]
Mo
We break down the biggest stories every day. Explain what's actually important in a nonpartisan, straightforward way to help you stay informed without getting inflamed.
- [00:24]
Jill Moshe
No hype, no spin. Just clear, smart news coverage with a dash of humor.
- [00:29]
Mo
So subscribe now to the MO News Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. For everything you need to know. This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine.
- [00:49]
Nicole Lapin
And I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems.
- [00:55]
Mo
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
- [01:00]
Nicole Lapin
And it starts now. I'm just so tired. I'm just so tired.
- [01:06]
Mo
Jason, I was going to ask how parenting is going, but I think you just gave me the answer.
- [01:12]
Nicole Lapin
I know, and everybody warned me and told me, but like a jet lag tired. It's like your skin hurts. It's like when I did the morning show. It's just like you never are not tired.
- [01:24]
Mo
That's because the thing about parenting that is unlike anything else in your life is the unrelentingness of it. At work, you have the weekends and then you have after hours, not really either.
- [01:37]
Nicole Lapin
But you have humans that can talk and rationalize.
- [01:41]
Mo
The parenting is literally all the time. It does not. And that would be fine if all you had to do was keep a child alive, which is technically all you have to do. But the problem is that you also have a life to live and a business to run. So. So keeping the child alive is also a job that has to get outsourced to other people. Didn't you just lose one of those people? Oh, well, you lost your house.
- [02:02]
Nicole Lapin
That's.
- [02:03]
Mo
It's just that we have covered, we've.
- [02:05]
Nicole Lapin
Covered it so much, but it's really like a full time job and hiring for the household. I wrote about this in my second book before I had kids. What was I like? I had no qualifications to be doing that. Being the so called CEO of your household, running your house like a business in theory is probably the way to go. Running a business in general is hard. Running a household Also hard, but, like, different hard. And I don't even know how to articulate it yet because I am so tired. But hiring this proverbial village to raise a child and then paying everybody I have to just give my wallet. I'm like, somebody walked in the door, please just take my wallet. And also time. And it's like this calculus that I'm too tired to figure out. But it's the time that you're paying to get your time back, but then worrying if the ROI of that time back is worth what you just gave your wallet to a person to do. I don't know. Yeah, you warned me.
- [03:12]
Mo
I warned you. We have record of it. So we have done many episodes on juggling parenting and working for a while. That was just me bitching about parenting because I have two kids, ages 9 and 6, and you asking questions and clearly not believing me. Then you went on and had a kid. We had this episode. It was, I think, the last episode that you and I did before you went on maternity leave, which was like you gazing into the future and thinking about what kind of identity shift you will go through. Because until then, work had been your baby, the company had been your baby, and now you have an actual baby. How old?
- [03:56]
Nicole Lapin
Four months old.
- [03:58]
Mo
Four months old. So now's a fun time to revisit this. Obviously, maternity leave did not go as planned because you had the house fire and you've had to deal with that along with everything else. But even if it's possible to set that aside and just think about, like, how. How you think of yourself or how you feel like you're managing yourself with this extra human in your life. What you thinking?
- [04:23]
Nicole Lapin
It's so funny to think about that conversation because that whole conversation was like, here I am making space between my home and my office where I can walk to and have separation from baby life, home life and context.
- [04:41]
Mo
For those who don't remember, you used to record out of your home. You had the second bedroom, was your studio, but then you had a child that was going to take over that second bedroom. So you were, for the first time, somewhere else.
- [04:54]
Nicole Lapin
You had to put the child.
- [04:55]
Mo
You have to have the child at your home. It's so annoying, but it is true. And so you were then creating this physical distance between work life and home life, which you didn't have before, which I don't have. I'm working from home. And so everything's like a big mush. And we were talking about how healthy that can be because you'll have this separation and then that, of course, didn't happen.
- [05:17]
Nicole Lapin
Yeah, that didn't pan out. It was such a good idea. It existed for two weeks. I took Sloane, my daughter, to the studio one day. I have a photo of her there. And then when she was two weeks old, the fire. And so those plans went bye bye. And I had no plans. Everything I tried to do to safeguard my mental health is, like, such a joke now thinking about it, because I tried so hard. I was like, I'm going to be really thoughtful about this separation and I'm going to try to safeguard the best I can around this identity crisis thing, because the area that was home to my work baby is now home to my real baby, and she is taking over this area. But then I'm going to feel sucked into all of this and have no identity. But my husb has a whole other office. So all this stuff was happening. And it's hilarious because we're still at an Airbnb and just trying to survive.
- [06:16]
Mo
Yeah.
- [06:17]
Nicole Lapin
So it's like something that I almost feel is a privilege to think about. I don't even know what my identity is. I'm still trying to just get through the day. And so I think this idea of separation and identity was such a privileged problem for me to have.
- [06:37]
Mo
That's interesting. Do you. This is gonna sound either like a stupid question or you will get what I'm saying, so we'll find out. Do you, when you think of yourself, think of a mom.
- [06:53]
Nicole Lapin
So interesting. I love this human so much. Like, it truly is crazy. And I hate the cliches and everybody's, oh, my God. Like, it's your heart, but not in your body and somewhere else. And, like, you're just gonna have this whole other love that you' known. And you tell me from a dad's perspective, because I actually don't see the same bond with my husband. Like, he loves her. She's cute, all the things, but I'm just like, I love this little mush head. And then there's something about it. Sounds weird, but, like, smelling her head, like, I get oxytocin from it. It's a weird.
- [07:28]
Mo
People love smelling babies heads.
- [07:30]
Nicole Lapin
There's such a cute smell. Jason. It's really. And I think when it's your baby, like, you there's something you needed. And I feel so bonded to her and, like, I don't want to be aw from her, but I feel the same. Otherwise, I have a shit storm. Not sorry, Rabbi.
- [07:47]
Mo
Yes.
- [07:48]
Nicole Lapin
I'm gonna really try not to swear. Being a mom, maybe is not part of my brand anymore. I have this crapstorm of so much other stuff that I feel like physically accepting my tailbone will never be the same. I have gone through so much heightened stress. The same size fits. Right now I feel physically the same. I'm not a whole new mom version of myself. I didn't. I didn't emerge from this wearing mom jeans. Oh, the mom jeans are in right now. So I don't know. What I'm trying to say is that I feel so bonded to this little baby mush. But I also feel like another big job that I have. It's like another big project that I have. And I'm like, now my to do list just got way longer. But everything else on the to do list needs to still get done in the same way. Yeah, if that makes sense.
- [08:52]
Mo
It does. That's generally how I experience parenting is thinking of it as a job. And I don't mean that in a judgmenty way. The way that some people might hear job and think like that means bad. I actually just mean that I process it like a series of tasks. When my 6 year old is freaking out about something and I've got to handle that. I almost don't think of it as me because I don't think of me as a person who has children that I have to take care of. For context, my grandma. So Nana Muriel, who Nana merely, she was wonderful, passed away a number of years ago. But anyway, she lived into her 90s, she told me, and then recently realized she told my sister the same thing, said it to each other at some point and realized that we both were haunted by this thing that Nana Muriel had said. So now I'm going to tell you and it'll haunt you. And the thing was that she said she would sometimes look at herself in the mirror and be shocked to see an elderly woman looking back at her. Because she doesn't feel like an elderly woman. She's looking through the same set of eyes as when she was a teenager, young and carefree. That idea has haunted me because it means that one day, hopefully if I live that long, I will experience that same thing. Right? There will be this disassociation between how I feel and understand myself and what I am to everyone else or what I'm doing. And. And that's a weird thing that parenting has given me a glimpse into because I used to see people with kids and I was just like, that's a parent. But now I have kids and that is not the primary way I understand myself. When I have to be in parent mode. I don't feel like a parent. I feel like me, the guy who used to go to ska shows in the 90s, who now somehow is dealing with this kid who's screaming and, wait a second, this kid is mine? How the hell did that happen? I feel that almost every single time. That's why I asked if you think of yourself as a mom, because I understand that I'm a dad, but it's not the primary way in which I orient myself. And that has, like, its pluses and minuses. It maybe makes me a little more frustrated or less. Less patient with the kids than maybe I would be if I was like, I am a dad. I'm going to be a dad right now. But at the same time, it helps me balance a lot of identities all at once and think of them as tasks I have chosen and am now performing.
- [11:20]
Nicole Lapin
Yeah, it's like a nesting doll of yourself, but a dude. A nesting dude doll. Like, the ska guy is in there. All of these former years and former selves build on each other and they never go away. And Nana Muriel had a whole lifetime of nesting dolls that brought her to her 90s. And I think that even if you felt more like you identified with dad, you probably still feel frustrated. I don't feel like I look in the mirror and I'm like, that's a mom, lady. I carried this child. I don't feel like this mega shift. Like, all of a sudden, when I birthed her, I wasn't like, mom vibes. The only thing is, I feel so naturally protective of her and want to smell her head all the time. If you asked me for a list of things that I am, I haven't changed my Instagram bio to Mom Wife.
- [12:18]
Mo
Which a lot of people do. I would tell you this. Stop me if I told you this in the episode just before you went on maternity leave. But also, maybe you're not even going to remember that, because mom brain, that is so real. It's like a crazy additional cognitive load. I recently learned the phrase cognitive offloading to writing something down so you don't have to remember. It is cognitive offloading. That is not a thing that you need to spend mental energy on. And we really love, as humans, cognitive offloading. And for very good reason. There's really interesting research that when you do cognitive offloading, you are able to think clearer and reach answers faster. These interesting studies where they'll ask people to remember a bunch of stuff and then also to perform some task, and those people will perform the task much more poorly. The other set who were given a bunch of information and allowed to write it down and then perform a task. It's interesting, right? Our brains have limited capacity. The reason I'm saying that is I would guess I'm not a neuroscientist, but I would guess that the kind of thing that you go through in that early parenting stage is that there is now so much more to remember, to learn, and to pay attention to. The patterns of life are not settled, and so your brain is just overwhelmed. There isn't the capacity for all the stuff that there used to be.
- [13:37]
Nicole Lapin
The cognitive offloading is often talked about in entrepreneurial circles around streamlining. What you wear, like Steve Jobs black turtleneck.
- [13:46]
Mo
The idea being take that decision away from yourself so you don't have to think about it every morning. If you just have an outfit or closet full of the same exact thing and you know you're going to put that on, then you've cognitively offloaded that decision and you can get to the day faster.
- [14:00]
Nicole Lapin
Yeah. And also, mom brain is actually a neuroplastic process that involves the gray matter in your brain. The brain tissue responsible for processing information, undergoes changes during and after pregnancy. This change, characterized by reduced gray matter volume in certain areas, is often associated with enhanced social cognition and maternal attachment. So while some gray matter loss is observed, it's not necessarily a sign of brain decline, but rather an adaptive response to help the brain prepare for demands of motherhood. So basically, some of the gray matter, like legit shrinks and it takes about.
- [14:38]
Mo
Two years, your brain has shrunk, is what you're telling me, which tracks. Sweet.
- [14:42]
Nicole Lapin
Totally true.
- [14:43]
Mo
That sounds right.
- [14:43]
Nicole Lapin
But yeah, the cognitive load is super real. I think that cognitive offloading is such an important discussion that you should also have with your partner. I think that for me right now, in our not ideal home situation, we're both working from different areas of this Airbnb. Naturally, anyone who's helping with our daughter is coming to me for any direction, no matter what. No matter if we're working the same amount or if we're producing the same amount of money for the family. I still feel I am the go to person for all things baby.
- [15:23]
Mo
You need to talk to Jen, my wife, about that. That is a conversation we're having a lot at home. Our nannies will always go to Jen for a question about the kids. My parents also will always go to Jen for a question about the kids. This drives Jen crazy. I totally appreciate that it drives her crazy. I'm in a funny position because it's hard to train people otherwise. Jen sometimes will tell Sandra, who watches the kids in the afternoon, will tell Sandra to ask me for something. Jen will be like, I am on calls for the rest of the afternoon, so if you need something, ask Jason. And Sandra will still call for Jen. Then I will sometimes hear that and scramble out of my office to try to intercept it and get involved so that Jen doesn't have to deal with it. But sometimes I don't know the answer. Jen knows the answer. Like, where's this? Or where do the kids need to be? She knows the answer. Then I feel really bad. Most recently, Jen was telling me that she is exhausted by having to be the one to plan all the play dates for the kids, which gets more complicated as the kids get older because then they have these social dynamics. These social dynamics are constantly changing. And like, our older son is friends with kids one day and then not the next day. Jen the one like texting all of these parents. And then it's all your social anxiety, but now, like, another layer of it because now it's somebody else's social life and their social anxiety. I text these parents, but these parents are going to get annoyed and it's awful. But I don't entirely know how to absorb this from her. First of all, because I'm traveling a lot. I was away Tuesday to Thursday this week, we're talking on a Friday, and Jen was trying to make playdates for the weekend. I guess I could have done it, but I was in transit. Also, she's the one who has all the contacts. And anyway, these are sounding like excuses because they're all totally overcomeable. And it's true, they are. But it's like when you're in the slipstream of life and parenting, you end up defaulting to these roles that Jen doesn't love and that I feel bad about, but that neither of us have exactly figured out how to solve for. And that is what you are now experiencing.
- [17:19]
Nicole Lapin
Would have. It just gave me the cheat sheet.
- [17:21]
Mo
So we figured out some things. So one of them is with families where the kids make a lot of plans. We've agreed with the families that planning will happen on a text thread with all four parents. And that way everyone is informed and engaged on the conversation. So it's not just the moms texting each other. The dads are on that text thread. And I think that's really good. So that is a good solution. Another one is there's a Saturday coming up. Jason, figure out what to do with the kids. Jen has to set that in motion. But that's good. Or off the list. She's delegated. There's cognitive load to delegating, but not the same as having to execute yourself. So those are some of the solutions we found. The other one is to be mindful. Sometimes you can't split every task, but if you at least know whose tasks are what and you stick to that, then everyone feels like they're pulling weight. Some of my tasks are cleaning the dishes, dealing with trash, recycling, and composting. Like, all the stuff that has to get lugged everywhere.
- [18:28]
Nicole Lapin
Composting or still Brooklyn.
- [18:30]
Mo
Yes, I know. It's totally Brooklyn. Municipal compost. It's wonderful. So that's what we've fallen into. But, yeah, what you're saying is true and sucks.
- [18:39]
Nicole Lapin
It sucks. It's real. I was on our first recording back, and tiny little office space, and most of the time my husband is using it for his calls, and I'm just trying to makeshift a part of the couch or something until we get into a space. I think it was our first recording back, and I. I don't have a massive, beautiful setup yet, but I have a computer that I'm talking to a light.
- [19:11]
Mo
You look like you're. I haven't been to your Airbnb, but it looks to me like you're sitting on a couch. And I assume there's a table in front of you with a computer on it.
- [19:19]
Nicole Lapin
If somebody walked by, they'd be like, oh, that lady is doing a podcasting zoom. Something we don't know. And the door's closed. I don't know if you even remember this or if Morgan remembers this, but it's probably on tape that we had to cut out of an episode, but I hear a knock on the door, and I had told Sharon, who's watching our daughter, I'm going to do a recording in the office. Jared is in the couch corner. I hear the little knock, and I keep trying to ignore it, and then it's loud, and I'm like, oh, gosh, something happened. That's where your brain goes. So I'm like. I stop mid sentence and I'm like, I do remember. Come in. Just like, I didn't want to bother Jared. He was on calls, but we're having a playdate.
- [19:59]
Mo
But you.
- [20:00]
Jill Moshe
You can be bothered totally, right?
- [20:01]
Nicole Lapin
It was so cuckoo. Crazy bananas. I was like, wait a minute. What? How do I just take a moment and do work uninterrupted if I can be interrupted? Anyway.
- [20:13]
Mo
Oh, hold on. What you need? Can it wait? No, this is appropriate, a brief update, which is that Colin, 6 year old, has to poop and actually, isn't this nice? He interrupted me instead of Jen. I don't know where Jen is. At six years old, the kid can half wipe themselves. So he does the first couple wipes, but then I gotta, I gotta get.
- [20:32]
Nicole Lapin
In there, bring it home.
- [20:33]
Mo
So. Yeah, I'll be right back. Stick around. Help Wanted. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Look who I found.
- [20:49]
Jill Moshe
Hi, Jen. Save me, Nicole, first of all, congratulations.
- [20:56]
Nicole Lapin
Thank you.
- [20:57]
Jill Moshe
On the baby. And I know the last six months has been like a total fuck show, but thank you.
- [21:06]
Nicole Lapin
It's so funny when you were going to deal with the poop. Jason, the same thing happened just now. There was a knock on the door and she was like, oh, what's the box on the counter? Did you order paper towels? This is our nanny who's clearly, I'm doing things.
- [21:22]
Mo
But you mean the same thing happened, she came to ask you about it instead of Jared?
- [21:26]
Nicole Lapin
Yeah.
- [21:26]
Mo
This is why I brought Jen in, because while I was wiping a butt, I called down to Jen and I said, Nicole and I have drifted into a conversation that I feel like you will have lots to say about everything. Jen, one of the things that Nicole asked is if we have come up with any solutions to diverting the expectations all from you. And I was embarrassed that I don't think that we have great solutions for this. So classic case here is that somebody like the nanny comes to ask Nicole a thing and then specifically says, Jared was on a call and I didn't want to interrupt him, so I've come to interrupt you, who clearly are also on a call and also doing work, but it seems better to interrupt you.
- [22:10]
Jill Moshe
Yeah, I think there's an assumption that the mom holds more information, which is usually Jason knows where anything is.
- [22:17]
Mo
Yeah, that is true. I do not.
- [22:18]
Jill Moshe
So there's a few things. Number one, it's difficult because I don't have a door to my office. My office is just the bedroom and I'm very happy up there. Except there's no way to keep the children out. When our sitter gets here, she always yells up, hi, Jen. Which is really nice of her, but I'm usually on a call. She might continue to yell to ask me things. We're very close and I've told her many times that even when I text her to be like, I'm going to be on a call, it doesn't register. And Jason. I think because Jason's not the one who interfaces with her most of the time and because he has a door and because the one child who is interested in a parent always comes to me first. Except I'm very happy that Colin went to you to wipe his butt. I'm surprised it didn't go for me, but I think maybe that was cause he really needed to get to the bathroom and you were the closest grownup, so. Anyway, it's annoying, but I feel like it's always on me.
- [23:17]
Nicole Lapin
Can't wait for it to get better. Well, the thing is, years later, I'm looking into my future right now. You talk openly about division of labor. You have major careers and figure out more complicated things. Seemingly. But if you guys haven't figured it out, I don't have a lot of hope.
- [23:39]
Jill Moshe
Nicole, have you had a discussion with your sitter about this?
- [23:46]
Nicole Lapin
Yeah, and I still think it doesn't resonate for her some reason. Is it a cultural thing? Is it just an assumption that dad's work is more important and like, dad works and mom doesn't, but we're both.
- [24:02]
Jill Moshe
What, like, what if you.
- [24:04]
Nicole Lapin
Like, what did she come from me?
- [24:05]
Jill Moshe
So, like, what have you said to her? Or like, how did that conversation go?
- [24:09]
Nicole Lapin
I need to get better at clear communication. This is for sure on me. I'm nervous because it's so personal making sure that she takes good care of our daughter. I don't want to offend her and I'm not as clear as I would be with another type of employee because it feels like maybe she's going to hate me or something and then take it out on the kid. I don't know.
- [24:37]
Jill Moshe
No, that's not going to like that. That is not a thing. I don't think. I don't know. That seems like I understand that you're concerned. I think that that's not at all what would happen. She is not gonna take it out on your child like you're dealing with an adorable little baby. No, she's not gonna take it out on the child. Worst case scenario, she might be annoyed with you, but she's not gonna take it out on the kid. But I don't think she would take it out on you either. If you go to her with Jared and basically be like, listen, we love the work you are doing for us and our daughter. Please don't feel like you always have to come to me when you have a question about something in the house or the baby. You are very welcome to go to Jared and interrupt him.
- [25:26]
Mo
As I'm listening to this, I'm realizing I'm trying to put myself the sitter's point of view here. And what I just realized as you were saying, that is that the challenge with telling anybody something like that is that it still puts the judgment call them. That makes it really difficult for her to know how to navigate this and also creates stress about whether or not every time she needs something, she's going to do the right or the wrong thing. So the better move is to not put the work on her, but rather to put the work on the couple first, which, Jen, you and I have not exactly done. But that would be to come up with a specific guideline, like between the hours of blank and blank, if you need something, go to the husband. Or on these days, he is available, not me. I think the thing that she's most concerned about is making the wrong decision.
- [26:20]
Jill Moshe
But I think there's a lot of value in that. But I also think that creates extra work for Nicole and Jared. Schedules change. You don't know who's recording when, who has a call when. That requires a lot of busy work and just remembering to do it. Like, I like the idea in theory, but I think you have to give the sitter a little autonomy. Be like, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, go to me. Tuesday, Thursday, every other Monday, go to my husband.
- [26:45]
Nicole Lapin
But do you feel like some mom guilt when you say no? Oh, okay, good. Because I'm like. I feel like in my head they're judging me because I'm a mom, and I'm like, okay, I'm unavailable for this baby.
- [27:02]
Jill Moshe
I don't know your sitter. I don't know her background. I think we're all in some ways participating in this very stereotypical gender breakdown. Right. It makes sense that the sitter goes to the mom even if the mom is working. That's how things are. And we're moving away from that. But that's still the default.
- [27:18]
Mo
I just had a slight and obvious revelation that part of this might be a gender thing, but another part of it might simply be going to whoever the sitter feels like they report to. This is a workplace for them. You almost forget, if you are the person hiring the sitter, Sandra will pick up the phone sometimes because someone's calling her, and she'll say, I'm at work, because she is, because our home is her place of work. So if you have a job, then if you have a question, you go to the person who you report to. In this case, she. She functionally reports to you because you're the one who most interfaces with her. The solution then is that I need to be doing a better job being involved in the general.
- [28:00]
Jill Moshe
Yeah, but that's not gonna happen. We are stuck in this format. And I, like, I'm not even gonna say stuck in the format because there's certain things that I take care of in the house and there's certain things that Jason takes care of in the house. Our ceiling leaks when Colin takes a bath. Who is not gonna spend three seconds thinking about the plumber since I told Jason to deal with it, is you. I'm not spending a second thinking about that. Jason, I hope you called the plumber or will so, like, writing it down right now. The problem is that if the plumber comes in the middle of the day, who's going to deal with the plumber? It's going to be me. Although if I said, Jason, you're dealing with the plumber, I would like to. Yeah, Jason will actually deal with the plumber.
- [28:39]
Mo
I texted the exterminator this morning.
- [28:41]
Jill Moshe
Just, just for the record, that's usually my job anyway. The fact of the matter is that it's usually going to be the mom in a heterosexual relationship. It's usually the mom that deals with the sitter. That's just how it usually goes. And that means that, yeah, this is the workplace and that's who the sitter reports to. But that's generally the dynamic. The problem is that it's the workplace, but the purpose of the sitter is so that the parents don't have to engage with the sitter or the children during the workday. So she should be, in theory, self sufficient, which Sandra mostly is. I love Sandra. She's awesome. I think I need to have a more formal conversation with her to be really nice about it and be like, I know you're doing an awesome job, but I need a little more space.
- [29:27]
Mo
I just want to broaden this out for a second. Beyond sitters, One of the other things Nicole and I talked about before you came was how you feel like setting up the playdates has become your responsibility. You recently told me that you don't like that has become your job. And I told Nicole that one solution that we've come to, which didn't fix everything, but was to create text threads that involve all four parents so that everyone is involved and to just sort of like, try to infuse that thinking throughout everything, which is that it's easy for the childcare work to get siloed.
- [29:59]
Jill Moshe
Into the dad that doesn't work either, because that's not how every family operates. And frankly, like, if. If we. Someone. It's gotta be delegated. It's gotta be delegated because if we're both sending a text thread, who. I already told you, like, this is stressing me out. I don't want to do this. So I'm gonna just sit there on the text. I need you to do it so that it takes the stress away from me.
- [30:26]
Nicole Lapin
I can't even set up my own playdates, so I can't function as a normal adult with my own social anxiety. Banking on a kid's social anxiety seems very stressful.
- [30:39]
Jill Moshe
This is my social anxiety about my kid, who I don't think is actually socially anxious.
- [30:46]
Nicole Lapin
That's fair.
- [30:46]
Mo
I just wanted to point out that this isn't a thing that's specific to sitters, because that's a very narrow problem.
- [30:52]
Jill Moshe
We have one couple, although Finn's not hanging out with him anymore, who was very adamant about we want all parents on the thread. And that's awesome. I'm so happy. I'd, like, totally support that, but I think that that's not the norm in most families. You could try it and see what happens, but I still think someone's got to make the decision and do the back and forth.
- [31:12]
Mo
All right, so, Nicole, you've seen into your future. How depressing is it?
- [31:17]
Nicole Lapin
So depressing.
- [31:20]
Jill Moshe
It's not depressing.
- [31:21]
Nicole Lapin
It's exciting and scary and like everything else, Jason was what I thought, great birth control before I was pregnant. And then I was like, this is not going to be as bad as he says. And then maybe you just caught me on a day that I'm like, I am so spent.
- [31:40]
Mo
All right, we solved all parenting and gender problems, and I'm gonna call the plumber.
- [31:45]
Nicole Lapin
Oh, my God.
- [31:46]
Mo
I did actually write down call the Plumber because she told me to do it yesterday, and I totally forgot. I'm gonna call the plumber. The ceiling is leaking. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
- [31:59]
Nicole Lapin
Pfeiffer, and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoy. Do you want some help? Email our helpline at helpwant wanted@moneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show and follow us on Instagram at Money News and Tik Tok at Money News Network for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance.
- [32:19]
Mo
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
- [32:20]
Nicole Lapin
All right, well, talk to you soon.
- [32:38]
Mo
Sam.