Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show - A Doctor’s Take on Your Newborn Worries
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode: Zak sits down with Dr. Parga Belinkie, pediatrician and new parent whisperer, to talk about those intense, often foggy first months with a newborn. They get into what matters most in a pediatrician-parent relationship, what’s actually worth worrying about (and what isn’t), and how to navigate the early avalanche of advice, anxiety, and sleep deprivation. It’s a conversation that grounds you in the basics—without making you feel like you have to get it all right.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode may contain explicit language. |
| 0:03.5 | Welcome to Karen Feeding, the show where we raise the next generation together. |
| 0:07.6 | I'm Zach Rosen. |
| 0:08.8 | Today on the show, I'm talking to Dr. Joanna Parga Balinky, a neonatologist, author, and co-host of the AAP's Pediatrics on-call podcast. |
| 0:18.7 | Dr. Parga Balinky is an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at the Children's |
| 0:22.9 | Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, |
| 0:28.6 | we talk about the most important things Dr. Parga Balinky thinks you should know about newborn health, |
| 0:34.4 | how often babies should have checkups in the first year, what happens at those |
| 0:38.0 | visits, and how to think about vaccines in this really divisive world. Our conversation after the |
| 0:44.0 | break. |
| 0:48.2 | Hey, it's Mary Harris, host of Slate's Daily News Podcast, what next? |
| 0:55.3 | I'm talking with Amicus co-host Mark Joseph Stern about the Supreme Court's new term, which technically starts this week. |
| 1:02.7 | The thing about this year, though, is that Mark feels like he already knows who's going to win in court, Donald Trump. |
| 1:09.8 | Which leaves him with a whole other question. |
| 1:12.5 | Can he call these justices judges? |
| 1:15.8 | The law is changing every day, it seems. |
| 1:18.3 | And the Supreme Court is often changing the law without explaining itself. |
| 1:21.5 | So it's, again, hard to conceptualize that as law, hard to describe it accurately or fairly as judging, it looks a lot more |
| 1:29.7 | like a super legislature, just passing a bunch of statutes that it thinks are best for the country, |
| 1:36.6 | and doing so without ever receiving a single vote from the American people. Check out what next, |
| 1:42.0 | wherever you listen. |
| 1:45.8 | Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money, the podcast from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. |
... |
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