Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show - Is My Kid Ready for Middle School? Am I?
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Care & Feeding, Elizabeth and Lucy respond to a listener wondering how to help their child—and themselves—prepare for the leap to middle school. The hosts share practical tips and emotional insights on everything from shifting friendships to growing independence, academic pressure, and those moments when your once-chatty kid starts speaking in shrugs.
They unpack how to build trust without hovering, how to guide without gripping too tight, and why middle school can feel like both a beginning and an ending for parents, too.
Plus: Reflections on the emotional weight of parenting costs, and a conversation about how the world needs to make more room for kids just being kids.
Join us on Facebook and email us at careandfeedingpod@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today’s show, and give us ideas about what we should talk about in future episodes. You can also call our phone line: (646) 357-9318.
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Produced by Palace Shaw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode may contain explicit language. Welcome to Karen Feeding, the show where we raise the next generation together. I'm Elizabeth Newkamp. I write the family travel blog Dutch Dutch Goose. I'm the mom to Henry who's 13, Oliver who's 11, and Teddy who's 8. We live in Tokyo, Japan, but I'm currently traveling with the kids, and we are in rural Korea. Damn, girl, you're far. I'm Lucy Lopez. I also |
| 0:23.1 | host another podcast, The Mamacita Rita. I'm mother to Amelia who's 15, my kinsenera, and Avery, |
| 0:30.2 | who's 12. We live in Miami. Well, Lucy, today it's just us and we're shaking it up a little bit. |
| 0:37.7 | We're going to start with our round of triumphs and fails. |
| 0:41.1 | Then after that, we'll answer a listener question about our favorite topic, middle school. |
| 0:46.7 | The listeners looking to prepare for the transition. |
| 0:50.0 | We have tons of advice to offer, so let's get going. |
| 0:53.4 | But first, we're going to take a quick break. |
| 1:01.5 | Welcome back. |
| 1:02.6 | It's time for triumphs and fails. |
| 1:05.0 | Lucy, do you have a triumper fail for me this week? |
| 1:07.7 | My friend, I think I have a fail, like a parenting fail. Okay, let's see, |
| 1:12.3 | because you know I love to turn your fails into little triumphs. I know. So, you know, |
| 1:17.0 | summer. Test me. I know, I know. You're going to lift me up because that's the kind of friend you are. |
| 1:22.8 | But here's, okay, so summer budgets around here have been very tight for the past couple of years. |
| 1:30.5 | Like, I would say the past four years, very tight. |
| 1:32.8 | And my kids are old enough now to understand what essentially that means, right? |
| 1:38.1 | Or at least to notice. |
| 1:40.0 | And when they catch up with their friends, most of them are like off on trips. |
| 1:44.2 | Like one friend literally took a picture. |
| 1:46.9 | It was like, I'm in the French Riviera. |
| 1:49.0 | Another friend is spending like her whole holiday in Colombia. |
... |
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