This episode contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcasts, for Thursday, August 31st, the Accountable Edition.

I'm Jamila Lemieux, a writer, contributor to Slate's Karen Feeding Parenting column, and Mom to Naima, who's Penn, and we live in Los Angeles. I'm Elizabeth Newkamp. I write the homeschool and family travel blog, Dutch Dutch Goose. I'm the mom of three littles, Henry who's 11, Oliver who's 9, and Teddy, who's 6. And we live in Tokyo, Japan. I'm Zach Rosen. I make another podcast. It's called The Best Advice Show. And I am Dad to Noah, who just turned six, and Ami, who is nearly three. We're in Detroit. Today on the show, we're going to start, as always, by sharing our parenting ups and downs from the week. Then we're going to be joined by Dashka Slater. Dashka is an award-winning journalist and author.

Her most recent book is called Accountable,

The True Story of a Racist Social Media account and the teenagers whose lives had changed.

It's a story of harm done by and to young people,

and if you don't have kids at that age yet, it'll still be a fascinating conversation.

Then, if you're a member of the Slate Plus Club, we've gotten some wonderful listener suggestions from you all about games

and even how to handle the great bathroom conundrum of 2023. Here's which you'll hear if you have Slate

Plus. All right, so I do have a little bit of an update.

It's not incredibly satisfying.

But when I went to pick the kids up for school, Jeff and I both happened to be traveling

down there.

We bumped into the teacher and Jeff was like, now is the time.

And she basically said, you know, thanks for sharing with me.

I will talk to Oliver tomorrow. And so we, we walked out. We were like, okay, did we solve anything? But at least I felt like I had laid down groundwork if I need to send a letter or do something else. Oliver then said, well, I went to the bathroom and I didn't have to put my name on the board. I'm like, did she ever talk to you? Oliver said, well, she told me that I should use the bathroom when I need to use the bathroom because she doesn't want anything bad to happen to my body.

So I'm like, okay, maybe she heard that.

But Oliver said she hasn't officially redacted the rule.

And as of this week, no one yet has had to serve time for using the bathroom.

As a Slate Plus member, you'll get a whole bonus segment every week and all your favorite

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You can sign up for Slate Plus now at slate.com slash mom and dad plus.

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