Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show - When Your Teen Thinks They're the Parent
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode: Zak Rosen, Elizabeth Newcamp, and Lucy Lopez dive into a letter from a parent with three kids spanning college to preschool — and two of them are acting like they run the nursery. What do you do when your teens become self-appointed disciplinarians for your four-year-old? And how do you re-establish the line between “big sibling” and “co-parent” without sparking a family feud?
After that, of course, we’ll circle up for a round of triumphs and fails.
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Podcast produced by Palace Shaw.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode may contain explicit language. |
| 0:03.2 | Welcome to Karen Feeding, the show where we raise the next generation together. I'm Zach Rosen. I make another podcast. It's called The Best Advice Show. I am dad to Noah, who is seven, and Ami, who's four. We live in Amsterdam for, like, another month. I'm Elizabeth Newcamp. All right, 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. And we live in Tokyo |
| 0:26.4 | Japan for about another month. Hey, I'm Lucy Lopez. I host another podcast as well, the |
| 0:32.9 | Mamasita Rica. I'm mother to Amelia, who's 15, Avery, who's 11, and we live in the 305 till the cat 5. |
| 0:40.9 | I did that for you, Zach. |
| 0:42.6 | Thank you. |
| 0:43.5 | Today on the show, what to do when your oldest tries to parent your youngest, stricter than you ever would. |
| 0:51.6 | And after that, of course, we'll circle up for triumphs and fails. |
| 0:54.8 | Let's do this. |
| 0:55.8 | First, a quick break. |
| 1:10.8 | Welcome back. Welcome back. This time to answer a listener question. This came into the Karen Feeding email box. |
| 1:13.2 | Dear Karen Feeding, our family has three kids, 19, 15, and four. The elder two want to parent the youngest very strictly. We get lots of, you would never let me do this. Why are you letting them get away with this? When we intervene and |
| 1:28.9 | tell them to stop parenting the youngest, they are inappropriately trying to correct very normal |
| 1:34.4 | four-year-old behaviors, often with a really severe tone of voice. When they were much younger, |
| 1:40.7 | we dealt with the oldest in this behavior by assigning a parent chore any time they |
| 1:45.1 | tried to parent our now middle kid, i.e., if you want to be an adult, you have to go and |
| 1:49.8 | load the dishwasher. But nowadays, the oldest kids regularly help with household tasks because |
| 1:55.2 | they're a part of having a functional home, so we're reticent to use chores as negative consequences. |
| 2:02.5 | The eldest is living at home and going to community college. They're under our roof for a while longer. How do we make it clear to the |
| 2:07.9 | oldest ones that they are the siblings, not the parents? It's not fair. The baby of the family doesn't |
| 2:14.8 | need four parents. Any creative ideas? |
| 2:20.4 | Signed to too many parents. |
... |
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