The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, July 5th,

the co-parenting Conundrum Edition.

I'm Rebecca Lavoie, a journalist and podcaster in New Hampshire,

and I am mom to Henry who is 16, Teddy who is 15, and a stepdaughter Lily, who is 18.

And I'm Carva Wallace, a writer and podcaster based in Oakland, California, but today recording

live from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I'm the father to Georgia who is 12, and Ezra, who

is 15.

Gabriel Roth has a sick kid so he cannot join us this week, but we will miss him,

but we'll do fine without him, as we sometimes have to do.

We will soldier on, and today we will be taking listener questions, one from a mom who is co-parenting with a less than capable X, and another from a soon-to-be parent who is worried about how to model good screen time habits when she herself does not have them.

But first, let's talk about triumphs and fails.

Carvel, what have you got for us this week?

Man, this has been such an incredible thing.

So for some listeners know that I am in the midst of a two-week road trip with my two kids. We started, what's not a road trip, it started as a flight. We flew into D.C., and then we spent some time in D.C., and then today we drove, or yesterday, we drove to Pittsburgh. Then we're going to spend a few days here. than we're driving to Cape Cod to hang out with friends for the rest of the holiday week.

And, you know, that's a lot of parenting to teenagers and, you know, and so forth.

And so most of all it's been going fine.

It's been a lot of fun.

There's been a lot of, like, laughing.

I would say that Saturday, maybe Friday night is the first night that we started to all get a little bit irritated with each other.

But I felt like I navigated us through that more or less without a major incident.

I noticed that I myself was getting really irritated with both the kids.

...