Welcome to nurture versus nurture. I'm Dr. Wendy Mogel and I'm a clinical psychologist. I've been in

practice for approximately 100 years and I work with parents and we talk about their children

to help them understand that whatever they're struggling with, they are not alone. I've seen it

before, it's a little bit funny and a little bit wonderful. One of the things I do in working with

parents is I bring up words from other languages. Monica Padman has so beautifully described this

as a side hustle in linguistics. I collect words that are untranslatable into English and I tie them

into the conversations with parents so that not only can we realize that our struggles are not

unique to our family, but that the planet has a way of describing some of our motions and some

of our dilemmas in beautiful single words. So today we are going to meet Eric and LC. The theme of

this episode is thinking about new ways to demonstrate love. These days it's tough for families

to figure out how to strike a balance between fun and firm. Parents are so close to their kids and

when I was growing up, if someone asked your dad the name of your fifth grade teacher,

he would not know right off the top of his head and now we just have so much data. We're always

parsing it and figuring it out and also a really sweet and warm and affectionate friendship parents have

with their kids and at the same time they want to have structure and be firm and they want the kids

to become independent but super accomplished and then each child is different. These are a lot

of balls to juggle and often I see the most loving devoted smart parents playing blame pong.

This is a term I made up for how parents will just because the other parents is the closest one to

them and it's all the other parents fault that things aren't going so well and then sometimes

teams emerge and each parent is selecting their draft pick. Today you'll hear how our very dear guests

Eric and LC bump into each other as they negotiate their families rules of engagement.

After our session, I will share with you what the author of the Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood

...