I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black.

I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.

I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do.

More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.

Music Welcome to the gray area Friday.

My guest today is Anna Norff, my longtime colleague at Vox, who I'm ashamed to say I've not had on the show before. But we are writing that ship today.

She's a wonderful reporter. She writes about kids, parenthood, American family life.

She's also a novelist. That is my introduction of you. Did I miss

anything? How would you introduce yourself at a party? At a party, I guess I'd say, I'm a reporter

and a writer, journalist and novelist. So you got, you did pretty good. You're beat as a journalist.

It's pretty capacious kids, families, parenthood, a lot of gender politics. I mean, that's, it's a

pretty, pretty broad area to cover. I'm not sure that's a typical beat in a lot of newsrooms. I mean,

how did you land on that? Yeah, I came to Vox as the gender reporter in 2017. That was

sort of right when Me Too was becoming really big, and so I reported on that for about a year almost exclusively.

And since then, I sort of do a lot of things, but a lot of it circles around, you know, I typically call it American Family Life.

I write a newsletter called Kids Today, which I think of really as a newsletter about kids lives,

like not so much about parenting.

There's a lot of really great parenting newsletters out there, and I try to steer clear of advice,

and instead as much as I can just to talk to kids about their experiences and learn about what kids are experiencing right now.

And I've also kind of like been trying to have more empathy for children and figure out what it's like to be a kid today.

When I had kids, I realized like how powerless you are as a kid and how other people dictate so much of your daily life.

So I find myself a lot of times like trying to get in their headspace and think about what is that like and how do kids take back a little power? How many kids do you have? Two. I've got, I have one six-year-old and another one on the way, actually. Oh, congratulations. It's exciting. In April. Thanks. Should I be terrified? Nah, it's fine. The second. You'll be fine. Your six-year-old's big, like they can dress themselves, you know, you'll be fine.

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