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Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting podcast, the Don't Test My Kids episode for Thursday, December 5th, 2013.

This is our inaugural episode of Mom and Dad are Fighting.

I'm Dan Coise. I'm a senior editor at Slate. I'm the dad of Lyra, who is eight, and Harper, who is six. I'm Allison Benedict, also an editor at Slate, the mother of Wally, who is eight months, Sam, who is three, and Harry, who is five. Hi, Allison. Hi, Dan. I'm in New York, and Dan's in D.C. And today we're going to talk, first of all, with Robert Colker of New York Magazine about his recent article about whether there really is an opt-out revolution going on, not with women in the workplace, but in our schools with parents opting their kids out of standardized tests.

And then we'll talk about the new Disney animated movie Frozen and whether it's portrayal of sisters rings true. Plus, we'll do recommendations. But first, we have our parenting fail or parenting triumph of the week. And I'll go first. And this week I have a parenting triumph, Allison. I'm happy to say. No way. Yes, I know. It's rare, but it happened.

So my triumph is that I let my daughter, Lyra, stay up until midnight last night to read the last Harry Potter book. Wait, on a school night. Yes. So I realize now that that sounds like a fail when I say. No, no, no, no. But no, so she was really, really excited. And like, she reads every night and usually we would poke our head into the room, right, at, like, 10 or something at some ungodly hour and be like, put your book away. It's time to go to sleep. But she was just so excited about this last Harry Potter book. And I knew she was, like, very determined to finish it. Like, that was a goal she had set for herself. and I remember how I felt like that about certain books when I was a kid that I just had to finish it.

I wanted to finish it so badly.

Yeah. she had set for herself. And I remember how I felt like that about certain books when I was a kid that I just had to finish it. I wanted to finish it so badly. So I just let her. I let it go. And she was so happy this morning. Good job. I felt like, yes. So she was really tired also. And I assume we'll get like a note home from her teacher. But I still, nevertheless, triumph. Keep in mind that you're calling in a triumph when she's whining at the dinner table tonight because she's exhausted. Yes, I will bear that in mind. Okay. Mine is going to be a fail this week. I'm sure there were some small triumphs, but a larger fail. This is actually a general fail that's been happening for quite some time, but it became more apparent over the holiday weekend. And I'd love listener advice on this. Basically, I am failing my middle child. The baby gets a lot of attention from me because he's crying and I hold him or I'm breastfeeding. And the

oldest child is now finally old enough to play Uno and play chuggers and play chess, which this weekend,

as I said, it was really apparent because my parents were in town for Thanksgiving and wanted to play all these games with him. And then the middle child is just totally lost. And I don't have anything for him to do. And he acts out because he's looking for our attention. So if you are a parent of a middle child or a middle child yourself, email me at mom and dad at slate.com.

That's mom and dad at slate.com.

And give me some advice because I really actually like don't know how to get out of this stereotypically, this middle child syndrome that I feel like I'm already trapping my son in.

So the problem is that obviously the baby demands attention. Right. And obviously you can do fun things with the older kid. Right. So is the issue really just that you can't think of anything that isn't boring to do with your middle kid? No, it's that there are two parents and three kids and one of them gets the shaft and it seems to always be him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The old saying that once you have three kids,

you're playing zone. Right. Right. Okay. Topic one, the opt-out movement. If you send your kids to public

school, you have no doubt heard about these two big stories in education. There's the rollout of the

Common Core, a huge new effort to transform K-12 education in America with new standards for what kids

should be able to do at each grade level and tests to measure that. And then there's the opt-out

movement, a small but vocal group of parents across the country who are pulling their kids out

of standardized tests. Writer Bob Kolko recently wrote a piece for New York Magazine about the opt-outers

in New York City, and we're so happy to have him here to talk about it.

Hi, Bob.

Hi, Allison.

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