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Hello, and welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's parenting podcast for Thursday,

December 19th, the Holiday Swirl Edition.

I'm Alison Benedict, an editor at Slate and the mother of Harry 5, Sam, almost three, and Wally nine months, who, by the way, is a monster baby weighing in at 23 pounds at his last checkup. Holy, holy. I'm Dan Cois. I'm an editor at Slate. I'm the dad of Lyra, who is eight, and Harper, who is six, who I think weighs like the same as Wally. Yeah. Well, we had a, we had like a four-year-old over the other day who was wearing the same-sized diapers as are nine months old. Yep. It's all in the breast milk. Wow. On today's show, we're going to talk about how interfaith families approach the holiday season with Susan Katz Miller, the author of a new book called Being

Both, Embracing Two Religions in an Interfaith family.

And then Parenting Hate Reads, those often New York Times, sometimes Atlantic, sometimes

late, stories about and four parents that seem written to intentionally enrage us all,

and yet we can't stop reading them.

But first, our parenting fails or triumphs for the week. Dan, you go first.

I have a triumph.

Oh, another triumph.

Yes. I'm really, I'm posing myself in this podcast as an excellent parent.

But don't worry, it's all going to collapse eventually.

So my triumph this week is that I triumph last night in actually helping my daughter

with her homework in a useful, non-annoying, non-judgmental way, I think. So I find Lyra's, my older

daughter's math homework to be like totally bewildering sometimes. What grade is she in? I'm sorry.

She is in third grade. So it is full of jargon and like phraseology that I find totally alien. And I never thought I would be one of those parents who is like always bemoaning the new math. Right. But now I have sort of turned into that because I just don't know the answers to her homework, not because I couldn't do the math, but because

I don't even understand, like, what the questions are asking. It's more like foreign language

homework than, like, math homework. Put the number in the five counter. Yes, I know. It doesn't

make any sense. But so anyway, so she has a big test today. I think she's taking out like right now,

and she was very nervous about it.

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