The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting.

Slate's parenting podcast for Thursday, February 8th, the Secret Twins Edition.

I'm Gabriel Roth. I'm an editor at Slate, and I am the father of Leo, who is three and a half,

and also of Eliza, who is seven years old. I'm Rebecca Levoy, a journalist and podcaster in New Hampshire, and I am mom in absentia to Henry, who is 16, Teddy, who is 15, and my stepdaughter, Lily, who is 17. And I'm Carvel Wallace, a writer and podcaster in Oakland, California, and I am the father to Georgia who is 12, and Ezra, who is 14.

Today on our show, we have a question from a mother who is scared to send her son to camp for fear that he will encounter sexual abuse.

We also have a question from another mom whose solution to the problem of dirty stuffed toys is potentially coming back to bite her in the

ass in fascinating ways. Uh, plus as always, we'll have triumphs. We'll have fails. We'll have

things to recommend to you. On Slate Plus, we will take a third question. So many great questions

this week. Uh, this one about the eternal problem of teenage boys and hygiene. Triumphs and fails. Carvel, why don't you

tell us, have you triumphed or have you failed? I've done both, and today I'm going to tell you

about something that I think, it feels to me like a failure. It happened just this morning I was

driving Georgia to school. We were making small talk, and somehow, I don't remember how this came up. The

discussion of dress coding came up, which is a thing to be dress coded at her school is to be

cited by a staff member for failure to follow a series of dress code situations. And so I've known about this for a while and that this happens.

And it's not something that Georgia typically runs into because she doesn't, like, she pretty

much wears jeans and a hoodie every single day.

But she initially told this story about a friend of hers who was dress coded and how

she was frustrated because there's these three eighth-grade girls

who dressed in violation of the code all the time, and they'd never get dress-coded. And Georgia was wondering if Ray's had something to do with it because the three girls were, like, white and her friend is black. And so we were having a small discussion about that. And then she started unfolding to me more about the dress code. And then she explained that, um, like the details of it,

which I sort of knew but had forgotten were that girls can't wear like anything that shows

their belly button and they can't wear like spaghetti straps and the, the shorts have to be longer

...