The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, August 10th, the pre-teen fashion plate edition.

I'm Rebecca LaVoy, a journalist and podcaster living in New Hampshire, and I'm also mom to Henry, who's 16, Teddy, who's 14 and away at sleepaway camp, and my lovely stepdaughter Lily, who is 17.

And I am Carvel Wallace, a writer and editor out in Oakland, and I am the father to Georgia, who is 11, but turning 12 very soon, and then Ezra who is 14. Gabe is on vacation

this week, but he will be back next week. Today we'll be taking a couple of listener questions

about what to do about moving into a segregated city and managing a kid's personal style. Plus,

our recommendations, triumphs and fails, and in Slate Plus, we will hear from a teacher facing an age-old dilemma around parents and their deadbeat school supply shopping or non-shopping, as the case may be.

But first, triumph and fails. Carvel, do you have a triumph or a fail for us this week?

I do. This whole past week has been the greatest of triumphs. I took

just one of my kids. I just picked the one. I picked my favorite one. I took my, I took my daughter

on a trip, just the two of us, and we haven't done that. I don't know that actually we ever have

done that. Me and my son tend to end up having lots of time together because it's

like male bonding stuff and it's like, hey, come with me to the hardware store. It's like,

okay, cool, dad. And then in the car we're talking about music and, you know, like action movies. It's

very gendered in a weird way that I didn't like expect, but it seems to happen. And I feel like

I don't really get a lot of

one-on-one time with my daughter. So one of the things I did when I got this book advance was

planned out a couple of trips for all the kids, trips that my son took alone, which we talked about

last week, or two weeks ago, and then I planned this trip for me and my daughter to go out and visit these friends of ours way on the East Coast, so she could have kind of an East

coast summer deal with the fireflies and the, the brope swings, and the lakes, and all that

stuff. And so we went and did that, and it was great. And I just, just like when I traveled with

Ezra to New York City, there was not a moment where I felt like this was anything other than,

...