The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, February 16th, the Teenage Life Coach Edition.

I'm Gabriel Roth, an editor at Slate, and the dad of Eliza, age six, and Leo, who is two and a half. Next time, we'll be saying goodbye to Alison Benedict. But this time, I'm here with Rebecca LaVoy, a writer and the host of the podcast, Crime Writers On. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. I feel a little bit like the Anderson Cooper to your Kelly Rippa right now.

It's exciting for me. I'm just thrilled to be Kelly Rippa to anyone's Anderson Cooper, to be

honest. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your family. Well, I have two kids of my own,

Henry and Teddy. Henry is 15 and a half. Teddy is 14. I also have a lovely 16-year-old

stepdaughter, Lily. So I have a little bit of a brood here. As you may have guessed by the

step, I am remarried. So our family is a little bit of a blended one. And it's a pretty

exciting times around our house. We're, you know, pretty busy. We both

have day jobs and do a couple of podcasts. So, yeah, it's quite the melee around here sometimes.

And are your kids living with you full time or do they go back and forth with other parents or how

does it work? They actually, my kids and their dad, their dad lives about two miles from us. So we have a week on, week off parenting arrangement. We've been doing that for years. I mean, my kids, we got divorced when my kids were four and six. So it's been, you know, almost a decade that they've been living this way. And honestly, this is maybe, maybe one of the more controversial points of view I have about this, but the week on, week off, parenting lifestyle is really, really wonderful in a lot of ways. I call it the hidden benefit of divorce in one sense because you can cram all of your work and activities into the week you don't have your kids,

but that also you really do develop a different perspective on who your kids are as people when you have a little distance from them in between, like, the time that you do spend together.

So, you know, it's definitely influenced my parenting style and my thinking about raising kids for sure.

And how about your stepdaughter? Is she with you the whole time?

She's not with us nearly as often as the boys are. She lives about 45 minutes away.

She goes to, she's in high school. She's very, very busy. So, you know, the traditional sort of

every other weekend and weeknight thing is now kind of a slave to how busy

she is and when we can just see her. So sometimes we see her a lot. Sometimes we don't see her as much.

It's great having her around. I love when she can be here, but it's inconsistent right now.

I think that I have, you know, my kids are much younger than yours. And so I, my older daughter is six years old.

And I'm still sort of getting into the swing of like, okay, now I guess I'm a parent

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