Hi mom and dad are fighting listeners. I'm Susan Matthews and I am the editorial director

of Slate's podcast The Waves which we've recently just brought back. It's our show about gender

and feminism and we thought that you might be interested in this week's conversation. I talked

to Elizabeth Bruning a writer at The Atlantic about a piece that she wrote about her decision to

become a mom at 25 and why parenting when you're younger might not be so bad. We thought that you

would like it to so here it is in your feet. Enjoy. This is The Waves. This is The Waves. This is The Waves.

Welcome to The Waves. Slate's podcast about gender, feminism and the precise correct age at which

to have your first child. Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we

can't get off of our minds and today you've got me Susan Matthews the news director at Slate.

I'm joined by Elizabeth Bruning who is now a writer at The Atlantic but just before that she was

an opinion writer at The New York Times. It's one of her last pieces there that we're going to talk

about today. The piece was published on Mother's Day and it was called I became a mother at 25 and

I'm not sorry I didn't wait. Liz welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. It's a thoughtful

piece and it also spurred quite a bit of backlash and argument online and so I wanted to have you

on to talk about both the arguments and the piece itself and to sort through why it provoked the

kind of response it did and what we should take from that. So we'll get into both of those things

right after the break.

So Liz I wanted to start by asking you how you came to write this piece in the first place.

There's been a lot of conversation lately about the falling birth rate a lot of consternation about

that. To me though this piece really felt like something that came from a more personal place.

So I just wanted to start by asking you if you can tell me a little bit about like when you realized

oh people think that you are a young mom and they have all these feelings about that.

...