The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's parenting podcast for Thursday, August 24th, the Three Fails Edition.

I'm Carvel Wallace. I'm a journalist and editor in Oakland, and I'm the father of Georgia, who is 11, almost 12, and Ezra, who is 14.

Gabe and Rebecca are on vacation this week, but they'll be back next week, and today we've got two special guests.

I'm Allison Benedict. I'm an editor at Slate, and I live in New Jersey, and I'm the of Harry who is eight almost nine, Sam who's six, and Wally four.

And I'm Ami Cooper, hairstylist and Gardner in Oakland, California.

And I'm the mother of Vida, who's 17, Ari, who's 12, and Jerome, who's eight.

Today we're going to be talking to Ami about raising a trans sixth grader, and we're going to have

recommendations. And in Slate Plus, we're going to catch up some more with Allison, who's

here on her triumphant return. But first, triumphs and fails. Allison, what do you have for us?

My triumphant return will begin with a fail. So I was kind of loath to talk about this today,

but I figured that meant that I should, which is that I send my kids to a really awesome day camp and every day they send pictures home

and I love combing through them at the end of a horrible day of editing crap about Trump

and trying to find my kids smiling and having fun. But pretty early on, I started sort of having the impulse to share these cute pictures

whenever I found my kids in one of them and then stopping myself from sharing them

because all the kids are white and I send my kids to a camp that's basically all white. And I like basic, I know that

that's not a good thing for them or a good decision to have made and that's my fail.

Hmm. Wow. Wait, so are you saying that the decision to send them to this camp is what you're considering the fail?

Yeah, I mean, and I've made it twice. Like I sent my, the first year we moved from the city to the suburbs a couple of years ago. And the first summer we moved there. My son had like a pretty terrible time at the camp we sent

him to and he had a pretty terrible first year at school, just kind of not knowing anyone. So I thought,

I want to give him like the best summer camp experience I can. And my parents said they would help us out.

And we found this camp that we heard was great. and what all like most of what I knew about it

...