Alright y'all, just a heads up, this episode contains some salty language, so it's gonna be some cussin.

What's good y'all?

You're listening to Code Switch, I'm Jean Demby.

And not that long ago, we did one of our favorite kinds of episodes, Ask Code Switch.

It's where we take often very personal questions about race and identity that we get from y'all,

the listeners of Code Switch Nation, and try to report them out, and contextualize them, and offer up some advice.

And those are often like our most contentious episodes, because people have very strong feelings about the answers we get from experts and the conclusions we arrive at, you know, like all advice.

But on our recent Ask Code Switch episode, we focused on race and parenting, that is how we should go about talking about these big questions around identity with our parents.

How do you set boundaries with immigrant parents? I think it's disrespectful to set boundaries.

Where does the idea that certain small physical traits like having straightened hair are too grown come from?

Why did you fight harder to ensure that I was accepted into white American culture, then you did to ensure that I was accepted into Latin culture?

At the time we recorded that episode, I was identifying mostly with the letter writers as somebody's child, thinking through how that relationship should look,

since everybody is an adult, right? But since then, I have joined the other club, the parent club.

As y'all know, I've been out and away from Code Switch getting to know my own child, and it's been a mind-bending experience.

As my friend Kasha told me, you just love your kids so much that it almost breaks your brain, and that suddenly makes your parents much more legible to you.

Oh, so this is how you felt about me? Like, no, what are you so ridiculous?

Now the IG algorithm is spraying all kinds of cute kid content my way, and the search end is trying to get me to buy baby clothes,

and I'm trying on this new identity, father, and I really don't know what it is I'm doing, y'all.

I was raised by my mom with lots of help from my grandmother and aunts and my older cousin, and so I don't really have a template to work from.

But I realized a lot of people who do have one are struggling with some of this stuff too.

So before the baby came, I reached out to a lot of my friends to talk to them about their own fathers, and their feelings about fatherhood,

and things got real heavy. There were some very dramatic, strangements.

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