Gene Demby here – I'm tagging in on the newsletter for a little bit because your regular, intrepid newsletter-writer, Leah Donella, up and had a baby! Congrats, Leah!
As it happens, parenthood was already heavy on our minds, and our episode this week is about just that. Just ask any therapist: almost everyone has feelings about parenting. And so many of our advice conversations on Code Switch end up being expressly or implicitly about this particular relationship, whether it’s folks wondering how to have hard convos about the world with their own kids or about what to do about their parents when their politics or ideas about how to raise a family don’t align.
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But “parent,” as an identity unto itself, often has a dizzying, kaleidoscopic effect on all of people’s other, seemingly settled identities. It pulls apart those ideas we had about ourselves and our values out of shape and rearranges them. Some old things feel more intense; some other things that have been otherwise important to us, are oddly less so. (And this is happening all while shaping children’s earliest, most inchoate ideas about who they might be. No pressure, tho. 😬)
And of course, all these feelings are bumping up against the realities of the real world: we've gotten letters from listeners over the years about “The Talk” that Black parents give to their kids about how to behave if they encounter the police; for a lot of children of immigrants right now, the worry stems from what might happen when their parents encounter immigration enforcement agencies like ICE. We’ve had listeners ask about whether it made sense to start a family given the looming climate catastrophe. (Even the chatter about the recent Michael Jackson biopic has become a conversation about parenting, as fans relitigate the corporal punishment the pop superstar experienced, or, depending on your perspective, the child abuse he survived.)
And so this week of Mother’s Day, we’re revisiting some of our stickiest questions about raising a family — or being raised in one. And Leah: we promise not to break nothin’ over here while you’re out!
This weekend, Code Switch O.G. Hansi Lo Wang, who now covers elections and the census for NPR, stops by to help us make sense of the chaotic political landscape after the Supreme Court took a stick of dynamite to the last major pillar of the Voting Rights Act. He walks us through what their decision means for the future of Black political representation, the future of fair elections for everybody, and this fall’s pivotal midterm elections. That comes out tomorrow (Saturday) on the NPR App or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaking of parenting...we've been raising Code Switch, the podcast, for almost 10 years! Help us celebrate our birthday month by telling us your favorite episodes, or episodes you wish we'd do, or ones you want us to update from years past. Send us a voice memo (or a regular ol' email) to codeswitch@npr.org.
Written by Gene Demby and editedby Dalia Mortada
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