Childfreedom, Kinship, and Who Can Take Your Fries

Childfreedom, Kinship, and Who Can Take Your Fries

Michael Yarbrough [https://michaelyarbrough.net/] — associate professor of Law & Society at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center — joins Vance and Rachel to talk about what it means to be intentionally childfree, how we think about family and kinship too narrowly, and why so many of our care relationships don't have names — or policies to support them. Listen to learn about: * Why "childfree" and "childless" aren't the same word, and why the distinction matters * How childfree people experience workplace accommodation, and why the conversation still tends to require framing care around someone else * Why infrastructure — housing costs, transportation, the built environment — is often the missing piece in conversations about family support * South Africa's child support grant program [https://childrencount.uct.ac.za/indicator.php?domain=2&indicator=10] and what it models about giving people resources without red tape * Michael's take on Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours as stories about self-actualization, relational freedom, and the ways relationships both enable and constrain it Mentioned in this episode: * Abigail Ocobock [https://sociology.nd.edu/people/abigail-ocobock/]'s research on marriage availability and LGBTQ adult life course expectations, including her book Marriage Material [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo237036719.html] (University of Chicago Press, 2024) * Brady G'Sell [https://anthropology.uiowa.edu/people/brady-gsell]'s work on social reproduction and kinship in South Africa * Mark Granovetter's "The Strength of Weak Ties" [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pub/papers/granovetter73ties.pdf] (1973) * Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf * The Hours [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274558/] — film directed by Stephen Daldry, based on the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham * A Room of One's Own [https://roomofonesown.com/] bookstore, Madison, Wisconsin Sign up for the Nurturing Minds newsletter, in which we share more about the psychology and philosophy of parenthood, but with pop culture memes: nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com [https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/] Our sponsor: Nurturing Minds is supported by Cone Wealth. Learn more at conewealth.com [https://conewealth.com/]

After the Ban: Building Sustainable Smartphone Policies That Support Students

Rita Gehrenbeck-Shim — a teacher at Boston Day and Evening Academy, part of Boston Public Schools — joins Vance and Rachel to talk (on her own behalf, not as a BPS or BDEA representative) about what phone bans actually look like from inside a classroom.  Listen to learn about: * What changed at school after a consistent phone policy replaced a patchwork of individual teacher reinforcement * The question Rita thinks the policy doesn’t yet answer: are we teaching students how to manage their phones, or just managing the phones for them? * The social pressure to be instantly available and what it costs us when we never get to be unreachable * Rita’s vision for what she’d change if she could redesign the policy from scratch * A Reddit commenter, Seth Rogen, and the choice not to have kids   Mentioned in this episode: * National Bureau of Economic Research study on the effects of school phone bans [https://www.nber.org/papers/w35132] * Boston Public Schools phone policy [https://www.boston.gov/news/council-backs-bell-bell-mobile-phone-policy-boston-public-schools] * Cell phone pouches [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAs9CLHAJDs] * Syntropy [https://fore.yale.edu/blogs/entry/1704376896] * Universal Basic Income [https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-basic-income/] Sign up for the Nurturing Minds newsletter, in which we share more about the psychology and philosophy of parenthood, but with pop culture memes: nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com [http://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/] Nurturing Minds is supported by Cone Wealth. Learn more at conewealth.com.

What Researchers Actually Know About Smartphones and Teen Mental Health

Nancy Deutsch and Bethany Teachman — co-directors of the Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment Initiative [https://tyde.virginia.edu/] (TYDE) at the University of Virginia — join Vance and Rachel to talk about what the research actually says about social media and teen mental health, and what it doesn't say, which turns out to be a lot.  Listen to learn about: * Why headlines about social media and teen mental health often distort research findings * What researchers across this debate actually agree and disagree about (and if you want 90 more minutes on the drama, check out this TYDE-hosted debate between Jon Haidt and Candice Odgers [https://tyde.virginia.edu/livestream-odgers-haidt/]) * Why focusing narrowly on screen time or social media may crowd out attention to other key contributors to youth mental health * Practical approaches to navigating device use in your own household, including the case for digital literacy over digital bans * What teens themselves say they wish adults understood about how they use their phones * Nancy and Bethany’s takes on parenthood in Gilmore Girls [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_Girls] and Shrinking [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_(TV_series)] Mentioned in this episode: * This article in the New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/health/social-media-detox-mental-health.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gVA.9hHC.W_tY2dRB09_C&smid=url-share] reporting on this study [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2841773?guestAccessKey=1b34668e-afe8-4888-aa3d-dd05b3b83eff&utm_source=for_the_media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=112425]  * Nurturing Minds episode S1E7: The Moral Outrageometer [https://nurturingminds.podbean.com/e/the-moral-outrageometer-with-kyle-sanford/] * Nurturing Minds newsletter post: Junk, chatarra, and screen time [https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/p/junk-chatarra-screen-time] Sign up for the Nurturing Minds newsletter, in which we share more about the psychology and philosophy of parenthood, but with pop culture memes: nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com [http://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/] Our sponsor: Nurturing Minds is supported by Cone Wealth. Learn more at conewealth.com [http://conewealth.com/]

The moral outrageometer with Kyle Stanford

P Kyle Stanford —Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California-Irvine —joins Vance and Rachel to discuss his co-author study of people’s estimations of the dangers that unattended children face. Listen to learn about: * Moralized judgments * How norms about parental supervision of children may be shaped by gender and racial biases * Whether it is possible to ratchet down our collective anxieties about leaving children unattended for even brief periods No Child Left Alone: Moral Judgments about Parents Affect Estimates of Risk to Children [https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/2/1/12/112692/Correction-No-Child-Left-Alone-Moral-Judgments?searchresult=1] Black Dads Are Doing Best of All [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/opinion/charles-blow-black-dads-are-doing-the-best-of-all.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.jH0u.c-gwakI3BRkx&smid=url-share] Subscribe to the Nurturing Minds newsletter: https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com [https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/]

Housework under the rainbow with Samantha L. Tornello

Samantha L. Tornello—Associate professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State and parent of 2—joins Vance and Rachel to discuss their research on how LGBTQ couples divide housework and childcare. Listen to learn about: * Simone de Beauvoir and Dorothy Gale from Kansas agreed that housework is torture * How families divide up gendered work at home differently depending on the parents’ genders * Communication as key to satisfaction with the division of housework and childcare—and why that satisfaction matters more than who does what https://pure.psu.edu/en/publications/transgender-and-gender-non-binary-parents-pathways-to-parenthood [https://pure.psu.edu/en/publications/transgender-and-gender-non-binary-parents-pathways-to-parenthood] This episode’s title pays homage to Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, PhD, without whom this episode would not exist. Subscribe to the Nurturing Minds newsletter: https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com [https://nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/]