Parenting
Iris on parenting · June 17th
storyflo · parenting
Jun 18, 2026 · 17 min listen
Listen · storyflo · parenting
Iris on parenting · June 17th
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This past weekend while Jacob was at a bachelor party, canoeing down a river in central Pennsylvania, I attended Ada’s 5th grade Awards Brunch, then welcomed my niece, nephew and sister-in-law for a not-that-scheduled but activity-filled weekend featuring Brooklyn Bridge Park splash pad, lots of iced coffee, too much sun, lots of playgrounds, lots of slides, water balloons, Knicks game 5, all the cousins being out way too late, Ada at a sleepover, and a Sunday birthday party where both kids had endless gummy candy, two giant shave ices, coconut cake, and mainlined a few Spindrifts apiece. We all collapsed on Sunday afternoon, overdosing on heat and the hangover haze of a city-wide championship euphoria, lazily half-watching the World Cup until it turned into a power nap. As usual for this time of year, and also for the holiday season, I feel the duality of excess and gratitude, a bittersweet moment of indulgence before inevitable transition. It’s a frenzied feeling of the cup that runneth full verging on the cup that spills into chaos; we’re hanging on through the miracle of surface tension. Part of the sensory overload is the volatility of children on the verge of change and the emotional undulations that come with it. Julian announces the number of days remaining of school each morning, contemplative, and openly sad about it. “I don’t want third grade to end,” he says, which was also how he felt about first and second grade. Both last days ended in tears. He’s nostalgic already, even though he hasn’t had particularly much to say about school for the entire year he’s been in it. But, now that it’s almost over and he has gradually found intimacy in the daily rituals and rhythms of his class, there’s just his 8 year old grief. I’ve learned that in 2026, graduating elementary school in NYC is a year-long event where fifth graders are referred to as “seniors,” and rather than a simple diploma hand-off and shift of buildings, there’s two celebratory field trips, special hard-cover yearbooks, a Class of 2026 t-shirt, also a Class of 2026 hoodie, a 5th grade dance, the aforementioned Awards Brunch, and then the yearlong feeling of social domination that one enjoys by being the oldest lot in their school. Ada has soaked up her senior status, but with this great rise, I fear, will also come the inevitable fall. By this, I don’t mean anything noxious, more that her friends are going to disperse next year, the social fluidity will change, she’ll be new in a big building, no longer the big fish in small pond but small fish in medium pond. Because I’m a person who is constantly looking a mile in front of me, I see puberty and iPhones and all that is middle school hanging out there down the road, making the now ever more bittersweet. Because she is 10 and lives 99% in the moment, she enjoys the myopia of only being as volatile as the immediate day warrants. A big part of the feeling of being on the verge of chaos are the work functions, summer planning, friend gatherings, and end-of-year celebrations. But the bigger part, perhaps always, is processing the change my kids are navigating, reacting to it, being a receptacle for it. I’ve been trying to find a softness amidst it all, one that shows up as hugs and slightly later bedtimes. It shows up as letting Ada crawl in bed next to me while Jacob is at the bachelor party and being awoken by a fireworks display. It shows up as asking if a kid wants to take a walk without a particular endpoint in mind. The softness is trying to be generous as possible in my interpretation of inputs, and to resist needing to control the outputs. It’s saying what you notice, not what you are or aren’t. It’s not being able to control how they feel, but giving the feelings somewhere, hopefully, to go. Recommendations: To read: More on “soft eyes” and deep listening by Jenny Odell, Living in an Alive World To drink: the new “island punch” flavor of Spindrift, which has a bit of passion fruit, guava, and orange, and dare I say… is the best. To wear: Expanding beyond Birkenstocks into other still very walkable sandals and got these Teva Voya Infinity sandals thanks to a friend’s recommendation, which are cute and very comfortable. Also finding that the Margaux Flat Sandals are extremely versatile for dressing up or still being able to wear with cut-offs. To see: he still life acrylic paintings of Andrejs Ko, which are somewhere between Vermeer and Rinko Kawauchi. Love love love. Swim: This LuxeCrinkle Backflip suit from Summersalt, which has both decent coverage and a very flattering cut. The “crinkle” is more subtle than a Hunza G or Youswim suit, which I like better. Long sleeves for summer exercise: No matter how much sunscreen I wear, I find my in-sun tennis time is probably damaging my skin, so have started wearing this long-sleeve micro-mesh running top from Bandit which is the lightest way long sleeve i’ve found.
There’s no better summer activity than a pool day, especially for kids with lots of energy. I don’t like to obsess over every little, tiny thing when it comes to mine and my family’s health but if you’re spending time at the pool this summer, it’s important to think about minimizing chlorine exposure. For as little as $5/month, upgrade as a paid subscriber & gain access to the HealthyMom Club bank of 80+ kid lunch ideas (new ones sent out every Sunday!), monthly family meal plans, & monthly expert guest articles 💖 Chlorine is a chemical element (liquid or gas) with a strong smell. It is used as a pool sanitizer and it works to disinfect the water by killing bacteria, algae, viruses, and neutralizing waterborne pathogens. This is really important, especially in public pools. Clean water is a safety necessity. That being said, chlorine is unfortunately a strong chemical that can have negative impacts on our health, skin, and endocrine system. Chlorine disrupts iodine uptake which can lead to thyroid issues. Chlorine is an endocrine-disruptor, meaning it can negatively impact hormones. Chlorine is a lung irritant (ever noticed coughing when you’re near an indoor pool?!) from the toxic gases it emits. Creates harmful byproducts called disinfection by-products (DBPs) that are carcinogenic and tax multiple organ systems including the skin, eyes, and liver. This is all especially relevant for kids, who have developing, sensitive systems. A matured, adult detoxification system is going to be much more efficient at filtering out chemicals as opposed to a 3-year-olds. There’s actually a lot you can do to protect yourself and your children from chlorine this summer, even if you’re spending a lot of time in the pool. You can manage your exposure in a healthy way without obsessing over it! As much as possible, avoid pools that are treated with chlorine. Instead, opt for salt-water pools and natural bodies of water like lakes and the ocean. If you’re swimming in your neighborhood or have a pool yourself, you can even talk with the pool staff to ensure they’re maintaining healthy, minimal levels of chlorine added. Piggybacking off the above, avoid indoor pools entirely. Because chlorine is a gas and a big irritant to the lungs, indoor pools trap in a lot of the chemical in the air. Rinse before swimming and after. Rinsing before will remove anything on the skin that can react with the chlorine. Rinsing afterwards helps to remove chlorine from the skin and prevent any from absorbing into your system. For your shower afterwards, use warm water and a natural, gentle, non-toxic soap that will help to remove the excess chlorine on top of your skin. Hot water can open your pores and increase absorption of the chlorine, so avoid hot water. You can also make a DIY-spray to spray on your and your kids’ bodies before swimming. You can even spray it on your hair to help with any chlorine-residue left there. Use a mix of filtered water and Vitamin C Powder (ascorbic acid). You’ll mix the water and Vitamin C powder in a ratio of 1 cup to 1 teaspoon… so 1 cup of water for every 1 teaspoon of ascorbic acid. Another big source of chlorine in our daily lives in tap water and shower water. You might not be able to control what’s added to swimming pools near you, but you can filter the water in your home. You can use a filtered showerhead for the shower and bathtub filter for the bath. It’s more important for the bathtub since you’re soaking in that water… especially for kids. Finally, be sure to be drinking plenty of water before, during, and after swimming. Proper hydration helps your body filter out toxins and And, at all times, avoid drinking any pool water as much as possible. Tell your kiddos—NO drinking pool water!!! While we’d like to hope that pool staff are properly trained at maintaining healthy chemical levels and avoid adding excess chlorine, it’s always best to play on the safe side.
I hope you’re having a good week so far. I just finished reading historian Stephanie Coontz’s new book about marriage: For Better and for Worse. It’s great and I’m going to have her on my podcast very soon. I’ll also have Fault Lines author, sociologist Karl Pillemer on soon as well. You can listen to my podcast here along with prior interviews with Pauline Boss (Ambiguous Loss), Ruth Whippman (author of BoyMom), Emeritus U of Penn sociologist Frank Furstenberg, historian Steven Mintz (co- author of Childhood in America), Rutgers estrangement researcher Kristina Scharp, Nedra Tawwab Glover, Michele Weiner-Davis, Tania Khazaal and others. Speaking of Karl Pillemer, Kristina Scharp, Michele Weiner-Davis and Tania Khazaal will all be joining me along with Rachel Haack and Matthias Barker and Tania Khazaal in Chicago on July 31st. It’s rare to have so many leading researchers, writers, and clinicians focused on family relationships and estrangement gathered in one place for a day of conversation, learning, and connection. To register or learn more, go here. Helping people understand how their families shaped them is important. Most of us know from personal experience that parents and siblings can have a profound influence on who we become, our sense of trust and safety in the world, and even our ability to parent our own children. But there is a downside to viewing adult life primarily through the lens of family-of-origin wounds. Many adult children come to believe that if they didn’t receive everything they needed growing up—or continue not to receive it as adults—then their parents deserve suspicion, resentment, or even estrangement. This perspective can encourage people to reinterpret their entire life story through the question: “What would my life have been like if I had better parents?” While self-reflection can be valuable, it can also lead people to view many of their disappointments, struggles, conflicts, or unmet goals primarily as the result of parental shortcomings, rather than developing a broader understanding of how lives unfold. As important as parenting is, research shows that adult development is shaped by many influences, including: • Genetics • Neighborhood and community • Friendships and peer relationships • Siblings • Teachers, mentors, and other adults • Socioeconomic circumstances • Life events and opportunities Parents play a significant role, but they are only one part of a much larger developmental picture. One consequence of our culture’s intense focus on parenting is that it often assigns parents more responsibility than they actually possess. It can also encourage adult children to see parental imperfections primarily as reasons for anger rather than occasions for understanding, perspective, or compassion. No parent raises a child perfectly. Every parent falls short in some way. The question is not whether our parents made mistakes. The question is whether we can hold those mistakes within a larger and more balanced understanding of human development, family relationships, and the realities of being imperfect people raising imperfect children. If you need help in this area join us tonight for NOTE: This is part of my Tuesday Webinar Series for Estranged Parents and isn’t included in a Substack Paid subscription. However, I will be doing another Zoom Q and A for paid subscribers this Thursday. June 18 at 12 Pacific. You can get the Zoom invite below as well as the replay from last week’s. Please put all questions in the comments section rather than emailing them to me. And to get the replay to last week’s Substack Q and A for paid subscribers see below
This summer, we’re going to visit family in England and France. I’m excited for chubby babies and rainy beaches! For three weeks, the boys and I will be sticking to one carry-on each, so we can more easily navigate airports, trains, and buses.… Read more The post My England Packing List appeared first on Cup of Jo.
By now I’ve told you heaps about the Adriatic Writers Conference where we dove into the depths of the writing process and brought a dozen writers several steps closer to successful publication. I want to offer just a little taste of that to all of you. It’s a 60 minute online masterclass with me, organized and facilitated by book coach Maureen Wiley on June 30th at NOON ET! The question I get asked more than any other is how to actually write a book. To celebrate the release of The Parisian Heist, Maureen and I are offering a live masterclass where we’ll talk about everything I’ve learned over the course of writing more than ten books including: how to get started how to write a banger of a beginning and an ending how to write believable characters that readers want to spend time with how to create an ensemble that makes sense how to draft and edit what to do when you get stuck Plus my tips on how to find an agent. We will be doing a second one on how to market and sell a book. This one will be an hour long with plenty of time for Q&A and the only price of admission is that you buy the book. Consider it a bribe if you’d like. I’m not above that. Pre-order the book, send us your receipt, and you’ll get access to the masterclass, live Q&A, and a coaching session with Maureen. If you’ve already ordered consider yourself pre-invited. Just fill out the form with the email you used on our last pre-order form where we gave away this substack! Also anyone who orders now can also get this substack for a year for free. Talk about value, people :).
The Maccabiah Games are rolling out a brand‑new anthem for the first time in decades, and it’s a surprisingly playful mix of old and new. Two Israeli artists—singer‑rapper Nunu (Naomi Aharoni‑Ga) and rapper Jimbo J (Omer Havron)—took the 1981 “Maccabiah Song” by Naomi Shemer, added their own rap verses, and turned it into a catchy track called “Sport.” They kept a few of the original refrains, sped them up, and closed with the classic “am Yisrael chai,” but the middle is full of tongue‑in‑cheek lyrics like “I’m really, really good at sports” in both Hebrew and English.
The collaboration feels intentional: Nunu’s recent album captures Israel’s post‑October 7 mood, while Jimbo J is known for sharp cultural commentary. Together they blend silliness with a genuine sense of pride, especially in the chorus that invites athletes from around the world to “train for 2000 years” and reminds listeners that the Jewish community has been sporting for millennia.
The anthem also showcases the Games themselves—about 55 countries, over 8,000 athletes, and a few Olympic medalists like Artem Dolgopyat and Stav Hershko appear in the video. It’s a reminder that the old stereotype of Jews being “bad at sports” is just that—a stereotype, and the song leans into that with a wink.
If you’re looking for a fresh workout boost, the track’s upbeat rhythm and bilingual chant make it easy to sing along, even if you’re on a treadmill and only have a heavy Israeli accent to work with. It’s a fun, inclusive celebration that feels right for the summer.
In this episode, I sit down with my dad to talk about it all: what it was like raising kids while navigating an intense career, how he protected family time through the busy years, and what he hoped to teach each of his three daughters. We talk about why he never refers to himself as a “girl dad,” his single favorite thing about each of us, and how he and my mom kept their marriage a priority. He also shares why being a grandparent is “all of the fun things” with none of the burden and why he’s in the best chapter yet! Watch on YouTube Listen on Apple Listen on Spotify Key Takeaway / Points: The origin story of how he met my mom in high school His career pivot from psychology to finance The story behind creating the Amex Black Card How he and my mom kept their marriage a priority (and hitting their sweet spot in their 60s as empty nesters) His playbook for maximizing time with your kids during an intense career Adapting his parenting style to each of his daughters Grandparenting vs. parenting, and advice for soon-to-be grandpas Follow me: Instagram: @cameronoaksrogers Substack: Fill Your Cup Website: cameronoaksrogers.com TikTok: @cameronoaksrogers YouTube: Cameron Rogers
A couple of months ago I was grateful to be at the Skoll World Forum, reuniting with old friends and making some new friends, and learning, learning, learning. One of the topics threaded through many of the conversations was, of course, artificial intelligence (which one speaker argues is better named machine intelligence). Are you intrigued, scared, confused about the role that this new technology is and will play in our lives and the lives of our families and communities at this fragile time? Me too! Here are some of my learnings and hunches after listening deeply. I wanted to share them with you so we can keep learning together: We are living through a moment of punctuated evolution. The world marches along sometimes, and then other times it races. We are in a fast-paced era of violent change. There is so much tragedy and possibility—norms, people, technologies, ecosystems dying and being born minute-by-minute. It’s dizzying and de-stabalizing on so many levels, so if you’re feeling that, it’s real and you’re not alone. Machine intelligence is decent at connecting people to life-saving information when they need it (think about a teenage girl who doesn’t feel like she can talk to any adults in her life finding out about contraceptive options via a chatbot created by Girl Effect, for example); it is much more dynamic and potentially perilous when it’s used for relational purposes (think of AI-assisted suicides among young people). One of the dangers of the relational uses of AI are the ways in which it parrots the human interacting with it. This leads to reinforcement of one’s worldview, whether you’re talking about your spouse or your president. We always need authentic and nuanced feedback about how we think and how we impact others, and we are at a particular moment when we are more politically and culturally polarized than ever. Being reinforced by a machine designed to keep us hooked is not supportive of our personal or collective evolution. Some are saying that AI is the end of storytelling, that writers like me will be out of a job in no time. But I actually sense the opposite. I wonder if we will become even more attached to and supportive of the human artists that we love, their weirdness, the lived experience they bring to their creations, their embodied intelligence, and society will experience at artistic resurgence where we really understand the value of human-made art again. Machine learning can be useful in cutting down on our administrative load as caregivers and engaged citizens. This is exciting, when one things about caregivers having their cognitive load reduced so they can spend more time with their loved ones having fun and less time arguing with insurance companies. But, as one expert I sat next to at the conference pointed out, if AI is integrated into our already and still broken systems, like healthcare, they might just make immoral systems more efficient. What’s the good in that? Imagine an AI-powered process that helps caregivers connect to respite support faster, but then there aren’t enough people actually providing the respite or funding to support the program; in this case you are moving caregivers faster towards wait times and learned helplessness. As machine intelligence becomes ever more integrated into our lives and the systems that run through them, natural and human intelligence will become ever more instructive and sacred. We will crave to have embodied experiences. We will crave being together with other bodies, other spirits, other vibes. The reality is, this technology is here and it’s not going anywhere. One speaker claimed that 1 out of 3 people globally is already using AI for mental health support! There is no putting the genie back in the bottle, which means it is urgent for us to befriend and influence that genie! I’m left wondering how historically marginalized people can shape large language learning models and machine intelligence so that the AI of tomorrow is more just, more culturally-relevant, and more helpful to those who need to access power and accurate information the most? And how do we make sure the climate impacts are contained and don’t become one more area where already marginalized people are further marginalized by a resource rich people are using? When it comes to power and safety, there are SO many valid questions around machine learning and we desperately need wiser, slower, more collectively conscious people in discernment and decision-making positions around its roll-out. I think the Center for Humane Technology has some of the best explainers on what the dangers are and what we can do about it. I’ve often felt like the guys in Silicon Valley currently leading the AI charge need a major dose of big sister energy—someone who can help them take seriously how much this technology can impact humanity and our shared future.
The UK government just announced that, starting soon, children under 16 will be barred from most social‑media platforms. It’s a policy decision, not something backed by a new study, and the goal is to boost online safety and give kids more of their childhood back.
From a parent’s angle, the rule can make it easier to set clear limits on screen time and might shift broader expectations about how kids use smartphones. That practical upside feels like a relief for anyone juggling young children and digital temptations.
At the same time, the move raises concerns for mental‑health professionals. Cutting off access could limit social connection and the benefits some platforms provide, and the long‑term effects on young people aren’t yet clear. It’s a trade‑off between immediate safety and the nuanced ways digital life shapes wellbeing.
This piece appeared originally in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the startup world, there’s a measure that founders and investors pay close attention to: the burn rate. Before a company is generating positive cash flow, the burn rate measures how much money a company is losing each month as it uses its available cash to cover expenses. Dividing a company’s total cash position by its burn rate tells you how many months of runway it has before it needs to raise more cash, get acquired, or fold. In contrast, the measures that we typically use to determine the health of a college — via the Department of Education Composite Financial Score, Moody’s Ratings, the Forbes College Financial Grade, and the like — focus on net assets and income statements. But income statements can hide negative cash flows, and net assets include a college’s endowment, large percentages of which are often restricted. Net assets also include an institution’s property and physical plant — assets that are not easily liquidated to cover expenses when times get tough. Take Hampshire College, for example. Plans for the development of a portion of its 800-acre property to generate cash fell through in December 2025 — and that paved the way for its closure. Ultimately, cash is the key measurement. How many years — or months — can an institution pay its bills through the cash it has on hand and the cash that is generated in the normal course of operations, all else being equal?
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