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In this week’s edition of Slate’s parenting podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Slate editors Allison Benedikt and Dan Kois talk to University of Chicago professor Sian Beilock about parents’ and children’s math anxiety. Then elementary school teacher Matt Dicks reports from the first day of school while the wounds are still fresh. Plus, Rebecca Onion, Slate’s history writer, and her mother join us to answer a listener’s question about being a scholarship student at a private school, and parenting triumphs and fails.
This week on Slate Plus, Slate’s Julia Turner, editor in chief; Laura Moser, education writer; Doug Harris, director of technology; and Heidi Strom Moon, product manager, discuss their children’s first days of school.
Items discussed in the show:
- Slate on Virginia’s “Kings Dominion Law,” or, as Dan refers to it, “America’s finest law”
- “Intergenerational Effects of Parents’ Math Anxiety on Children’s Math Achievement and Anxiety” in Psychological Science
- How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel by Sian Beilock
- Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To by Sian Beilock
- “Square Root of Kids’ Math Anxiety: Their Parents’ Help” by Jan Hoffman and a test of your math anxiety in the New York Times
- Matt Dicks’ website
Mom and Dad recommend:
Allison recommends the two-part This American Life episode The Problem We All Live With and Wonder by R.J. Palacio for young readers.
Dan recommends Flop to the Top! by Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing for new readers and Space Dumplins by Craig Thompson for teens.
This week’s advertisers are:
- Little Passports. Keep your kids busy this summer with Little Passports, the award-winning subscription for kids. Right now, Mom and Dad Are Fighting listeners can save 40 percent on their first month today with promo code MOMANDDAD40. Learn more at littlepassports.com/momanddad.
- Casper, an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price. Casper mattresses come with free delivery and returns within a 100-day period. Listen to the episode for a $50 discount on any new mattress.
- Frank Einstein and the BrainTurbo, the third installment in the hilarious, best-selling children’s book series filled with inventions, science experiments, and baseball-playing robots, by author Jon Scieszka and mad scientist illustrator Brian Biggs. Frank Einstein and the BrainTurbo is on sale now from Amulet Books.
Follow us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should cover in the next edition. Got questions that you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833.
Podcast produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Jessie Chasan-Taber.