Whether you’re a parent or not, if you listen to podcasts you may well have noticed a huge glut of shows aimed at people with kids, clogging up the iTunes chart like families packed into your local Tesco on a Saturday morning. Currently riding high is Here We Go Again, the new show from Loose Women panellist Stacey Solomon (premise: ‘Stacey Solomon has just had a baby … several years after her last baby!’) From the same producers, there’s also Confessions of a Modern Parent, in which Nadia Sawalha – also from the ITV daytime staple – talks about ‘[navigating] the minefield of parenting teenagers into well-adjusted adults’. Elsewhere, there’s Happy Mum, Happy Baby – in which celebrities tell Giovanna Fletcher about the challenges and triumphs of raising children – and the comedian Josie Long’s show Josie and Johnny Are Having a Baby (With You!) among many, many others.
There are now so many of them that parenting podcasts have become a genre of their own, like true crime or middle-aged comedians getting angry about the word ‘woke’. It’s easy to see why. Having kids can simultaneously be overwhelming and lonely, and nothing helps like knowing that other people feel the same way, especially via a medium as intimate as podcasting. The touchstones – especially during the early years – are so universal that it can be genuinely helpful to hear other people struggle with the same thing without fear of judgment.
I’ve only really latched on to a couple of them, but they’re arguably the best two. The Longest Shortest Time is basically the This American Life of parenting podcasts, with each episode covering a different parent-specific subject with precision and authority. There have been episodes about single trans parents, about the architecture of a teenage brain, about polyamorous parenting. There was just a three-part sperm special, which sperm fans should definitely check out.
The other podcast is Scummy Mummies, where comics Helen Thorn and Ellie Gibson interview celebrities about parenting. This one is looser and warmer than The Longest Shortest Time. It’s also capable of disarming devastation at times. One early episode – Ellie’s New Baby – was devoted to recounting one of the host’s recent traumatic birth, and it’s still one of the most affecting podcast episodes I’ve ever heard. The pair maintain their humour, but the trauma of the birth and its aftermath is still palpable. By the end of it everyone is in tears. It is a gorgeous example of podcasting.
But that isn’t to say that all parents should have a podcast. I count myself in that – and I should know because I had one. The Naughty Step was a fortnightly parenting podcast I co-hosted with my wife that hit the skids for a number of reasons. One was simple practicality (recording, editing and releasing a podcast is an absolute pain, especially when you could be spending that time with your actual children) and another was that it was pretty self indulgent. There are so many podcasts in the world that something has to be truly special to stand out. What we had, like approximately 95% of all parenting podcasts, were two people waffling about their children.
Besides, parenting podcasts can be a terrible place to go to get advice. When you don’t even have time to get dressed properly every day, there is something supremely offputting about the thought of devoting an hour of your life to directionless waffle just so you can find out which brand of formula milk is the best.
In the end, all parents want is a friend in their ear. A peer who can relax them, or inform them, or just help them feel their way through the dark. Someone who understands. And that isn’t going to be the same person for everyone. Some podcasts – especially a few by big-name Instagram influencers – struck me as vapid and insincere. Others are too dry, or too specific. I found my home in The Longest Shortest Time and Scummy Mummies – two hugely different shows. For you, it might be someone totally different. But it will be someone. Especially when the alternative is to go outside and actually talk to another parent. That, I think we can all agree, is about as appealing as being covered in baby barf.
