The following is a transcript of Episode 2 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: Hello and welcome to Perfect Jewish Parents, a new podcast from the Sham Hartman Institute, about the joys and oys of raising children Jewishly. I am Masua Sagiv, I’m a scholar in residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute.

You know, Masua, my wife likes to catalog the conversations she has with her kids, especially when they’re like really Facebook-worthy. And my son in particular is great at asking amazing questions, though they often come at crazy times. And there was one time, a 15 minute period in which he just like threw at, ask all these questions. Why do people have different voices? What makes us laugh? How big is the eardrum? How would someone eat a lion? What makes us ticklish?

Masua: Of course. How would someone eat a lion is of course the question that we always think about. 

Josh: It’s like, where do they come from?

Masua: Just from the last week, my three-year-old asked me, when you’ll be my age, can you play with me? And can the outside be inside? Which I was like, umm?

Josh: It, it stopped you in your, uh, I don’t know how to respond to this

Masua: Yes.

Josh: Right? That question of responding is really interesting, because on one hand the speed at which our children lob questions, not to mention the range of topics is both impressive and occasionally infuriating.

Masua: And of course a lot of the times these questions come at bedtime, or when we’re just trying to get out of the door to go to school. And even if not, some of these questions are extremely challenging because we are not sure about the answers ourselves.

So today joining us for this conversation is Scott Hershovitz, who’s the Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor of Law and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. And last year he published his book, Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.

And we wanted to talk with Scott about why kids are particularly good at having big conversations. and how these big conversations and big questions that kids ask us provide an opportunity to engage in curiosity and in creativity, even though sometimes they can be very challenging.

Josh: We’ll be back with that conversation in a moment. 

One of the reasons we wanted to talk to Scott today is because he has written really compellingly, a book for parents about talking philosophy with your children. And in the book you talk a lot about your son’s, Hank and Rex, who are major characters in the book.

 And I wonder by way of introduction, if you could share with us a little bit about how this project came into being. When did you first notice the philosophical thinking of your kids? 

Scott: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. It’s really exciting to connect with people who are interested, not just in big conversations, but in big conversations with kids. I was kind of surprised, like not long after we had Rex, who’s our older one, maybe around the time he was one, I started to notice that he did things that were interesting to a philosopher, just sort of the ways in which he was acquiring language.

But then once he could talk, certainly as he moved into two or three, he started to ask questions that were recognizably philosophical and we started to have conversations about them. And I initially didn’t have an idea for a book I would just take these things into my classroom. You know, I teach philosophy in a law school and, if we were having a conversation say about punishment, rather than start with whatever abstract philosophy or legal case we’d read, I’d say, Hey, let me tell you a story about something one of my kids did, and ask them, Hey, how do you think we should respond to this bad behavior? 

And two things would happen. First, the class would come alive. People as you know, really love to talk about kids and the crazy things they do. And the second was that, my students would start to have ideas about the purposes of punishment. What are we trying to accomplish when we punish, say a kid? So we’d open up these philosophical conversations in a way that was super relatable, and then we could turn to the legal cases or to the philosophy.

And eventually I just realized I was talking so much, to my students about my kids. And then I started to do it with my colleagues too. And I thought, well, maybe there’s a broader audience. If these stories about kids really make philosophy come alive, in an academic setting, maybe that could help with a broader audience too.

Masua: So, you know, on the one hand you got me noticing much more closely to what my kids are asking me, and I’m grateful for that. But on the other hand, and I don’t know if it’s something wrong with me or with my kids, but most of my kids’ questions are definitely not big. A winner is what are we eating today, followed closely by why are we eating that?

So we want to start our conversations. How do we guide them to ask these questions, especially when they’re not really young anymore?

Scott: Yeah, so I think like one of the main features of being a parent is just like you’re lost in a blur of questions. So I cite the psychologist, Michelle Rinard, who recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with her kids. And, I forget the exact statistics, but it worked out, that over the hundreds of hours she listened to, children were averaging more than two questions per minute. Most of those questions, as you say, aren’t particularly deep, aren’t particularly philosophical. They’re what’s for dinner? Or where’s my toy? 

But my suspicion is that buried in the blur are actually some big, deep questions., they’re not gonna come out every day, but they’re gonna come out every once in a while. So part of what I want parents to do is just to pay attention, and to see if you can catch those moments when a kid is asking, right? 

So we sent both of our kids to the Jewish Community Center preschool. Both of them came home with questions about God, questions about whether God was real. You know, Rex one night at dinner just sort of wonders aloud whether he’s dreaming his entire life, which is of course a philosophical question that has, ancient roots, both in Western and Chinese philosophy. You know, I don’t want people to get the mistaken impression that having a kid is like having a full-time philosophy seminar. You’ve gotta listen for it. But then also, you can structure these conversations if there are particular issues that you want to engage them about. 

Sometimes you can do it by telling them a story and asking a question about that story. So I might, tell them about, a problem I’m having, a student who say, didn’t tell me the truth, and ask them, is it okay to lie? What do you think of appropriate consequences? Should there be a consequence for people that lie? You can get conversations going that way by sharing stories from real life. 

You can also get conversations going through picture books. There’s a really wonderful website that I like to recommend to people called Teaching Children Philosophy, which has teaching modules for lots of common picture books and books you probably read over and over again in a way of making them more interesting is to check out that website before you say read Knuffle Bunny for the seven-millionth time. And it’ll give you some suggestions of questions you can ask that will engage your children about philosophical topics through those books.

Masua: But preferably not at bedtime. Right, because then you are really exhausted.

Scott: I’ve got, mixed views about bedtime actually. Cause two things are happening. One is it’s, quieter in the house and there’s less distraction and your kid wants to extend the day. And so they may be willing to engage a longer conversation or a more intellectual conversation than they would when there was some other activity that was available to them. 

But then of course, you’re exhausted and you may not have the energy for it.I think it’s worth remembering that like it doesn’t need to be a part of every bedtime, but bedtime is actually, at least for us and our kids, has been a really terrific opportunity to have some of these conversations.

Josh: I think the notion of, oh, can you listen to your children’s questions from a different vein is helpful. Cause I’ve noticed myself since reading the book, trying to be more attentive to, in what way is this a philosophical question?

And then like, my four year old yells from the bathroom is my butt the front or the back? And I was like, oh God, like how, what? And then I’m like, oh, well that is like, you’re asking big questions of body, and categorization and how do I come to know things. But it’s also like when are you gonna understand? 

Scott: Oh my God. Can I just say I love that question. If there’s a sequel, “Is my butt the front or the back is absolutely going in it.” What did, what did you say?

Josh: Well, that then leads to many questions about why she doesn’t have a penis, but her brother does have a penis, so I think I, I just sort of said, it’s your back and we’re working on wiping these days, so it didn’t, I was hearing it, but I didn’t get to the point. 

Scott: Oh, that was a practical question. It wasn’t a question about the nature of front and back. I get it now.

Josh: Yes, but I, that’s, you’re, able to hear it in a particular way, which is I think part of what you’re sort of encouraging parents to do.

When you talk about God and Judaism, you introduce this notion of fictional wisdom. I think that’s the term which I found really, thoughtful and profound and interesting, which is to say, on one hand you’re writing for a general audience in which practice may not be the nature of their religious experience. Whereas in Judaism, I think we understand within the Jewish world, the myriad of practices one could do is sometimes connected to whether or not you believe in God, but it can also be connected to a whole bunch of other things.

And you introduce sort of, well, I’m pretending I’m going and doing all these things and I’m pretending, and I do that for all these other reasons, and it’s not about God. And I was struck by that. I think it’s a really interesting notion of what it means to be a people with a set of cultural tools. And sometimes God can an impediment to that conversation whether with our kids or with our spouses or just as adults. 

And I’m wondering if you could share a little bit more about, how you’ve navigated sort of the set of Jewish practices that you do in your family and the conversation about God, which sometimes feels connected and sometimes doesn’t. 

Scott: So this chapter was really born out of a conversation that I had with Rex when he was four years old. So I said like, buried in the blur, you sometimes get these deep questions. And one question he had persistently, when he was at the JCC preschool was, is God real? And I like just to toss these questions back at kids. So, you know, we talked about it before. On this particular occasion, I was cooking dinner and he said, is God real? And I said, What do you think? 

And he said, I think that for real God is pretend and for pretend God is real. And it came out just that smooth. And I was stunned by it in the moment. And I said, Wait a minute, what do you mean by that? And he said, I think that God isn’t real, but when we pretend, he is. And I’ve been thinking about that really ever since he said it. He’s about to be a Bar mitzvah. So the last nine years, nearly a decade I’ve spent thinking about what he had to say. And it really helped me understand myself and my relationship to religion better because, as you say, there’s lots of ways in which I engage in religious practice.

We’re members of a synagogue and we observe holidays and participate in rituals and I’ll fast on Yom Kippur, and we’ll keep Passover and our children will have Bar Mitzvahs. But I haven’t thought of myself as someone who believes in God, certainly not belief in the existence of the God, of the stories that we tell. And so I always had this sort of like what I thought of as a kind of contradiction, lurking in the background. 

And then like thinking about what re said helped me appreciate that one way of engaging religion is as a kind of pretend play, right? So that as Rex put it, God isn’t real, but when we pretend he is. And in just the ways that like play can enrich a child’s life, imagining worlds that don’t really exist, I think that the same sort of pretend can enrich our lives. And I came to realize that these traditions lend a structure to my life and provide occasions for celebrating and ways of celebrating and ways of connecting to a community and connecting to a past. And I value all that, even if I sort of lack the metaphysical commitment to there being a God.

Josh: It reminded me of, there’s this essay that I really love by Adam Seligman and a couple of other authors, about ritual and the limits of sincerity that ritual creates a world of, “as if.” It’s a possible world. And he says, when you’re telling your kids to say thank you, you don’t need them to be sincere in their belief of like, thank you. In fact, my worst self as a parent when I’m trying to get my kids to sincerely express an idea, but when I get them to like, play the game, that what we’re doing, is we’re doing this active play. We’re imagining a world in which we can all get along. God willing, that would be in my house, at dinner time. So ritual actually gives you sort of a foundation upon which, to engage with one another and that’s all underlined or rooted in this notion of play.

Masua: By the way, we are doing it with our kids as well, not just, we’re expecting our kids to say thank you, even if they don’t mean it. At times, I find myself telling myself to be more patient and say stuff to my kids, even if I don’t mean them, because I know that’s better parenting and when I’m calm, I’d be glad I did that and acted that way.

Scott: You know, I think it’s really insightful, like the thought that you get them to engage in these customs, these rituals. Sometimes you’re doing that in the hope that the feelings that are being expressed eventually attach themselves to those expressions. So you hope that by teaching your kids to say thank you, that they’ll come to feel gratitude, right? So it’ll come to be genuine and you hope that as a parent, right, I push myself in some of the ways you do that you’ll come to have the attitudes that you’re expressing, in the moment, the ones that you know you should have, even if you’re not feeling them. 

What I think was a realization for me that this conversation with Rex, helped me get to was, my religion can be valuable even if we don’t arrive at that spot further on. I think that some people have read that essay in the New York Times or read the chapter on God in the book and they’ve reacted to it, like, I hope Scott, that you get fully there. Right? That, you know, 

Josh: No, yeah. 

Scott: And, maybe like, I would be fine if I got fully there. I’m not ruling it out. But also I’ve come to appreciate all of the many ways in which my connection to Judaism and my Judaic practices are valuable to me, even if I don’t arrive at full belief.

Josh: I mean, I would just say I would never want belief to be an impediment for people to play in the world of Judaism. It feels like so sad to me. And I’m a pretty God-centered individual in my own life. But I just find it’s, that they’re two very different experiences 

Scott: I think one of the things I really value about Judaism is its openness about belief. That it cares more about what you do in the world and who you are in the world, than what you think about these questions. You know, I sometimes marvel at the messages of other religions and think I would never make it, even for a day. 

But I also think that there’s a connection between that openness and attitude and right this philosophical enterprise of, in our house, like big questions are up for debate and there are no views that are off limits. There are no litmus tests for beliefs that you have to have to be a good member in standing of this religious community, of this family and, it’s something I really value about Judaism.

Masua: Your answer for God is pretending, but let’s say I’m not sure what my own answer is, either about God or in other subjects. so is the right way to deal with a subject in which I’m not sure about, in which I have doubts with, is to talk about it with my child? Is there a line we can say, this is actually too much to talk about with my kid and, you know, you differentiate between, young kids who have tendency to philosophy and grownups who are realistic.

And at some point you are asking, why do the laundry when the world may not be what it seems? Now for you, the fact that the world may not be what it seems is awesome. For me, it’s terrifying. And for me, I mean, that’s exactly the reason why I do the laundry. I do the laundry because that’s a way to deal with the helplessness towards the big questions and especially, the consequences that they have, towards our lives, and when we are parents. 

I agree with you that we have a responsibility to open our minds and open our children’s minds but it also seems to me that we might have a responsibility to provide our kids with stability and even, yes, with answers at times. So I’d love to hear your take on, when is doing philosophy with our kids an act of great parenting and when is it almost betraying our responsibilities as parents?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a really wonderful question. I hadn’t framed the issues quite that way. So here’s what I wanna rule out, like at the very beginning of your question, you said if I don’t know the answer, maybe I don’t want to have the conversation with my kid. And actually that’s the attitude that I wanna change, because one thing I think is super cool about these big philosophical conversations with your kids is that they upend the standard hierarchy in the relationship that you have with them.

So usually you are the person with the answers. If they want to know where something is or how something works, you are the person who can tell them. But if they want to know what happens when you die. Or whether there’s a God, you are a person with views, perhaps, and questions of your own, but you’re not a person with the answer.

There’s this philosopher I really admire named Gareth Matthews, who is maybe the first person to come alive to the philosophical abilities of kids. And he said that one thing that’s super cool. Doing philosophy with your kids is that it can be genuinely collaborative. You’re gonna bring different things to the conversation. They’re more open-minded and creative than you are because they haven’t, figured out the standard explanations of things they haven’t learned not to ask different kinds of questions. You know more about the world. You’re gonna be a more disciplined, more rigorous, more sustained thinker. 

But he thought you can, in conversation together, collaborate in a way that it’s really hard to collaborate with your kids in other areas of life. So I would say never let the fact that you don’t know an answer stop you from having conversation with your kid. In fact, tell your kid that you don’t know and ask them what their ideas are and share your ideas and try and make it a genuine partnership.

All that said, I don’t want my philosophical conversations with my kids to increase their anxiety about the world, or to raise new worries. So I think you want to present age appropriate puzzles to your kids, not overwhelm them. Try and meet them where they are. But chances are, your kids have some anxieties, they have some big questions. They’re worried about death or they’re worried about God. Or maybe like, I grew up in the south as the only Jewish kid in school, I was told I was going to hell by other kids on other occasion. 

Like if you think your kid is out in the world picking up stuff like this, you don’t want it to be something they’re struggling with on their own. So find out what their anxieties are and see if you can suit them through conversation, but I agree, there’s no reason to add existential worry where they have none.

Josh: It’s very clear that your children are not just angelic philosophers that are enlightened, philosophical gentlemen, but you know, how do you navigate the interactions and the partners and the, all that stuff?

Scott: Well, you know, I don’t wanna give a misleading impression of what the book is like. It’s not all conversations with my kids. Sometimes it’s philosophical reflection on them. One of my favorite stories in the book is when Hank comes home and reports in a very mysterious way that he’d taken revenge on one of his classmates who’d called him Flufer Dufer. And then you’re referencing, you know, some of the conflicts that we have, around bath time or about, whether we’re playing with each other’s toys, things like that. And those provide, in the book, an occasion to reflect on punishment and what parents are trying to accomplish when they punish kids, and how similar or different it is to what the criminal justice system tries to do when it dispenses punishment or conversations about revenge, trying to understand why we all have this impulse and whether it’s something that should be restrained or whether there are aspects of it we should try to honor and find substitutes for. 

On the question of like, how do we deal with the chaos of parenting? I feel like, not well is often is, is often the answer. And you can see in the book, I think, some of my attempts to think through some of our foibles are first and early failed attempts to punish Rex and, what went wrong and what could we be trying to do differently? I am blessed, the other thing I should say, I’m blessed to live with a social worker. My wife, is a therapist. And, she is the calm voice in our house who knows better how to address the chaos. So maybe the answer is, if it’s not too late for you, parent with a professional.

Josh: I’m still trying to marry rich, but that didn’t happen either. So

Masua: This is so interesting because my social experience here in America is so different than, the one that I had in Israel. Yes. Because here no one cares what I choose to practice or what I’m doing or what, what my family’s doing. But in Israel, there’s a whole web of institutions,, that are affected or in which my family is affected by my choices. 

Josh: Meaning like you belong to a synagogue and you go to a day school here, but it’s different?

Masua: It’s different. Yes. It’s different because, because I’m much freer to observe and or not observe certain practices. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I’m still an outsider and not really belong to the community. So let’s say even when I’m talking about here, right? So, I’m personally, sociologically, observant. But there are some practices which I find immoral or that doesn’t seem right to me.

But then the philosophical conversations that I have with my children, let’s say about Jews versus not Jews or intermarriage or antisemitism, they can come into conflict with my community, with school, with society. So how do we deal with the fact that my family is not an independent unit and there is the community outside, when we are having these conversations?

Scott: I think it’s a really interesting question. I write in the book there’s a chapter on knowledge. Actually it’s not even a chapter on knowledge. It’s a chapter on truth that comes before the chapter on knowledge. And it defends the idea that there are objective truths, but then asks, why is it that we have so much trouble agreeing on them? And it introduces two notions epistemologists have. An idea of an epistemic bubble and the idea of an echo chamber.

So an epistemic bubble is a situation where you’re shielded from contrary sources of information. So, if you only ever read one newspaper or you only ever watched one news station, then you’d only get the views represented through that paper or through that TV station. Epistemic bubbles actually turn out to be super easy to pop. And very few people live in a real epistemic bubble because they’re at least aware that there are other TV stations, and maybe they flip past them sometimes, or they see other news on the internet.

Echo chambers are really much more pernicious. You’re in an echo chamber where people are trying to actively undermine contrary sources of information. So I think of like Rush Limbaugh as somebody who really worked to create an echo chamber among his listeners, to tell them that anybody who disagreed with him had bad motives, was out to get his listeners. And so even though you might encounter outside information, you were immediately disposed to distrust it. 

And one observation I make towards the end of this chapter is, families for little kids are epistemic bubbles, right? They’re little kids’ only source of information, and, at least until they start going to school, having, you know, peer groups that extend beyond their family, and that’s how it’s easy to create some of the magical beliefs of childhood. Because they don’t encounter contrary stories. So you can tell them there’s a tooth fairy, and they’ll believe you for a while.

I think it’s important, even though a family is an epistemic bubble, not to let it be an echo chamber. Not to have your kids distrustful of all other sources of information, even the sources of information that you might disagree with. If they’re gonna live in a pluralistic society, they’re going to go out in the world and they’re gonna encounter people that think differently than they do. 

I want my kids to be open-minded, but also prepared for critical engagement. So we talk more about trying to figure out who’s trustworthy, and how you assess sources of information. Is kind of like the toolkit I think I need to give them as a parent.

Josh: I’ve been thinking a lot about how you cultivate critical engagement and also how you cultivate as my eldest enters pre-adolescence, some sort of deference to expertise and knowledge, whether it’s your teachers or like, oh, it might be that I actually know something, and I’m wondering, have you ever encountered it where the desire for the sort of critical conversation translates into like, oh, I’m gonna argue with you right now, cause I think I’ve learned some ways to philosophically challenge and you have to say this isn’t the right time. Or they start doing it with their teacher or their principal or what have you. What does that look like? 

Scott: I don’t know if it’s a downside, but there is, a shift that comes if you parent the way I’m suggesting, which is your kids become adept at arguing and they feel empowered to argue. I think this happens naturally for many kids anyway, but they lose whatever disposition they might have had sometimes to defer to your authority.

 But I try to lean into that too, right? To have conversations about why it is that I get to decide there’s a chapter in authority on this book. And sometimes the answer might be because I know things that you don’t, right? That’s true especially when they’re little. Sometimes it might be that not being in the situation you’re in, I can see it more clearly. I don’t have the kind of biases, that you do, or I’ve developed habits of self-control that you don’t have. And I’ll tell my kids about that. Sometimes it might be that, like, it’s just that a decision has to be made and, you know, when you’re an adult, it will be your decision to make, but for now, it’s my decision to make.

And I’m comfortable sometimes, asserting my authority in that way. And sometimes preemptively, if there’s not time to have a conversation, what I encourage parents to do is just return to it later. And to have a conversation about why you made the decision you did, right? Like one thing I wanna communicate to parents is, your authority to settle a question doesn’t mean to act however you wanna act. You should try to get things right and when there’s time, you should be willing to share those reasons with your kids because you’re trying to help them reach a stage where they can make good judgements for themselves.

Masua: This also feels like a respecting kind of parenting that generates maybe a different kind of trust than the trust of the epistemic bubble. Because I feel like as our kids grow older, they respect the fact that we respect them and they learn to trust us because we trust them with asking the questions. And as you said before, Scott, collaboratively understanding the world around us.

Scott: I think part of earning that trust is being willing to acknowledge when you’ve got it wrong. I find it hard sometimes, especially now that we’ve reached adolescence, but I will go to my kids and say, hey, I’m, I’m sorry I got upset, or I’m sorry I made that decision and I’ve been thinking it through and I made a mistake and I tell them, like, when you’re thinking about people in the outside world, that you should trust the people who would tell you if they got it wrong. And so I’m trying to be that kind of parent, that would be upfront, honest, and say, I made a mistake and here’s why. And I’m.

Josh: That’s such a great approach. Scott, thank you so much for talking with us. 

Our last segment is called On One Foot. It’s a moment when we respond to a question that’s been posed to us by children. I’ll start with a question I got last night. My four year old turned to me and said, people eat cows? And I said, yes, in fact, you eat cows. And she said, why is it okay to eat cows? And I was stumped for a moment. How would you answer on one foot?

Scott: You know, so I think, and this reflects some of the conversation that we had earlier, I think I would start by saying I’m not sure that it is. And I’d wanna give the kid the first opportunity to make a case, because when that question comes, why is it okay, that child has probably already thought that maybe it’s not. And so I’d want to hear them articulate their reason for worry, and tell me why they think it’s not. And maybe ask them how it makes them feel, and what their concerns are. And then to share my, you know, I’m not a vegetarian. I eat meat. I try to eat meat that’s been treated humanely. Although, I exist in a world that’s not so good at treating animals humanely. So I probably fail in that more often than I would like, but I would like to share my uncertainty and my anxiety about that question with my child.

Josh: Nice.

Masua, is it okay to eat cows or animals? How would you answer? 

Masua: I think I’m gonna take this to a Jewish angle and say that although Jewish tradition does not forbid eating meat, and in fact it actually encourages us to eat meat, there are also clear views that say that eating meat is actually unethical and immoral and in the future we won’t be doing that anymore. And I think that I’ll want to talk about how there is a gap sometimes between our vision and our aspirations and between the reality that we’re facing right now.

Josh: Nice. I mean, obviously if I’m like, you have to eat dinner right now, I would be like, you have to eat dinner right now. This is one of those moments where you’re trying to get out at doing something I want right now. But I think if I have, the context is one in which there’s actually room for conversation. 

I think I would want to share my personal experience, which is I was a vegetarian. I’m no longer a vegetarian. We’re trying to eat less meat. I’m more concerned about environmental issues than about treating animals well. But I know that there’s an entire philosophical school right now about animals rights, and legal school. And so I’m interested in bringing that conversation to bear. 

If you have a question you want to submit to the show, please write to perfect Jewish [email protected].

Josh: Scott, it’s been a pleasure to have you here. We really appreciated your ideas about talking philosophically with our kids. It’s a great book, Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures and Philosophy With My Kids. It deals with big questions. It also deals with questions pertaining to Jewish life, so people should check it out.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Scott.

Scott: Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be part of the opening episode and I can’t wait to listen to more.

Masua: Thanks for listening to our show. 

Josh: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where we tackle pressing Jewish issues facing Jewish communities, so we can think better, and do better.

You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free, live classes, and events at shalomhartman.org. 

Masua: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. This episode was edited by our production manager, M Louis Gordon, and our theme music is by Luke Allen. Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creative. 

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Masua: If you have ideas for an episode, parenting questions, or if your kids asked you a question you want us to answer, send us an email to [email protected].

Josh: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.