It Takes A Village

It Takes A Village is an RNZ parenting podcast built on interviews. Kathryn Ryan, of RNZ National's Nine to Noon, puts one family question at a time to someone who works on it professionally. The range of ages is wide. At one end, Dr Natalie Flynn takes on the flood of information that comes with a new baby: breastfeeding, whether to leave a baby to cry, vaccination, co-sleeping. Her rule is that a parent who is emotionally well, responds predictably with calm, warmth and delight, and in time sets clear boundaries has covered what matters. Much of the rest, she says, is opinion dressed as fact. At the other end are teenagers and the practical problems they bring. Warren Nanwu, a financial well-being program manager at Westpac, advises leaving the word budget out of money talks and steering teens away from get-rich-quick advice on social media. His practical tip is to have part-time pay go into an online savings account and move a set amount across for spending, so saving happens automatically. Dr Marie Davies from Auckland University argues that critical thinking needs material worth arguing about. Her advice to anyone teaching it is not to be afraid of controversy. Anishma Ram of the Dental Association deals with a stubborn problem: older children who now run their own routines. Her answer is to build brushing and flossing into the morning and afternoon until it happens without thinking. School-age children get their own conversation, with speech and language therapist Christian Wright on getting a child to talk about the day. The advice is food first, because tired, hungry children are not ready for a complicated conversation, and the HALT checklist of hungry, angry, lonely and tired comes up too. The car also comes up as a good place to talk, since sitting side by side means no eye contact, with a wry caveat about children who have just come out of an exam. The difficult subjects get the same plain treatment. Therapist, educator and researcher Jo Robertson calls for tighter restrictions on online pornography, in a country with no meaningful age verification system. She says young people want adults, especially family members, to talk with them about it, and she urges keeping devices in shared spaces and starting early. The New Zealand setting runs through the practical detail, from free basic dental care until 18 to children waiting for dental surgery under general anaesthetic. Where to start depends on the child's age: 'How to cut through the noise as a new parent' for the newborn stage, or 'Critical thinking for teens to manage the online world' later on. What each conversation offers is specific tactics rather than a parenting philosophy.