StrollerCoaster: A Parenting Podcast

StrollerCoaster is a parenting podcast created by Munchkin, the baby-products company, and it approaches early parenthood as a series of practical questions that deserve straight answers. Lynn Smith leads the conversations. In several episodes she is joined by co-host Justin Tyler, and their banter about being happy and being hungry loosens up the expert segments. Feeding is the subject the show keeps returning to. The titles make that clear: 'Formula? Breastmilk? Both? There’s No Wrong Answer.', 'Breastfeeding: Finding the Flow' and 'Feeding Without Frustration – From Breastfeeding to Solids (And Everything In Between)'. The formula conversation is introduced as the first of three episodes on formula and feeding. Its guests include Nona Willis-Aronowitz, introduced as an author and speaker who wrote an opinion piece. Lynn Smith does not pretend any of this came easily to her. She remembers feeling alone when she first became a mother, and says she can still feel that stress nine years later. She also admits she went all in on homemade purees before friends told her about baby-led feeding. Her openness sets up expert answers that mostly reassure instead of laying down rules. One guest explains that babies often want more milk at night in the first months and calls this a normal biological process. Another says purees and baby-led weaning are not competing camps and describes the choice as 'a buffet of options.' The show pays attention to parents as well as babies. In 'Parental Happiness w/Dr. Laurie Santos', the guest describes a national survey in which time management and technology came up as major struggles, and the conversation turns to why postpartum depression is harder for people who try to push through it alone. 'Stressless Snack Time w/Chef Duff!' takes on the after-school snack rush, and a guest named Jennifer suggests that children are likelier to try food they helped make. The commercial ties are out in the open. Target and Walmart are thanked as sponsors, and Munchkin's own products, including a new infant formula and a nipple shield called Flow, are promoted on air. Episodes close with a 'moment of calm', a spoken escape to places such as New Zealand dairy pastures, a New England wood in the early morning or a Pacific Northwest apple orchard. The same feed carries bonus StrollerCoaster StoryTime episodes for kids, hosted by Ross, which stage stories with actors and sound effects. In one of them, a girl named Samantha goes to the beach with a new red bucket and starts borrowing a shovel and starfish sand molds from other children.