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In the season ender Elise and Amy take a look back at what they've learned most this season, where we're at now, and where things might go from here.

Leslie Forde joins us to talk about what she calls the "Mom's Hierarchy of Needs," and what she's hearing from companies about their desire and commitment to come out of the pandemic with dramatically improved workplaces.

Petra Bueskens, is a psychologist and social scientist in Australia, and a well-known motherhood researcher worldwide. She coined the term "strategic absence" to describe a tactic she saw while studying women who were deliberately trying to upend traditional gender dynamics in their home. The idea is that if you plan the occasional absence from the home, not only does it help maintain your independence, but also it forces everyone else in the household to share the load of domestic tasks. But ... can it work in a pandemic?

Midwife and public health research Janelle Palacios grew up on the Flathead reservation and specializes in native families. In this episode, she walks us through how American social workers pathologized Indigenous family structures, the long period of family separation in tribal communities that followed, and all the many ways that a communal approach to family is better than the nuclear family approach.

Writer Heather B. Armstrong (aka Dooce) and author & Longest Shortest Time creator Hillary Frank join us to talk about the history of the mom beat and why it's still not taken seriously.

School's not back after the summer, exposing even more need for after school programs that have filled the gap for working families. But those programs face a precarious funding future. Nikki Yamashiro from the Afterschool Alliance joins to share her latest research. PLUS a brief history of how daycare shame started in America. Check out the Afterschool Alliance: http://www.afterschoolalliance.org/

Dr. Beth Sawin has spent decades studying systems change, and what she's learned about the climate crisis and various other crises gave us a surprising feeling ... dare we say hope?

Japanese fatherhood researcher Masako Ishii-Kuntz explains why Scandinavian-style family support families failed in Japan (complete with applicable lessons for the U.S.), and why she's placing her faith in an unusual solution to gender inequality: home economics classes.

Sociologist Julie Kohler is a senior advisor at The Democracy Alliance. She joins us to talk about where the idea that every (nuclear) family should fend for themselves even came from, and what the pandemic tells us about the need to find a new model. Read her story "The End of Family Values," in Boston Review: http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/julie-kohler-end-family-values

We were already digging into the research on various problems facing American families, and then COVID-19 hit and ratcheted all of it up a notch. This season we'll look at where the nuclear family ideal came from, the relationship between families and the school system, how and why mothers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds face very different experiences of motherhood in America, how the climate, COVID and parenting crises intersect, and much more. Subscribe now so you won't miss our first episode, dropping August 18th ... the day school was supposed to start again.