I am continually impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge that Josh and Nicole have. The podcast is interesting and entertaining most of the time. However, I would encourage the hosts to continue to educate themselves on things outside their lived experiences. There was the early episode about not needing too many gadgets that completely ignored the needs of the disabled community - many of the gadgets named help cooking be accessible for the disabled. This newer episode about kids meals is another misstep. One of the hosts doesn’t have kids, and the other has 1 who is 8 months at time of recoding. While they admit in the episode that they did not do any academic research in preparation for the episode, if they had they would have seen that most children become picky in their toddler years. Of course, an eight month old will eat pretty much anything you put in front of it! The advice to share whatever the adults are eating with young children is sound advice backed up by research, but it ignores the very real and frequent phenomenon of children reverting back to safe beige foods in their toddler years. Additionally, this completely ignores neurodivergence and eating issues, such as ARFID. Also, part of the experience of going out to eat at restaurants with children is to teach them how to exist in polite society. This goes a lot easier for most families if they can almost guarantee that there will be something for their child to eat on the menu. In summary, this was a misstep. I would encourage Josh and Nicole to have an expert on the show to weigh in if it’s a topic outside of their lived experience and if they’re unable to do the research.
