ON PARENTING…with Andy Cohen and Caitlin Moran

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1:41Reflecting on the joys and challenges of parenting with two former How to Fail guests brings me a lot of joy, especially as I think back to one unforgettable moment, meeting one of my heroes, the one and only Andy Cohen, brilliant host and executive producer behind the Real Housewives franchise and Bravo's late night talk show King on Watch What Happens Live. Andy talks about a time he failed to be prepared with one of his children in the school playground and he felt he'd let his son down. The insecurity that came with that experience and the vulnerability he felt really will speak to so many of you.

2:21Then we go to the brilliant journalist and author, Caitlin Moran, who I recorded with way back in 2022, live at the Shoreditch Town Hall. Maybe you were there. Caitlin talks about the terrible sadness of realising her daughter had an eating disorder and how she didn't deal with it in the right way at first. First up though, here's Andy.

2:47Your second failure pertains to parenting. Yes. And it's failure to be prepared with with one of your children in the playground. This was just a specific instance where I was at a playground over a weekend with Ben. I think he was probably like three, and it was unseasonably warm that day. It was like an Indian summer, and it was a birthday party at a playground. And all of a sudden, they turned the water feature on at this playground, and all the moms had changes of clothes for their kids. And so the kids were then suddenly in swimsuits and running around the water. And Ben didn't have that.

3:34And I felt, now this was also, I went through a real serious moment early in Ben's life where I was going to these events with him, with his friends, where I didn't know anybody, and I was the only single parent. I was the only gay parent. I was famous. I felt, and I'm never, I do not carry around insecurity. I don't, I felt in those situations very vulnerable, insecure, unprepared, on display, judged. And it was all in my head, by the way. I've gotten over it, thank God. And it was really, and by the way, every parent group that I've been around has all been lovely and whatever. It was really in my head.

4:25It was my own insecurities. But at that moment, and I looked at him and I was just like, oh my God, my kid isn't able to be in the water and this was on me and whatever. And I just, I think I cried that day. I cried a couple times that day. I just felt lower than low. I felt so alone. I just felt like, and I felt very over my head and I felt like a failure. And what have I done to remedy that? Well, I think I've gotten my head together and I think I've just been in the game longer. And so I just have a confidence about it. And by the way, if I took Lucy to a thing and she didn't have a thing, I'd say, oh, I forgot it.

5:09All right. But it was a really vulnerable moment for me. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Sure. How much of that do you think was internalized social conditioning? Oh, all of it. All of it. Yeah. No one else noticed. It wasn't like anyone was like, oh, wow, Andy, he really... Ben was in the corner crying because he couldn't go in the water. He wasn't, by the way. Ben didn't know. notice. Okay. He did not notice. So I did.

5:46Your first failure is you wrote it to me as being so afraid of sadness. I did not deal with my daughter's eating disorder in the right way. Yes. So I was raised in a family that just kind of had never heard of or didn't believe in sadness. Like kind of whatever my problem was when I went and talked to my mother, whether it was like kind of like I have terrible period pains or I'm very depressed and anxious about the fate of the whales or kind of you know what will my life be like was always to say this why don't you have a poo and a hot bath and go to bed so that was that was sequentially yeah it wasn't you were doing you weren't doing them at the same time sometimes i did do the same time i have to admit it's a lovely image if you're clever enough with a hot water bottle and a duvet you can do all three at once but um but yes so we just didn't there were eight children and two parents in a three-bedroom council house in Wolverhampton and at one point they were breeding Alsatian dogs as well so it's a very it's a very crowded house full of poo and there wasn't time for anyone's emotions like kind of like you just couldn't have them and as I was saying before I was raised on musicals so for me it was like okay well I can like Marge Simpson says in The Simpsons I can take all my emotions and crush them down into a ball and push them to the bottom of my stomach and ignore them and simply watch the jolly musicals instead and I will just pretend that I'm cheerful Judy Garland cracking on with everything.

7:07And that has actually generally worked for me. Like I don't really have that many terrible emotions. I'm a very cheerful person. And so because it had worked for me, when my daughter started being depressed and anxious and scared of things at the age of 11 or 12, first of all, like they obviously told us to have a poo and a hot bath and go to bed. And then I progressed to why don't you take all your emotions and push them down to the bottom of your stomach? I'm sure it'll be fine. And then we watched a lot of musicals. and that oddly enough did not cure her of what is a mental illness like I did not know that that was the start of her being you know very profoundly mentally ill so how I'm sure there are people in the audience who know this and have experience of this whether themselves or someone they love and I just want to say hello I know what your life is like and you know I wish I could hug you all but you know for those who don't know an eating disorder is like an iceberg the bit where they stop eating and start self-harming and overdosing is the tip of an iceberg.

8:02What's underneath it is depression and anxiety. And as I came to understand in the years that followed, she was ill for five years, is that the reason someone starts physically showing you how unhappy and depressed they are by not eating, by turning into a skeleton, by cutting themselves up, by overdosing, is because they can't say it anymore. That if they were saying how sad and unhappy they were, that's all they'd be saying all day. And either they become bored of saying it, or they run out of ways of saying it, or they feel that it's not being understood, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they don't want to draw attention to themselves, or even the act of saying it makes them feel worse, that they have now gone into another phase where they're just going to physically show you all the time how unhappy they are.

8:43So it took a long time to understand that. And I went through many phases of trying to cure her anxiety and depression. First of all, I tried to reason her out of it. I was like, she's incredibly bright. I am reasonably clever. If I give her all the facts that she needs to know, then I will Ted talk her out of not eating. So I would talk to her about nutrition and energy and, you know, life and all these things you need to eat. Like, you know, every creature on earth needs to absorb energy in some way. You are no different from the plants or the animals you must eat. And that didn't work. And then I got angry and I was like, why are you doing this.

9:22You're an incredible girl. Life is amazing. You can make the choice to stop this now. Like, come on, just stop this. Like, don't do this. Take control of it. You're a strong girl. Stop. That didn't work. And then I thought maybe suffering like our Lord Jesus Christ might help and just cried a lot in front of her to show her how sad it was making me feel and going, if you can't feel how bad this is, if you're emotionally shut down, then maybe if you see in someone that you love, how sad it makes them to see what you're doing and how you're living your life. Maybe that will be the breakthrough that we need.

9:55And amazingly enough, that wasn't the answer either. And in the end, what I had to learn after a bunch of therapy and amazing experts and reading as much as I could is that what she really needed was for someone to look at her and say, you're sad, aren't you? You are sad. I can see that. I am so sorry that you feel this bad. I'm not scared of this you can talk to me about it I'm going to be with you all the way through this I have a plan I know what we need to do and I'm going to help you however hard it is to work through this plan that will make you better and that took five years to learn that because when I and I went everywhere and I rang everyone and I looked for all the information there isn't anywhere that tells you that that's what is happening and that's what you need to do everything that I've learned is pieced together from hundreds of different sources.

10:47And that was why I wanted to write about it in the book, because when she finally got better, she and she is totally better. No, she's too better. She's she's too fucking much. She's she's she's she's thriving, as the young people say. And what she said was, you need to write about this, because for my generation, there is no stigma or guilt in talking about mental illness and eating disorders. We have found a way to talk about this. We talk about this all the time. But your generation, the parents, you were brought up in a time when you didn't understand these things. And a lot of you think it's your fault.

11:18And a lot of you have guilt. And so every time you're talking to us, we can see that you're freaking out and feel terrible and worried you're going to make things better. And the parents need to know how to make the children better. Because even if you do finally get to the top of that waiting list for help, and mental health is so criminally underfunded in this country. And it's such a terrible waste of time and money and lives that they only help you when you're at a crisis point. And also it's so damaging because young people aren't stupid. They know if they're at the bottom of a waiting list, then if they become more ill and more troubled and cut themselves up more and take more overdoses and become thinner, then they'll be taken to the top of the waiting list.

12:00And so you have this appalling situation where these children are doing something which is in a kind of really weird, horrible, dark way, quite brave, and going, I'm going to fuck myself up even more because that's the only way I can get help. And that is a terrible position to put young people in, but they know the truth of the way the system works. So even if you get to the top of the waiting list and you finally get all the help that you need, you're only going to see that doctor two or three times a week maximum. And the rest of the time is down to you as the parent to take care of that child.

12:29And if you do not know what you are talking about, and if you do not know how to help that child, and if you have not worked out all of your problems, then that child is probably not going to get better and so that is why I wanted to write about it in the book just to go here's everything I've learned I hope this is helpful because the thing I want to do more than anything else is be youthful and I have to say of anything that I've ever written the response to that was nuts we serialized it in the times and I literally got thousands and thousands of parents contacting me going now I understand it now I understand the language.

13:00Now I understand the basis of this. Now I can help. And that was a profound privilege because, you know, I love to entertain, you know, I love to be funny. I love to like talk about secrets and stuff. But the thing I want to do most is be useful.

13:16Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

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