Podcast Episode 229: Money Matters – How Financial Anxiety Affects Families

This is the first of a two-part series that explores how money matters affect families. I’ve got two amazing guests for this episode. The first is celebrated parenting author Ann Douglas. Ann has written 30 books, including her latest, Happy Parents, Happy Kids. She and I talked about some of the ideas in that book back on episode 221, but I’ve invited her back to dive deeper into another important element of context Ann raises in this book — the implications of financial anxiety for parents.

We talk about just how much has changed with the cost of living, precarious work and more, and what those mean for the daily lives of parents, so many of whom are struggling to maintain a hold on a middle class lifestyle.

In the second part of this episode, I speak to British-American labour economist and Dartmouth professor David Blanchflower on his research that found it’s the cost of raising kids, not parenthood itself, that accounts for the decline in happiness associated with parenthood. These insightful conversations shed so much light on how financial anxiety is weighing on families.

Here are some resources related to this episode.

Happy Parents, Happy Kids

Ann’s website

Prof. David Blanchflower’s Dartmouth profile

Related Episode: Could You Give Away 70% of Your Stuff? Confronting consumerism with Cait Flanders

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