All around us there are signs of a city bursting at the seams. Migration to major urban centres sees this playing out in metropolitan areas all over. Cranes dot the sky line, and everywhere you go there’s another billboard promoting a new development, promising a toe hold in a real estate market that’s become out of reach to most people. But where those developments are replacing rental housing, what happens to the families that call those places home? This is a special episode that explores the consequences of a city’s growth that most of us don’t consider carefully enough. Made in partnership with award-winning documentary filmmaker Charles Officer and TV Ontario, we meet some of the young people who called Toronto’s The Villaways housing community home.
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This podcast and The New Family website are all about the many forms that families take, which includes the way those families are created. We’ve discussed the surrogacy on a number of occasions. It’s a compelling topic, especially given that Canada has become what some call a medical tourism destination for surrogacy. Yet there are a lot of misconceptions about surrogacy and a lot of grey area that my guest on this episode wants to see change. Leia Swanberg is the founder and owner of Canadian Fertility Consulting, a prominent surrogacy consulting agency, and an outspoken advocate for decriminalizing surrogacy. She shares her own experience with surrogacy, personally and professionally, including a news-making run-in with the law.
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My guest for this episode is one of the most popular we’ve ever hosted on the show. Sexuality expert Amy Lang helps parents talk to their kids about sex, love and relationships. She first joined us on to tell us how to talk to our kids about where babies comes from. Amy has a great website called Birds and Bees and Kids, and I invited her back to answer a question that crosses a lot of people’s minds: Is there sex after kids? She and I take a look at what’s involved in having a sex life through some of the different seasons of our own lives, including rough patches in our relationships, times of overwhelm between work and home and also through single parenthood. Amy shares some pragmatic advice for making space for intimacy in a busy family life and for reconnecting romantically after a period of disconnection.
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Like many parents of boys, I’m sure, I’ve noticed that — while globally there’s a long way to go to level the playing field for girls — here at home boys are more likely to be medicated for attention deficit disorder and more likely to drop out of school, while the girls are the more likely to be the ones standing at the front of the assembly collecting most of the academic awards. And young women are now out-graduating men from university at considerable rates and have been for some time. It seems that, as a whole, boys may be needing some clearer direction and better messages about what it means to be a boy. I’m joined today by Janet Allison of Boys Alive. Janet is an educator and parent coach with a specialty in helping parents and teachers to nurture boys. She’s also the author of Boys Alive: Bring Out Their Best.
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