ON PARENTING…with Andy Cohen and Caitlin Moran

Today, we’re chatting all about parenting on How To Fail! We’ll be revisiting some of the most meaningful moments from the archive - the ones that can bring a fresh insight, thoughtful perspective and a sense of comfort through parenting’s tougher challenges. First, you'll hear from the Daddy of Reality TV, Andy Cohen, who speaks about a time he felt he failed as a parent in the playground and how he worried he’d let his son down. Then we turn to Caitlin Moran, who shares her experience of 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. I hope these moments from other parents offer you a bit of guidance, relief and a reminder that every family finds its own way. Listen to Andy Cohen’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/AndyCohen Listen to Caitlin Moran’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/CaitlinMoran 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:26Elizabeth Day?

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• 2:09Elizabeth Day?

  Reflecting 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. Then we go to the brilliant journalist and author Caitlin Moran, who I recorded with

• 2:54Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 3:16Elizabeth Day?

  Your second failure pertains to parenting.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:20Elizabeth Day?

  And it's failure to be prepared with one of your children in the playground.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  This was just a specific instance where I was at a playground over the weekend, 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 like swimsuits and running around the water, and Ben didn't have that. And I felt, now, this was also, I went through a real serious moment

• 4:10Speaker 01

  early in Ben's life, where I was going to these events where, with, 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, every parent group that I've been around has all been lovely and whatever, it was really in my head, it was my own insecurities.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  But at that moment, and I looked at him, and I was just like, oh my God, I've, my kid isn't able to be in the water, and this was on me, and whatever, and I just, I think, I, I, I cried that day, I cried a couple of 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, all right.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So, but it was, it was, it was a really, it was, it was a really vulnerable moment for me.

• 5:46Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, thank you for sharing that. How much of that do you think was internalized social conditioning?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  All, all of it.

• 5:54Elizabeth Day?

  All of it.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. No one else noticed, it wasn't like anyone was like, oh, wow, Andy, he really, you know, Ben was in the corner crying because he couldn't go in the water, he wasn't, by the way.

• 6:05Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Ben didn't notice.

• 6:06Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  He did not notice, so I did.

• 6:14Elizabeth Day?

  Your 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.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  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 it.

• 6:49Elizabeth Day?

  Sequentially?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:50Elizabeth Day?

  It wasn't, you weren't doing them at the same time?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Sometimes I did do them all at the same time, I have to admit.

• 6:55Elizabeth Day?

  It's a lovely image.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  If you're clever enough with a hot water bottle and a duvet, you can do all three at once.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  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 was 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. And 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

• 7:47Speaker 02

  at the age of 11 or 12, first of all, I obviously told her 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 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. What's underneath it is depression and anxiety.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  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. So it took a long time to understand that.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  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? You're an incredible girl, life is amazing. You can make the choice to stop this now.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  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. And 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.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  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. And that was why I wanted to write about it in the book because when she finally got better, she, and she is totally better now, she's too better. She's, she's too fucking much.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  She's, she's, she's, she is 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 and 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

• 12:04Speaker 02

  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. And 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

• 12:49Speaker 02

  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. And 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 learnt, I hope this is helpful. Because the thing I want to do more than anything else is be useful. 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, now I understand the basis of this, now I can help.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:45Elizabeth Day?

  Please 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.