2023 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet

Use these tiers for quarterback, running back, wide receiver and tight end to guide your fantasy draft decisions.

It’s not enough to have comprehensive player rankings ahead of your fantasy football draft. You need to know how players fit into different tiers.

If, for instance, you miss out on an elite quarterback -- let’s say Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen or Jalen Hurts -- these tiers suggest that you might want to go in a different direction and grab a Tier 1 running back or wide receiver before targeting a quarterback that falls into the next level.

Here are all of my Tier 1 players, with links to the complete breakdowns:

I’ve got quarterbacks separated into eight tiers. As stated, there are three at the top:

Check out the complete QB list here:

There are a few Tier 2 running backs that are very close to being Tier 1 backs. A few of them have been Tier 1 in the past, but I still have them just a peg below these three:

Check out the complete RB list here:

We’ve talked al summer about how important receivers have become in fantasy and it’s reflected here. There are 16 players in the first three tiers of receivers -- more than there are for any other position. These are the Tier 1 receivers:

Check out the complete WR list here:

It’s almost unfair to lump the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce into the pool of tight ends -- he’s really in a class by himself. Still, if you don’t grab Kelce early in your draft, I’ve got the remaining draftable tight ends broken out into seven more tiers. In other words, you don’t have to wait until the very end of your draft to grab a valuable asset at the position.  

Check out the complete TE list here:

S7 cheat sheet: Your guide to AFLW season seven

BEEN caught up in the exciting end to the AFL men's season, and forgotten the NAB AFLW competition kicks off on Thursday?

Or maybe your team has joined the AFLW for the very first time and you need to brush up on all things W?

Womens.afl has you covered with a cheat sheet ahead of Thursday night's season opener between Carlton and Collingwood at Ikon Park.

All 18 clubs will take part in an AFLW season for the first time, with Essendon, Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and Sydney rounding out the competition.

Squads have remained at 30, meaning an additional 120 players have joined the competition in the past few months.

It'll also be the second season in one year for the AFLW competition, for the first time moving to a late August-early September season start.

Once again, it'll be a 10-round home and away season, but the 18-team competition will mean the finals has expanded to a top eight and four-week period (see below).

Eighteen teams don't go into 10 rounds, and the AFL has previously said it has attempted to balance the fixture to provide an equal spread of opponents over the three months.

If you're a new AFLW fan or just need a refresher, there are a few unique aspects to the AFLW:

It was arguably the busiest off-season in the AFLW's short history, but most of the big names actually stayed put despite lucrative offers from expansion clubs.

The biggest player of the lot, Erin Phillips, switched to her family's club of Port Adelaide, while Maddy Prespakis made the move to her childhood favourite Essendon.

A number of Carlton players have moved on, including Lauren Brazzale (Collingwood), Grace Egan (Richmond), Georgia Gee (Essendon), Courtney Jones (Gold Coast), Nicola Stevens (St Kilda) and Charlotte Wilson (Melbourne).

Former Geelong spearhead Phoebe McWilliams has joined the Blues, while Niamh (Adelaide) and Grace Kelly (St Kilda) have left West Coast.

GWS will have a new ruck outfit following the departures of Erin McKinnon (St Kilda) and Ally Morphett (Sydney), while the loss of Gemma Houghton (Port Adelaide) and Steph Cain (Essendon) will hurt Fremantle.

Sarah Perkins has returned to Victoria to play with Hawthorn, fellow forwards Izzy Huntington (GWS) and Bonnie Toogood (Essendon) have left the Kennel, while Port Adelaide landed a quintet of players – Kate Surman, Hannah Dunn, Cheyenne Hammond, Britt Perry and Jacqui Yorston – from Gold Coast.

A trio of Roos in Kaitlyn Ashmore, Jess Duffin and Aileen Gilroy have crossed town to line up with Hawthorn, joining former Saint Tilly Lucas-Rodd.

Unsurprisingly, last season's frontrunners are expecting to again lead the way in season seven, with reigning premier Adelaide, runner-up Melbourne and 2021 winner Brisbane virtually untouched by expansion.

Of the next tier, North Melbourne should get quite a few wins on the board, Freo and Collingwood may find the going a little tougher after expansion and injuries hit, while Richmond is looking lively after some strong practice match results.

What about the players who are doing year 12?

The change in season timing means a number of players will make their debut while still 17 (turning 18 by December 31) and still at high school.

Each player has their own program depending on how they wish to tackle the end of their schooling – some are focused on working towards their ATAR, others are completing year 12 on a pass/fail basis, while another group again are moving down the trade route.

Players have been training on a part-time basis, and if clubs wish to select a player for matches, it has to be in consultation with the player, their parent/guardian and the AFL's player engagement manager.

The No.1 pick in the accurate NAB AFLW Draft was held by Sydney, who drafted Western Jets tall midfielder Montana Ham.

Jasmine Fleming looked a step above in Hawthorn's practice match against Richmond, while Essendon forward Paige Scott has plenty of X-factor in attack.

Port Adelaide open-age signing Abbey Dowrick was a star West Australian junior midfielder, while Ella Roberts has been the talk of Western Australia for a few years, finding herself at West Coast.

A four-week finals series will be employed for the first time, with the top six extended to a top eight.

It will run the same way as the AFL men's finals series, with the top four sides earning a second chance and the losers playing the winners of the elimination finals.

Cheat Sheet: How To Talk to Your Son About Sex

S1: What about, like the sex talk? Did you guys have that together with your who to you?

S2: I would say yeah. Yeah, and that’s it.

S3: Having that conversation with your mother, it’s probably going to be awkward for everyone. But I have to lean on Ian for that.

S4: Welcome to How to. I’m Charles De. This is the second episode in their three part series, CHIH, which is designed to help listeners navigate this really weird back to school period that we’re all living through. Last week they talked about how to manage screen time when so many students are doing remote learning. Today, we’re talking with two parents who are panic about one particular aspect of being online with their teenage son is learning about sex and relationships on the Internet. This was something they were thinking about even before the pandemic started. Ian and Heather are both working parents in Ontario, Canada, with a 10 year old daughter and a 13 year old son named Henry.

S3: Henry is a great kid.

S2: He’s very curious. He spends a lot of time online, though, especially now, but generally like a good kid. And they really want to make sure he stays a good kid, according to his parents.

S5: Henry does really well in school. He has a solid group of friends and he plays on the hockey team. But lately he’s started talking more with girls, which, of course, is totally natural for a teenage boy. But he’s seen these things that seem to his parents more mature than he is. Like he talks about being stuck in the friend zone with this girl that he likes or a few other things that have given them pause.

S2: He said some things that I think he’s either picked up online or in locker rooms or at school. And the first time it happened, he you were going for a family walk and he said, you know, Mom, like any man can have his career ruined. If a woman just makes up an allegation of sexual abuse and they would lose everything. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It doesn’t really work like that. And then there was another conversation that they had while she started to sing a song about being something you picked up again on the Internet about being a pimp. And I ended up Googling it. And it essentially means to be someone who is nice to a girl, pays for things, but doesn’t get anything physical in return.

S3: And that was a huge red flag for me, yours and yours, when you pay for all the clothes.

S6: And then she says, thank you, broke your sim, yours and yours and yours and yours. No, you’ve never been a pimp yourself.

S1: It’s not unusual for a 13 year old boy to rebel through music that bugs his parents. But what happens when that gets mixed in with all the other stuff that they see online about how to be popular or how to talk to girls?

S5: How do you protect your son or how do you help them put everything in the right context?

S7: When you look at that big, bad Internet, there’s just so much available to you and it’s so easy to to find and and it’s so easy for for it to find you, too.

S2: And he has friends who have access to the Internet and teammates who have access to the Internet. So even if you can control what he finds, there are more things coming into the conversation that he might be having offline with friends.

S1: In your darkest moments, when you think about like your extreme concerns around around raising a son in an age where toxic masculinity seems to be something that is constantly written about and talked about, what’s the nightmare scenario for you?

S2: The worst case scenario for me, for me was the Toronto van attack 2018 when a young man purposely drove his his van into pedestrians targeting women. And that was the first time that I had heard the term itself.

S8: As police search for a motive, one possible explanation is circulating online, suggesting Manasquan was angry over being rebuffed by women in is short for involuntary celibate.

S5: It’s someone who feels spurned by women in society and some discussions on Insull forums online, they can be pretty disturbing. They’re often about resentment and misogyny. Some even advocate violence.

S2: You find a community that feels aggrieved and then and it builds until someone who is probably probably mentally unstable to begin with, but then they take some kind of action. And that was really scary to think that the same Internet that my son has access to could inspire somebody to take that kind of violent action.

S9: And obviously that’s an extreme scenario. But still, a lot of parents worried. The values we’ve tried to instill in their kids have a tough time competing with what they see online. Teenagers have to assert their independence, of course, and they want their kids to be exposed to new ideas, but how do they equip them to know right from wrong, particularly when it comes to things like sex and relationships when they don’t know what they’re seeing on the Internet?

S10: On today’s show, we’ve got an expert who has spent years talking to teenagers about all of this, and she’ll supply us some great advice after this quick break.

S5: To help Heather and Ian with their 13 year old son, Henry, they turn to Peggy Orenstein. Peggy, you spent a lot of her career writing about how to help kids learn about things like sex and romantic relationships. And she had this really eye opening experience in 2016 when she published a book named Girls and Sex.

S11: As I went around the country after publishing that book, which was about the kind of contradictions that young women still faced in their intimate encounters. Everywhere that I went, parents of girls and boys and boys themselves would say, What about boys when you go to write about boys? And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, in fact, nobody was talking to boys and more importantly, nobody really listening to boys. So I started doing some interviews. And then very quickly after I started that, the meta allegations began and suddenly everybody was talking about sexual misconduct. So it created this imperative to reduce sexual violence. But also I thought, you know, they really have to know what’s going on in their heads so that they can guide them towards better and more informed choices and what is going on in their heads.

S1: Were they aware of the metoo stuff?

S11: You know, yes and no. You know what I what I felt was there were two things going on at once which which didn’t surprise me because there was often contradictions in girls’ lives, too, which was that on one hand they had female friends. They saw girls as equal in the classroom, deserving of educational and professional opportunities.

S5: And what would they say about how they saw themselves or other boys?

S11: When I would say, describe the ideal guy to me, it was like they were channeling 1955 and it went immediately back to dominance and aggression and athleticism and sex as status seeking. And the really big one, of course, was emotional suppression.

S1: Like what did they actually say?

S11: What they would say most often was that they felt that the two emotions they were allowed were happiness and anger. So that whole bucket of emotions that boys learn around sadness, betrayal, frustration, you know, grief, anything like that gets funneled into this one emotion.

S12: And so here’s their first rule. It is easy to model for your boys. And I know this myself as a father, it’s easy to model these two emotions of happiness and anger and to leave out all the other kind of more complicated emotions. But the more they allow their kids, but both boys and girls, to see that emotions aren’t here, that they’re complex, that’s how they help them feel and learn to express all those nuanced feelings. And I have actually I don’t think I’ve heard the word masculinity used without the toxic modifier in like five years.

S1: Like like, I, I never I never hear someone say, like, oh, he’s got some great masculinity, really good. That masculinity is almost something that’s like always paired with toxic. And in my own kid, my my 12 year old masculinity for him is almost a bad word. Did you find that to be true when you were talking to to boys?

S11: Also, I would ask boys what they liked about being a guy and that was a lot harder for them to answer. Honestly, I think that with girls not to say that everything is OK in girl world, but we’ve given them this alternative identity to traditional conventional femininity that they can embrace and grow into and feel good about. And that hasn’t happened with boys.

S12: And so to do that, Peggy says they need to figure out ways to talk with their sons about what being a boy means in good ways, rather than just about what they ought to avoid or how things can go wrong. This is especially true when it comes to things like dating or what they’re seeing online about sex.

S13: You know, I don’t think he’s ever framed it that way, and I’m concerned that we’ve mostly framed it in what not to be and rather than what opportunities are there to be something interesting and different and kind and and probably guilty of of framing those conversations and how how not to be.

S1: Well, Peggy, when you talked to boys or their parents and they did have those conversations in positive ways, like how did the conversation go? Because I think you’re right. I remember when when my mom and dad talked to me about sex, they said it was something that two people do when they’re in love. And when I think about the conversation I might have with my kids, they’re a little bit young right now to talk about the the technicalities. But I I think you’re right. A lot of it would be like you have to ask consent at every single step. Be sure you like. You don’t do anything that she’s going to feel uncomfortable with. It is a lot focus on the negative, not the positive. When that conversation goes well, what does it look like?

S11: I mean, ideally, they start their conversations with their children from birth, you know, where where we’re naming body parts correctly, where we’re talking about what we’re saying about gender and the culture that they think about sex is like this siloed thing that’s separate from every other aspect of their humanity and citizenship. But it’s really not it’s you know, it all connects also this idea that it’s a talk. You know, I kind of liken it to table manners. Like if I said to you, all right, I want you to sit down with your child and tell them, you know, this is your fourth, this is your knife. Say please and thank you. Asked to be excused at the end of the meal. OK, go forth and be polite, you know? I mean, that would be ridiculous. You know, that you have to tell your child to say thank you 7000 million times during their their childhood before they do it reflexively. Right. They they don’t do it on their own. Talking about all of these things can’t be done in one conversation. They have to be done. Little tiny things that are kind of peppered throughout. Yeah, that’s one really big piece of advice. And if you’re in a situation, as Heather and Ian are, where you have two parents who are on board and you have a male father figure who’s really willing to talk to boys, that is gold.

S7: Yeah, my dad was very emotionally close and and I am to a certain extent as well. And so, you know, I’m trying to learn and try and figure out how not to be that way and and to do what I can to to it to assist. But it’s difficult, right?

S11: You don’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to know all the answers. You don’t have to know all the questions. You don’t have to do it right every time. But just trying and just entering somewhere in the conversation and indicating a willingness to have difficult, uncomfortable conversations that you don’t know how to have, what an amazing thing that is to show to your child.

S5: Here’s their next rule. If you want to be talking about sex or relationships or masculinity, something that feels normal to your kids, then you should have those conversations a lot until it feels kind of natural yourself, or at least as natural as talking to their kids about their table manners. And when you speak to your kid, you don’t have to know everything they’re going to learn the most if you’re working through these questions together, which at least in my house, is also kind of true of table manners. In fact, Peggy actually has a recommendation on things that you can watch together.

S4: Sir, do you know the cartoon avatar, The Last Airbender? Are you watching that in your family right now?

S1: My voice of what should I haven’t watched it myself.

S11: OK, so you need to watch it with him, because one of the amazing things about Avatar, Last Airbender and I am an evangelist about this show is that it has this incredible arc with the one of the main male characters who starts out as the as the evil guy and kind of the embodiment of toxic masculinity from his environment and other things.

S1: The thing is, you know, when I was attacking you. Yeah. I guess I should apologize for that. But anyway, I’m good now.

S11: And his arc towards being a really empathic man is remarkable. And I think something that really offers an opportunity for parents of boys right now to to talk about.

S3: I’ll tell you, their son’s watching it, right? They all are. Yes. He loves it. He loves it.

S1: But how do you talk to your teenage son when he’s watching something a little more hardcore? When they come back, we’ll get into what your teenager is probably already seeing online, whether you know it or not.

S14: So you thought raising a teenage boy was hard? What happens when it’s time for him to leave the nest? Let me suggest another episode about helping your kids get ready for college or whatever else comes next called How to Get Your Kid to finally grow up with tips from a former Stanford admissions dean. You can find that episode in all of their episodes by subscribing for free to their podcast feed.

S5: We’re back with their parents, Heather and Ian, and their expert, the writer Peggy Orenstein, and one of the hardest questions of parents face today, particularly parents of teenage boys, is how do they talk to them about online porn?

S14: This is something that like I’ve I’ve been struggling with with my wife as they talk about my 12 year old, which is, you know, I’ve read these things that say, look, your kid’s going to get exposed to to sexualized messages earlier. They’re probably getting exposed to porn. And one of the important things you should do is a dad in his parents is to say to them, what you see in porn is not real life. Like if you don’t look like that guy, that’s OK. And most encounters with women don’t like get to sex in 30 seconds like they do in pornography.

S1: But with my 12 year old, like, I, I don’t even know if he’s really seen porn. So if I have that conversation too early, I’m panic that, like, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about and it’s weird and scary for him. But if I wait too long, then it’s too late.

S7: I totally echo that. I was that was that was something I would ask.

S15: Well, so often the first exposure to porn is accidental. It’s not something that they’re seeking at somebody, you know, forwarding a meme or somebody turning their phone around and thinking, it’s funny, you know, they may be exposed to highly sexualized images or graphic sexual images before they’re looking for them for, you know, sexual gratification.

S1: Heather and Ian, let me ask you, have you guys talked to Henry about porn?

S7: They haven’t I mean, unless, oh, I don’t know if I didn’t discuss this with you, you know, it was a you know, the conversation that I had with him was I didn’t they didn’t go very deep into the specifics of porn, but it was just more of just trying to get what his understanding was of it. And this was probably he was maybe 10, maybe 11.

S15: Yeah. So you’ve opened the door to the conversation, but then they start looking. Boys between 11 and 13 tend to start seeking porn out intentionally. So if you’re talking about kids the age of your children, there’s a great website called Amazed Dot Org that does sex education for middle schoolers. And they have some really good information on both for kids and for parents on how to have an age appropriate conversation about pornography. And also, I think when you’re looking at mainstream media, I remember being with my daughter when she was like 11, and I asked her if she knew it. Porn was and she said, yes, I haven’t seen it. And, you know, and and then they went home and they were watching some movie on Netflix and it had a kind of generic sex scene. But it was the kind of thing that kids see a million times, which is, you know, kiss, kiss, rip off clothes, go immediately to heterosexual intercourse up against a wall or in bed, two seconds. Everybody’s having a simultaneous orgasm and it’s over. You know, they are getting a terribly distorted idea. And and one thing that I find in talking to older boys is that guys who are regular porn users actually express less satisfaction with their partner, interactions with their own performance and with their partners bodies. And so they want you to have a really good sex life, but this is not going to be the way that you’re going to get there.

S7: I got to say, I was a little heartened when I said I had a brief conversation with him about porn. You know, one of the things that I did discuss with him is exactly what you were saying, Peggy, was this isn’t real. This is not how it goes. This is not the the sequential elements of how these relationships work.

S14: So here’s the rule. Assume your kid has seen porn. In fact, studies show that the average age of exposure to pornography is actually 11 years old, but you don’t have to ask them about it in an accusatory way. Instead, let them know porn is common on the Internet. It’s it’s hard to avoid it sometimes. And it’s OK to be curious and have questions, but also tell them most media depictions of sex, including porn, are totally unrealistic. And then have that conversation again and again and again to make sure it really sinks in.

S1: When you talked to Henry about how he should treat girls, because this is something I struggle with all the time myself is is when I’m talking to my boys, I don’t want to tell them that they should treat anyone differently, except that they should treat some people differently. Right. Because they face different challenges or they come from different backgrounds. And so it’s a complicated thing.

S2: One of those conversations been like with Henry, if you talk to him about how he treats girls kind of thinking and of the girls that they know that he hangs out with, of course, you know, Maddie comes to mind and not only with Henry not treat Maddie any differently. This is the girl that he plays hockey and baseball with. She wouldn’t stand for it. She wouldn’t stand to being treated any differently. But I think that has actually been important for him. She’s better than him at everything. And I think that has helped him kind of really think of of girls as friends or that they can be just just friends. It’s not always that transactional relationship.

S7: I don’t think we’ve really had that kind of gender specific conversation. But I think what they try and do is say, hey, you need to treat everyone as they wish to be treated, you know, and you just said something that I love so often.

S16: I think when they think about the golden rule, it’s, you know, treat somebody the way that you would want to be treated. Right. But there’s what some educators now call the platinum rule going one step above. Is that other thing like how does that person want to be treated? How do they see the person, whether it’s gender, whether it’s sexual orientation, whether it’s just an individual person? You know, thinking about them from their perspective is an act of empathy. And that is going to be good for your child in so many ways.

S1: And these discussions can be hard for adults to wrap their heads around and all.

S17: Word which gets us to their next rule, let your kids tell you how they want to have these conversations, even if that’s not necessarily the way that you would choose to have it.

S18: I have a friend who says that her son will only have conversations with her on sensitive Topics if she’s sitting outside of his bedroom door. He’s sitting inside of his bedroom door and it’s all the way closed except for like a two inch crack. And they talk through that, you know, like said. So you might have to find creative ways so that you’re not sitting down, you know, looking him in the face and having these conversations. It might be less squirmy if you’re if you’re engaged in some other activity at the same time.

S7: Yeah. So usually in the car, as you said, like, you know, we’re going to different sporting events and whatnot. And so, yeah, that’s that’s the time. I usually have the conversations with Henry for sure.

S1: Peggy, let me ask you this, because you’ve spent a lot of time talking to to kids about locker room talk, particularly talking to boys about locker room talk, which has always been the stereotype of of a particularly sexist domain. What have you found in your research?

S16: Well, you know, sports culture can be character building. It can form camaraderie and and team building all these things, but can also be a smokescreen for the worst kind of what you really must call at that point, toxic masculinity and bro culture. And one boy I remember said to me when he was a sophomore in high school, he and a friend had tried to challenge some older boys who were saying something, you know, despicable about the female classmate, and they got mocked. And so the next time it happened, the friend of the boy that I was talking to kept on speaking out. But but this boy, whose name is Cole, did not. And Cole said that as he watched, he saw that other people started to like this boy less and and kind of make fun of him and not want to be friends with him in the same way. And Michael Thompson, who’s a psychologist, said it’s silence in the face of cruelty and misogyny where boys become men. And so for me, talking to boys wasn’t just looking at what they did say or looking at these guys who were total jerks or, you know, whatever, but looking at what boys couldn’t or wouldn’t say even when they wanted to or believe that they should.

S1: Heather, let me ask you, because I imagine you like me. They want their sons not just to be people who don’t sexually harass, but people who actually stand up to to others who are saying sexist things or talking about women in objectionable ways. And I know my son, he went through this curriculum at his his middle school where they taught him don’t be a bystander being upstander. And he hated it. It was so cheesy. But they want to raise their kids to be brave enough to stand up and say this is how they ought to behave in the world. How do you do that with Henry?

S2: That’s a tough one, because if your peers and to stand up and say something is is difficult. But I think they have an opportunity right now as we’re all learning that it’s not enough to be not a racist, but to be anti-racist. I think there’s an opportunity to extend those learnings towards misogyny and sexist remarks. We’re all kind of learning to have the tools to say, gee, that doesn’t sound right to me or check your facts on that. But it’s tough because peer pressure is huge. But I think we’re all going through this exercise right now where we’re learning how to meet that challenge.

S1: Peggy, let me ask because we’ve talked about, you know, porn and we’ve talked about, you know, sort of this very sexualized material on the web. But of course, most of what their kids are actually seeing on the Internet is like social media. They’re seeing these things that are are making these inside jokes that that look sometimes like racist and insensitive or sexist. And when they confront their kids, they say like, no, no, no, it doesn’t actually mean that it’s just a joke. Like, how do they teach their kids to be exposed to this barrage of information that they can’t control? They can’t even know what they’re really seeing or get the joke if they do.

S15: If I could solve that one, my friend, you know, I mean, that is that is the trick, isn’t it? I think the truth is that right now all their kids are going to suddenly pop out with something in a conversation that’s going to make you go, what the hell? It’s really, really hard to know what your kid is looking at all the time. But I think that they have a tendency to, as parents think that what’s going on in their online world is kind of like secondary or lesser or not really real, but it’s very real to them. And it has a huge impact. And particularly during the pandemic, when everything is moved online, they’re they’re having their childhood online right now.

S17: And this is their last rule, it is really easy to divide their kids lives into two parts online and real life, but for many of their children, that line doesn’t really exist. And so if they want to talk to their kids about sex or porn or any number of hard topics, they have to talk to them where they live, which means talking about what they are seeing and doing online, because for a lot of their kids, especially right now, that’s the most important part of their social life.

S13: Yeah, I think it’s helped a lot. First of all, to realize that I’m going to have to have some hard conversations that maybe even I’m squeamish about, but it’s important to have them and make sure that that they take a look at that approach, that masculinity isn’t just a bunch of things that you shouldn’t be. There are opportunities to talk about what it’s like to be a good person and a good role model and a good partner and a good friend, and then maybe taking the opportunity, the fact that they are all home, they have an opportunity right now to really model what that kind of healthy relationship can look like.

S7: They don’t know everything. They are going to make mistakes, but just to do their do their best and learn, there are some areas they can Excellerate and get better and do just do better for their kids and do what they can.

S18: I so I just want to express like total empathy and support because I just you know, they are all as parents contending with this and we’re all struggling with it. And it’s so new, you know.

S10: Thank you to Heather and Ian for sharing their story with us, and thank you to Peggy Orenstein for all of her fantastic advice. Make sure to look for her books, her most recent, Their Boys and Sex and Girls and Sex. And speaking of girls, we’ll wrap up their Back to school series next week by talking to a female high school senior who is not only navigating relationship issues, but also remote learning and trying to get into the college of her dreams all during a pandemic. It’s the last installment of their special series, Cheat Sheet. Do you need to have a tough conversation with your kids but don’t know how or do you have another problem that needs solving? If so, they want to hear from you. You should send us a note at how to at Slate Dotcom or leave us a voicemail at six four six four nine five four zero zero one. And they might have you on the show. How TOS executive producer is Derek Jaam, Rachel Allen is their production assistant and Mayor Jacob is their engineer. Their theme music is by Hanesbrands. June Thomas is the senior managing producer and Alicia Montgomery is executive producer of Slate podcasts, Gabriel Roth is Slate’s editorial director of audio. Special thanks to Rosemarie Bellson, Bill Carey and Maggie. I’m Charles Duhigg, thanks for listening.