Jenny Hagel Gives Great Advice (That I Asked For)
About this episode
Ophira Eisenberg and Jenny Hagel discuss parenting challenges, emotional language in children, and the intersection of comedy and family life.
Jenny Hagel joins Ophira Eisenberg to talk about parenting through big feelings, awkward questions, creative careers, and the strange emotional math of raising boys while working in comedy. Jenny shares how her now-12-year-old son transformed from a tiny Brooklyn tornado she once carried out of donut shops “like a sack of potatoes” into a “fun, chill roommate,” and explains how one preschool meltdown led to the line “my mad is too big for my body,” which completely changed the way she thought about tantrums and emotional regulation. The conversation moves from Mad Libs ruined by the phrase “diarrhea juice” to surprisingly thoughtful discussions about kids’ emotional language, including Jenny’s son describing a crush as “a string” connecting two hearts. Ophira and Jenny also compare notes on parenting boys with huge emotions, the pressure put on working mothers, and the exhausting flood of parenting advice from strangers who assume every family has the same structure and flexibility. Jenny talks about building her live comedy show Advice Nobody Asked For during the writers strike, where audience members anonymously submit questions into buckets labeled “family,” “love,” and “job,”…
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