Podcast · Kids & Family

Conversations with Parents

by The Irish Times · English · Kids & Family

***New episodes starting on September 29th*** Conversations with Parents is a podcast from The Irish Times. Host Jen Hogan talks to interesting people about being parents. What are the hardest parts? What have they learned about raising kids? What are their parenting strategies - or are they makin

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 41 min

Dr Siggie Cohen: don’t be a ‘permissive parent'

Dr. Siggie Cohen has worked with children for over three decades. In today's podcast, she speaks to Jen about childhood anxiety, boundaries, and permissive parenting. “Gentleness does not mean permissiveness,” she says. She argues in her new book "You are the Parent" in an era when many mums and dads feel overwhelmed by advice and expectations, they do not need to be perfect, but they do need the confidence to lead. Presented by Jen Hogan. Produced by Andrew McNair. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

30 Sep 2026 · 59 min
Falling birth rates, fertility, and becoming a mum later in life
Modern motherhood is changing. Women are having children later, birth rates are falling, and the challenge of balancing family life with work remains as complex as ever. In today's episode, Jen speaks to three mothers with very different experiences about careers, fertility, childcare, family pressures, and the realities of raising children today. From the financial obstacles facing young families to the sacrifices many women still make after becoming mothers, we explore what's driving these social changes and what they mean for the future. Why are fewer people having children? Has society…
18 Aug 2026 · 55 min
Back-to-school special: starting age, PE problems, school refusal and teenage vapes
Have you ever wondered how teachers treat your children when you’re not there to witness it? Well, if comedian-múinteoir Julie Jay is anything to go by, you can expect them to be well and truly mothered. Even if they’re teenagers. In this special back-to-school episode, Jen welcomes Julie along with lecturer in psychology Mary O'Kane and John Murphy from the Physical Education Association of Ireland to discuss the challenges and choices faced by parents when they're children are preparing to start the new academic year. Produced by Andrew McNair. Presented by Jen Hogan. Hosted on Acast. See…
2 Jun 2026 · 39 min
Marcus O'Laoire: 'We need to talk more about male fertility'
Marcus O'Laoire is best known for his photogenic cooking on social media. On this episode he opens up about the journey to fatherhood, and discusses the fertility tests he underwent en route to becoming a dad. He believes male fertility is not spoken about openly, how his friends reacted to hearing he was undergoing fertility tests, and discusses how the immediate suggestion following his sperm analysis results was that the couple try IVF. And we couldn't have him in the studio without getting some proper, gourmet recipes for baby purée. Presented by Jen Hogen. Produced by Andrew McNair.…
26 May 2026 · 45 min
'My children showed me what to do' — Dr. Suzanne Crowe on raising kids after loss
Dr Suzanne Crowe doesn’t even try to separate being a doctor from being a parent anymore. The president of the Irish medical council is a paediatric intensive care doctor and a busy mother. And she admits that sometimes taking care of extremely sick children has led to her feeling a strong need to check in with her own children. “I have rung home on occasion to just check everyone’s ok. They’re kind of used to that”. “I do sometimes think did medicine shape my parenting, or did parenting shape the brand of medicine that I do”, she says. “They’re inextricable”. On the latest episode of the…
19 May 2026 · 52 min
Leaving Cert stress? A psychologist, a guidance councillor and a parent share their advice
It’s said when someone in the house is sitting the Leaving Cert, the whole house is sitting the Leaving Cert. And with the State exams almost upon that’s a lot of people feeling the stress. But fear not because Conversations with Parents is bringing you a special episode with an expert panel to help parents and students navigate the whole experience in the least frazzled way possible. Yes, we’ve made our panel publicly relive their own Leaving Cert trauma for the heck of it. Jen talks about LC survival with guidance counsellor and founder of Find My College Course, Donnchadh O’Mahony,…
12 May 2026 · 45 min
Coleen Nolan: ‘Everyone thought we were nuns ... and that we’d never even kissed a boy’
Coleen Nolan has always had a very open relationship with her children. When it comes to having conversations with them, nothing is off the table, explains the TV personality and member of The Nolan Sisters . When her son told her he had sex for the first time, it was possibly a more personal sharing of details than many parents are used to when it comes to their teenagers’ lives, but Nolan says her own experiences of growing up, with parents who didn’t like to talk about certain things, made her particularly conscious to be a mother whose children could speak to her about anything. In…
5 May 2026 · 46 min
Dec Pierce: 'I know how toxic social media can be'
Dec Pierce has had a tough couple of years. The Today FM presenter and creator of Block Rockin Beats – his dance music and live gigs show - had a brain haemorrhage in 2023 and last year was diagnosed with breast cancer. On the latest episode of the Conversations with Parents podcast he tells host Jen Hogan about the shock of learning he had breast cancer while on holiday with his wife and young daughter. Fatherhood is something Pierce always hoped to experience but he had thought it wasn’t going to happen for him. “Myself and Kate were trying for a while”, he explains. “I always wanted to be…
27 Apr 2026 · 49 min
Oisín McConville: ‘At one stage, football was the only thing that kept me alive’
Oisin McConville was destined to get involved with Gaelic football from a young age growing up in Crossmaglen, Co Armagh in the 1980s. “The Troubles is something that played a large part in my life, because bombing, shootings, killings were common place day in day out when I was growing up”, he says. His dream was to score the winner for Armagh at Croke Park. And sure enough, he was the star of the county's first Sam Maguire trophy victory in 2002. He’s the father of two boys and a girl and for now he’s just about hanging in there on the coolness scale “but it’s only going one way”, he…
21 Apr 2026 · 50 min
Colman Noctor: ‘Behaviour is always the signpost to a problem. It is very rarely the problem’
Colman Noctor is a well-known child and adolescent psychotherapist, so you’d be forgiven for presuming with all this expertise at hand that he always gets it right when it comes to parenting his own three children. Not so, the father-of-three says on the latest episode, explaining his children “slam doors” and face the same “trials and tribulations” as the everyone else’s children. He shares the “sobering” moment he realised that you can read all the books and have all the theory, “but in Dundrum Shopping Centre when you’re kid kicks off, it’s a lottery. Parenting is an act of failure. It’s…
14 Apr 2026 · 40 min
Sarah McInerney: When I told my manager I was pregnant he said, ‘Can’t be helped I suppose’
Sarah McInerney is known for her self-assured, cool and calm approach to interviewing politicians, but on the first episode of the brand new season of Conversations with Parents podcast she tells host Jen Hogan, about the anxiety that plagued her second pregnancy. In a revealing and personal interview, McInerney discusses best laid plans and shares how becoming a mother of two children wasn’t as straightforward as she might have hoped. “My first pregnancy was a dream,” she says on the podcast. “I absolutely flew through it and thought, ‘Oh, I’m a natural mother. I’m just made to do this.’…
1 Apr 2026 · 1 min
Coming soon: Season three of Conversations with Parents
Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times and parenting journalist Jen Hogan is coming back with a new season. Season three will feature another group of interesting people with new parenting stories to tell. Find us wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is brought to you in association with Avonmore Super Milk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
18 Nov 2025 · 46 min
Richie Sadlier: 'My kids will be sick of me mentioning the word sex, when they're teens'
Former footballer Richie Sadlier is now better known for his career as a psychotherapist and working with young people in the area of sex education and wellbeing. Knowing what he knows about young people's lives, Andrew Tate and the manosphere, he's well equipped to deal with the thorny issues that many other parents actively avoid discussing. But he admits he might be the last person his young children will want to talk to by the time the teen years roll around. Richie and his wife, Fiona, have had a long and arduous road to parenthood. After eight heart-breaking rounds of IVF followed by a…
11 Nov 2025 · 47 min
Miriam O’Callaghan: ‘I’m lucky to have eight children after suffering secondary infertility’
Miriam O’Callaghan says she understands that having eight children is a source of fascination for people. And where once she might have been bothered by the double standards (i.e. how male broadcasters don’t seem to be defined by their parental status), she is now as happy to talk about her brood as she is about her TV career. The current affairs presenter has just released her memoir “Miriam: life, work, everything” and she delves into all of the above in this enthralling conversation with Jen Hogan. Miriam reveals she had secondary infertility after the birth of her first child, and how…
4 Nov 2025 · 35 min
Sophie Ellis-Bextor: ‘We were going out six weeks when we found out I was pregnant’
Sophie Ellis-Bextor wasn’t expecting to have a baby so soon into her relationship with her now husband, but she says there was a part of her that felt really good about it. This was in the early 2000s when it was not the done thing for a female pop star to start a family. 21 years and five boys later she’s managing to juggle family life with a successful singing career, having just released her eighth studio album, Perimenopop. But it hasn't all been smooth sailing. In this episode Sophie speaks about her first-born’s shaky start after a premature birth, raising five boys and embracing the…
28 Oct 2025 · 33 min
Chris Hadfield: 'I have an Irish granddaughter and I couldn't be more delighted'
Chris Hadfield has a granddaughter in China and, as of earlier this year, another granddaughter here in Ireland. But despite the distance, the retired astronaut says they are very much in each others lives. And after all, "I've been around the world in 90 minutes, it's just a little place," he jokes. In this episode, the world's most famous living astronaut sits down with Jen Hogan to talk about how he's managed to juggle such a successful career with parenting. Chris discusses his own upbringing and how it influenced his parenting, how his best intentions may not always have come to pass,…
21 Oct 2025 · 46 min
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin: 'My mum was mortified I was breastfeeding in a restaurant'
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin says she and her husband would have had a fourth child, but for her debilitating pregnancies. The scientist and broadcaster says her births went without a hitch, but she was chronically ill with hyperemesis gravidarum on each of her three pregnancies - a complication that causes persistent and extreme vomiting. Her third child, her daughter Doireann, was born at home; something she says she will never forget. Aoibhinn breastfed all three, though she found each experience difficult in their own way. One of her sons was born with a tooth making the process very…
14 Oct 2025 · 43 min
Ciara Kelly: ‘A consultant shamed me for being an unmarried, pregnant junior doctor’
Ciara Kelly was on in a bar on a sun holiday when she found out she was pregnant. 1999 was a time when Ireland was becoming more liberal, but being an unmarried mum "wasn't without some stigma," and no allowances were made on the gruelling 60-hour shifts that were common for junior doctors then. Though motherhood came early she took to it so well that she ended up having a family of four. In 2017 she swapped her medical career for a full-time job in radio. The primetime slot on Newstalk Breakfast means she often gives her take on the events of the day, sometimes drawing opprobrium on social…
7 Oct 2025 · 47 min
Prof. Donal O’Shea: “I’ll be advising my girls to go on HRT”
Being a hormone doctor wasn’t actually much help when it came to parenting three girls, according to Donal O’Shea. He’s an expert in how hormones affect the body but he admits his wife handled ‘the talk’ when his three daughters were teenagers. However, he goes on to say he will be advising them “if I’m around when they are post-menopausal, that they need to be going on HRT.” O’Shea is a consultant endocrinologist and one of the most recognisable doctors in Ireland, owing to his work and advocacy for people living with obesity. In this episode, he discusses the pressure on parents when it…
30 Sep 2025 · 44 min
Fintan O’Toole: ‘I would have loved to have been a stay-at-home dad’
Do fathers get a raw deal? Are men complicit in the detrimental effect that having children can have on women’s careers? And what exactly is an afterbirth fridge? In this episode Jen Hogan sits down with renowned political commentator Fintan O’Toole to talk about his arrival into fatherhood at a time of profound social change in Ireland. The pair discuss changing nappies, breastfeeding and why he has little time for liberal triumphalism. He has no regrets about choosing his family over a career in the US, but laments that he smacked his first child at time when it was the norm to do so in…
17 Sep 2025 · 1 min
The toughest challenge of their lives: Conversations with Parents season two
Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is coming back with a new season. Last year Jen Hogan spoke to interesting people about the hardest challenge of their lives: raising kids. Season two will feature eight brilliant guests with new parenting stories to tell. So stay tuned, wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is brought to you in association with Avonmore Super Milk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
2 Sep 2025 · 1 min
Coming soon: Season two of Conversations with Parents
Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is coming back with a new season. Last year Jen Hogan spoke to interesting people about the hardest challenge of their lives: raising kids. Season two will feature eight brilliant guests with new parenting stories to tell. So stay tuned, wherever you get your podcasts - or on irishtimes.com . Conversations with Parents from The Irish Times is brought to you in association with Avonmore Super Milk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
3 Dec 2024 · 40 min
Conversations with Parents - the debrief
Does parenting with the seemingly never-ending juggle of work, home-life, and trying to be everything to everyone, actually get any easier? What about if you have a child struggling with anxiety, where do you begin in the search for meaningful support? Siblings; ready-made friends, or sworn enemies - how do you manage sibling conflict? And does it really matter if parents share pictures of their children online? These are just some of the many questions that came in to us from listeners to our Conversations with Parents podcast. And, in this special episode, Jen Hogan sits down with the…
26 Nov 2024 · 39 min
Séamas O'Reilly: 'My son is the same age I was when my mum died'
Séamas O'Reilly is an award-winning writer who shot to fame for his story of accidentally serving drinks to former president Mary McAleese while high on ketamine. He went on to pen his memoir "Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?" which netted him an Irish Book Award, and a place in the Irish annals of meme fame; after rugby icon and TV presenter, Tommy Bowe, was inadvertently light-hearted about his "ten siblings!" Séamas speaks to host Jen Hogan about the tragedy of losing his mum at the age of five, how it influences his own parenting now that he has a little boy and girl, and what it's like when your…
19 Nov 2024 · 27 min
Black Paddy: 'I want to teach my children to love the colour of their skin'
Black Paddy wants to teach his children self-acceptance; to love their bodies and their skin colour. The comedian and social media star is best known for his viral videos which gently poke fun at the culture shock of moving to Ireland from Africa. But he won't be including his children in his antics, preferring that they grow up with a 'strong mind' before they're ever exposed to the opinions of others online. In this conversation with host, Jen Hogan, he discusses the impact of losing his father at a young age, his period of homelessness and substance abuse and how he was happy for…
12 Nov 2024 · 37 min
Terry Prone on allowing son Anton Savage to be in her publicity as a child: ‘I think it was the wrong thing to do’
Author, broadcaster and chairman of The Communications Clinic, Terry Prone, may live a quiet life now but she's faced the kind of challenges you could expect to see in a Netflix drama. From an against-all-odds love story (she met her husband Tom Savage while he was still a priest), living on the breadline, raising their son Anton Savage while they worked, to surviving a catastrophic car accident that dashed her hopes of having more children. In this episode, the communications expert speaks to host Jen Hogan about parenting in a patriarchal Ireland, how the family coped in the difficult…
5 Nov 2024 · 27 min
Ivan Yates: 'My children struggle with what I do'
Ivan Yates is known for his controversial views on all manner of issues, and parenting is no different. The broadcaster admits the number of nappies he has changed in his time are in single digits and that 'learned helplessness' served him well. But Yates shares a more thoughtful side to him in this conversation with Jen Hogan. He speaks about how a lack of emotional warmth in his own childhood influenced how we would parent his own children, how he was determined they would be in no doubt how much he loves them and how is outspoken beliefs are not always well received by his sons and…
29 Oct 2024 · 41 min
Victoria Smurfit: 'Micromanaging your kids makes them useless. Same for men.'
Victoria Smurfit believes to get by in life, "you need kindness, comedy and grit." The Hollywood actor, writer and producer has three children and tells them they must lead with kindness, find the funny in every situation and be prepared to work hard. She tells host Jen Hogan about the huge challenges that have come her way on her parenting journey including; her eldest daughter Evie's bid to save her sight, an attempted gun attack on her school in LA, moving countries after the break up of her marriage and dealing with crippling postpartum depression following the birth of her third child.…
22 Oct 2024 · 35 min
Maïa Dunphy: 'I was terrified of becoming a single parent'
Maïa Dunphy had never thought it was the right time to have a baby until, she jokes, her ex-husband told her at nearly 40 "it was time to 'do something' or get off the pot." The writer and TV star speaks to host Jen Hogan about becoming a mum later in life, fearing lone parenthood upon the break-up of her marriage and the conundrum of letting her son Tom make his holy communion, when she herself is an atheist. After losing her mum to cancer two years ago, she urges everyone to participate in family photo opportunities, lamenting that Tom has few pictures with his granny. Though, Dunphy…
15 Oct 2024 · 33 min
Tony Cantwell: 'Since my ADHD diagnosis I’m a more patient dad’
Having a son and a daughter has given comedian, Tony Cantwell, the opportunity to explore some of life’s big questions. Things like, is gender just a social construct? What’s it like raising children when you're neurodivergent? How do you gentle parent? And how much time spent pooing is deemed acceptable in the quest for me-time? Host, Jen Hogan, sits down with Cantwell who created, and stars in, the new RTE comedy series, Good Boy. He discusses the extreme lengths he’ll go to, to avoid needing to change vomit soaked bedsheets, co sleeping, and how scheduling “the ride” becomes a necessary…

About Conversations with Parents

Conversations with Parents is a English kids & family podcast from The Irish Times. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: The Irish Times
Language: English
Category: Kids & Family
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1770870669
Rights: The Irish Times

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