For comedian Iliza Shlesinger, the duality of modern motherhood often plays out in the background noise of her daily routine. While her two young children are allowed to watch age-appropriate cartoons, they occasionally catch whatever audio is thumping through the wall from her home office, where she has been teaching herself how to DJ. It creates a surreal sonic landscape in the household.
“It’s a lot of songs about female anatomy, and a lot of words we don’t use in real life,” Shlesinger notes, reflecting on the soundtrack to her latest creative hobby.
Though she tries to lower the volume, she rarely turns the music off entirely. The playlist is populated by the exact anthems that elder millennials have been dancing to since their high school and college days, and like many members of her generation, she fully embraces the nostalgia.
“These are the songs of my people,” she says, offering a wry breakdown of her eclectic musical choices. “This is called ‘Salt Shaker.’ We’re gonna go from the window to the wall, and I will tell you it’s about a nap party.”
For parents who came of age during the peak of 2000s club culture, this jarring contrast feels remarkably familiar. A generation that once spent weekends dropping it low is now tasked with hauling children from school to soccer practice. It naturally raises a lingering existential question: just because adulthood and parenthood have arrived, are we supposed to entirely forget the soundtrack of our youth?
Shlesinger, 43, has spent close to two decades channeling this exact brand of self-aware generational humor into her stand-up comedy. Her breakthrough 2018 Netflix special, “Elder Millennial,” effectively coined a cultural shorthand to define a very specific subset of a generation caught between analog childhoods and digital adulthoods. Today, she is still actively touring and performing, most recently supporting her latest stand-up special, “A Different Animal,” alongside her ongoing ILIZA! LIVE tour.
Beyond her stage work, she continues to dispense blunt, unfiltered advice to strangers on her podcast, “Ask Iliza Anything,” operating much like the trusted friend you turn to for your most unhinged questions. Her multifaceted career also includes a recent campaign with Pampers. Meanwhile, away from the spotlight, she is navigating the daily realities of domestic life alongside her husband, chef Noah Galuten, their 4-year-old daughter, and their 2-year-old son.
In a recent interview, Shlesinger opened up about what it truly means to parent as an elder millennial, the humor found in everyday domestic realizations, and the realities of building a family while maintaining a high-profile career.
We’re still shocked to realize we’re a mom, years later
It is no secret that welcoming children into your life requires a profound, fundamental personal shift. However, that reality does not necessarily make the transition any easier to navigate on a daily basis. Beneath the responsibilities of parenting, you remain the same individual who knows every single word to early-2000s club anthems. At the very same time, you are steadily evolving into someone new—a version of yourself you are still actively getting to know.
Even though her children are no longer newborns, Shlesinger admits that the ongoing evolution continues to catch her off guard. She experiences moments of genuine surprise when she looks in the mirror or reflects on her daily habits.
“I’m shocked at how often I’m re-realizing what a mom I am,” she shares.
That shift reveals itself in small, mundane details—everything from the deliberate way she chooses her jeans for practicality to the realization that her phone flashlight somehow always seems to be left on.
“This didn’t happen like, five years ago. I was cool,” she jokes with a declarative tone that virtually any elder millennial parent can instantly recognize and appreciate.
The collision of her pre-children identity and her current domestic reality occasionally yields awkward humorous moments. She recently recalled snapping a private photo for her husband, only to review the image and notice the scattering of children’s toys clearly visible in the background.
“Yes, they’re his kids, and it’s our bathroom,” she observes. “But that’s not hot.”
We’re nostalgic for the best parts of our childhood—and trying to recreate it
Part of the unique experience of parenting as a millennial involves a strong, sometimes overwhelming urge to hand down the best parts of your own childhood to your kids. Yet, this impulse is frequently met with the slow, humbling realization that the world they are growing up in fundamentally differs from the environment that shaped you.
Shlesinger confronted this generational gap while reflecting on the future memories of her daughter. She realized that her children will traverse entirely different school hallways and forge completely different core memories.
“She’s not going to go to my school and have my memories,” Shlesinger notes. “Once I internalized that, I got goosebumps. It’s up to me to make it just as nice as possible.”
Unable to directly transfer her past experiences, she has taken on the task of salvaging the essential ingredients of her youth—retaining the traditions that worked and letting go of the rest. It is a process of picking all the good stuff from growing up, whether that means sharing a slightly spooky story, starting a fun family tradition, or simply knowing when to discard outdated expectations.
In the spirit of establishing new household traditions, Shlesinger recently went all-in on autumn decorations, recreating an elaborate front-yard display lifted straight from her memories of growing up in Texas. For her, the festive arrangement represents a sense of safety and comfort.
“I always saw the houses that decorated for fall as the houses that felt comfortable and safe, and the world feels so unsafe now,” she explains.
That emotional motivation resulted in a front-yard tableau of controlled seasonal intensity. She bypassed casual decor and paid out of pocket to have workers deliver heavy bales of hay alongside oversized pumpkins that quickly began to weather in the heat.
“No one on my block did it. None of my friends did it. My husband did not care,” she says.
True to her vision, the display remains strictly autumnal, completely devoid of the fake blood or oversized plastic cobwebs favored by contemporary holiday trends. That aesthetic choice has led to friendly negotiations with her 4-year-old daughter, who naturally prefers spiders and traditional spooky elements over tasteful gourds and straw.
“I’m like, we’re not doing that. It’s autumn,” Shlesinger insists.
We know we all need a village
When conversations turn to the logistical challenge of balancing two young children alongside a demanding, high-profile career, Shlesinger offers a candid assessment that many public figures tend to gloss over for fear of judgment.
“Do you want the honest answer that no one’s allowed to give, because people will say you’re unrelatable? I have a nanny. I’ve always had a nanny. We have help,” she states plainly.
Shlesinger is a firm believer that women were never meant to raise children in isolation, arguing instead for the necessity of a supportive community. She emphasizes the importance of allowing other women to assist in the parenting process, welcoming diverse personality types into the household dynamic, and continuously learning from fellow mothers.
Reflecting on her initial entry into parenthood, she admits she bypassed traditional literature entirely.
“I didn’t read one parenting book. I work, I have a career. I figured I’d wing it,” she says.
When it came to managing daily childcare, she deliberately checked her ego at the door, choosing to defer to the expertise of her hired caregiver.
“Anything she said, I just did. I did not hire her to argue with her,” she adds.
Beyond her personal setup, Shlesinger advocates vocally for systemic support that would make such childcare accessible to all working mothers. She argues that the modern cultural expectation placed on mothers is an artificial and unfair burden.
“If we lived in a country that valued women and parenting, and put money toward giving mothers resources so they can afford childcare, I wouldn’t have to tell you I pay for a nanny,” she asserts. “Other countries, the village raises them. We decided to make it very hard, for deeply misogynistic reasons, to let women be fully realized artistically and career-wise, and be mothers at the same time.”
We’re still figuring it out
Like millions of parents navigating the daily trials of raising small children, Shlesinger is the first to admit that she is learning as she goes. A prime example involves something as seemingly simple as disposable baby wipes. Every parent is intimately familiar with the frustrating routine of attempting to pull a single wipe from a dispensing pack while simultaneously trying to keep a squirming, half-cleaned infant securely in place with the other hand. Instead of getting one, the pack inevitably yields half a dozen at once.
For years, Shlesinger assumed that this minor daily irritation was simply an unavoidable feature of modern parenting products.
“I thought, this seems really difficult, but all things are made difficult for moms, because the world hates moms,” she jokes.
Her perspective shifted when Pampers approached her regarding a new campaign centered around a redesigned packaging system engineered to dispense exactly one wipe at a time, effectively solving a decades-old parenting annoyance. The rare instance of a major corporation directly addressing a niche consumer complaint left a lasting impression on the comedian.
“We live in a world where nothing gets done,” she observes. “And a corporation said, enough women talked to us about a problem, so we fixed it. I wish politics worked that way.”
For the time being, Shlesinger remains focused on the day-to-day work of building a warm childhood environment for her kids, maintaining her elaborate neighborhood autumn displays, and processing the ongoing comedy and chaos of domestic life out loud. Like so many members of her generation, she continues to find the realities of motherhood simultaneously baffling and rewarding, choosing to approach the daily uncertainty with humor and humility.
“I’m constantly in awe of how little I know and how much I thought I knew,” she reflects. “Being in charge of everything, and then feeling so stupid most of the time. I think that’s peak parenting.”
