Brave, bold, courageous are a few synonyms for the notable women featured in this Apple TV show hosted by Chelsea and Hillary Clinton. For me, what featured in the foreground was the mother daughter relationship between the two women. They model a healthy adult child–parent working relationship at a time where the nature of this very relationship is for many becoming increasingly dependent. According to a recent article in The Atlantic, “The New Age of Endless Parenting,” we may face a future of continuous shared resources with our adult children.

As a mom starting motherhood in her thirties, I can relate to both women. By my calculations, Hillary started motherhood at the age of 32, and Chelsea had her kids at age 36 and 39. Both women had launched their professional lives prior to motherhood. I myself had mine at 33 and 36 in between a career-change. In contrast, my own mother had me at 27 and soon after immigrated to the U.S. opted to be a full-time homemaker. At the time, being an immigrant with small kids had to have been a full time occupation.

When I think about how much older I am to my daughter at 36 years, it feels like a chasm. Seeing these women share a symbiotic partnership in writing a book featuring women helped me see a similar age gap in action down the road with my daughter. I felt reassured by the women sharing their perspectives with one another and bantering together. Both my 13 year old, and I enjoyed watching the show together. She is fresh into her adolescence while I myself am entering peri-menopause. The show was a way to introduce the discussion of what it is like to be a woman, and an American one.

The first episode covers notable, outspoken women who use humor to point to women-specific issues. It opens with Chelsea recounting her own endless love of knock knock jokes she told as a child and thanking her mother for her patience. Women comics talk about how women must modify their behavior to adjust messages assumed to be given by their bodies or their presence. As women comics joke about gender inequality, female hormones, and menopause, but also bring up comedy’s boundaries. As Wanda Sykes puts it, comedy should “punch up and not down to the downtrodden.” It should fight the unjust powers that be but not ridicule the oppressed.

Also, Chelsea recounts being the target of jokes as a child from full grown adults and how inappropriate it felt to her. I vaguely remember SNL skits about the Clintons did not abstain from including Chelsea. To a child, it must have felt like bullying. I also think that the dark side of humor is humiliation, when humor is a weapon of public shame, like the kids at my daughter’s middle school relentlessly questioning her friend’s taste in music or attire. You wonder at the cruelty of youth this age.