In this Episode you will learn about:

• How parents can raising confident, curious, human-centered people
• The life-shaping power of books and conversations
• Civic journalism
• Keys to rebuilding trust in the press and key institutions 
• Why hope is a muscle and how we can make it strong

In this Episode you will learn about:

• Now Look!  The newest book by Sydney Lea
• The scourge of addiction in small-town America
• The role of nature in shaping a life
• The  role of friendship and community in saving a life
• Why a Liberal Arts education matters more than ever
• How to help kids embrace poetry
• Three poets all kids (and parents) should read

• Founder of the Village Well
• Educator
• Certified Positive Parenting Educator
• Education/Degree
• University of California, Davis

• In this episode you will learn:

  • What it means to “decolonize” your parenting 
  • How to leverage the wisdom of your cultural background in your parenting
  • Why it is important to interrupt intergenerational pain to create healthy, thriving families
  • How to apply positive parenting principles to common and not-so-common parenting challenges

   

Chris Balme

• Founding Principal at founding principal at Hakuba International School, Japan 
• Co. Founder and Former Head of The Millennium School
• Founder and Director of Argonaut
• Ashoka fellowship recipient
• Author
• Education/Degree:
• B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• B.S., Wharton School of Management.

Navigating conversations about identity, diversity, and justice can be fraught with linguistic traps and emotional landmines. On this episode we learn from Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Faculty Director of the school's Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging how to have nuanced and empathetic conversations about our differences, whether in our workplaces, our social circles, or in our homes and how to teach our children this skill so that they can thrive in a diverse and complex world.

Studies have shown that 69-90% of us will experience at least one serious traumatic event during our lifetimes. The sudden death of a loved one. A debilitating illness.  A natural disaster. War. What differentiates us?  How we respond;  how resilient we are.  Our guest today has found that extremely resilient people share  the 10 attributes we discuss in this episode.  As we reflect on the  personal and global challenges we have all faced in 2023 and look forward to the new year, understanding how we can not only become more resilient but teach our children to develop resilience, is undoubtedly one of the most important lessons we can learn.  

On October 24, 2023 a bipartisan coalition of 32 US. Attorneys Generals filed a Federal lawsuit against Meta alleging that the company knowingly designed and deployed harmful features at Instagram, Facebook, and its other social media platforms to induce young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use contributing significantly to a youth mental health crisis. The suit also alleges that Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its platform's use.  But in 2021 before these lawsuits, an anonymous employee of Facebook filed a series of complaints with the US. Federal government, claiming that Facebook had been misleading the public and investors about the impact of its services on the mental health of children and young adults. That employee later revealed herself to be Frances Hogan, and she is our guest today.

As we enter the holiday season where our kids are likely to spend more time than usual on screens, this conversation is more important than ever. 

“Some of issues parents expected to confront when their child was in their early twenties. have been pushed later. 

I think it's safe to say that many parents expected to still be providing some financial assistance to their child when their child was in their early twenties. Don't think that many parents expected to be doing it when their child was 30, and I think that from the young person's point of view they probably expect to be getting some help from their parents while they were still in college and right out of college, but I'm sure that they didn't expect that to be having to go to their mother and father and ask for financial help on the over 30 or 32, and that is going on today. And so I think the shifting timetable of the transition to adulthood has really made this an important topic and parents are perplexed”

• Distinguished University Professor and 

Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Temple University

• Education/Degree:
• AB in Psychology,  Vassar College
• Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies Cornell University

" The truth is Congress has so completely failed. They Haven't passed a Privacy law since Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers. It’s pathetic. Shame on them! This has reshaped everybody's lives, and they just sat there, and because of their political partisanship, the fact There's not a federal privacy, law, or Laws regulating social media platforms is a joke.  Absolute abject failure of our political system in the twenty-first century."

• Founder and CEO, Common Sense Media
• Co-Founder, Center for the next generation 
• Education/Degree
• BA, Stanford University
• J.D., Stanford Law School

'When I work with the athletes and talk about toolboxes, I think helping them build tool belts that give them the arsenal. So when? Not if but when the headwind blows. Oh, I got this! I have agency over my destiny. I get to decide what's next for me, (remove Petal's sound) Yes, I'm gonna need help along the way and support, of course, but I'm not gonna let any setback, not making the team or that coach not liking me, determine my future. "

• Peak Performance Coach
• Motivational Speaker
• Co-host: “Raising Athletes” Podcast
• Education/Degree:
• BA, College of William and Mary

"Complex care typically refers to the children at the very tip, who are the sickest and the book is really written to be more, all inclusive, because many children, while they may not be complex, they have chronic health conditions which cause a lot of increased work for their families. "

• Director of Pediatrics at the Atria Institute in New York City
• Education/Degree:
• BA, Harvard University
• MD, Vagelos College of physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University

In this Episode you will learn about:

• Courageous girls and women speaking up about the issues of our time
• How we can help our daughters find and use their voices
• How we can reconnect with our own voices and use them to raise awareness, fight for justice or share hope
• How some of the world’s most popular brands show their commitment to girls and women

“The ability to introspect to work through problems. This is one of the reasons we are so successful as a species. The ability to introspect is how we learn from our problems and plan for the future is what allows us in part to build spaceships that literally land SUVs nowadays on other planets like Mars. but, on the other hand, people struggle enormously with introspection to the point that they become overly angry, anxious, and depressed. And so we've got this remarkable tool. but it's really unwieldy. Sometimes it helps us. Sometimes it hurts us." 

• Professor, University of Michigan's Psychology Department and Russ school of Business
• Founder and Director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab, University of Michigan
• Education/Degree:
• Ph.D. Columbia University
• BA University of Pennsylvania

"Well, if we break money down to its simplest components, right? And how we handle it, what do we do with our money. We really do 3 things right. We spend it.

we save it, we give it away. And if you think about what actually goes into the decisions around each of those you know. They're all about emotions and behaviors. spending is about modesty and prudence and thrift, or it's about greed and envy. saving is about delayed gratification. Patience. giving is generosity. It's a sense of gratitude.  So

it's easy to think about this as a sort of you know, hard mathematical science, but I prefer to think of it as a social science. Money is about behavior as much as it is about numbers and math."

• “Your Money” Columnist, The New York Times
• Education/Degree
• BA, American Studies, Amherst College

"A third of the young people who come to us feel like it's unclear to them how to affect change. And so our goal has to be start small, start with the things that are accessible that you can actually do today, whether that's educating yourself or taking a first volunteer action. And then that portal can be a way to level up engagement so that you get to do more and more over time.”

• CEO of Do.Something.org, one of the world’s largest organizations exclusively for young people who are committed to positive social change
• Education/Degree:
• BS in Legal Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 
• J. D., Fordham Law School.

• DoSomething.org

"When we talk about caring for other people, we are also talking about caring for the common good, and we're talking about caring across difference. Relatively speaking, it's not hard for people to care for someone else. Almost everybody cares for somebody else. the higher bar for a lot of people is caring for people who are different from them in race or class, or culture, or political orientation, or religious orientation"

• Senior lecturer at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School of government.
• Faculty director of Harvard's Making Caring Common Project
• Education/Degree:
• Ed.D., Harvard University

Jonathan Rubenstein is father to one daughter and the founder and CEO of Joe Coffee, New York City’s original specialty coffee company and a pioneer of the Third Wave Coffee Movement.   

The award-winning collection of cafes is best known for brewing the highest quality coffee and serving its community of customers with warm, authentic hospitality.  

Jonathan is here to talk about how cup of coffee and a lot of care can make the world a better place

Laurie Palau is a mom two almost grown-up daughters, host of the super popular weekly podcast, This ORGANIZED Life, and  founder of Simply B Organized, a lifestyle company helping people declutter their lives so they could live simply and more meaningfully.  

Laurie’s advice has been featured in national publications including Real Simple and The New York Times and she speaks frequently on clutter, parenting, and entrepreneurship.    

She is the author of the best-selling book Hot Mess: A Practical Guide to Getting Organized.   This book is the topic of our conversation today.

New York Times bestselling author, Susan Verde is mom to three teenagers, two cats a dog and a tarantula. She is also a yogi and a mindful human who teaches yoga and mindfulness to kids of all ages.

Susan has written more than twenty picture books for children, in which she captures and celebrates the unique experience of being a child. Her books are used around the world to support mindfulness, yoga and  social-emotional learning programs in schools and libraries. 

Today,  Susan is here to talk about her latest book and her first book for adults: Say one Kind Thing: Lessons in Acceptance, Love, and Letting Go. 

The Metropolitan Opera (the Met) is the largest performing arts institution in the United States. Each season, the Met stages more than 200 opera performances in New York with over 800,000 people in attendance.   Millions more experience the Met through its 90-year-old radio broadcast series, its new media partnerships and state-of-the-art technology, including Metropolitan Opera Radio on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Met Opera on Demand and  free live audio streaming of performances on its website during the opera season.

Yet for all of its acclaim and reputation for being innovative and forward thinking, true inclusion has not been part of the Met’s story.  

Enter Marcia Sells, the first Chief Diversity Officer for the Metropolitan Opera and a phenomenal mom to her daughter and step-son.

Marcia joined the Met Opera after serving as Associate Dean and Dean of Students at Harvard Law School. Her storied career includes positions in academia, the private sector and public service. She is here to talk today about her work to make opera inclusive and ready to thrive in an increasingly diverse  world

Dr. Mona Delahooke is mother to three adult children, and grandmother to one grand-daughter. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than thirty years of experience and serves as senior faculty member of the Profectum Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting families of neurodiverse children, adolescents and adults. 

Her latest book, Brain-Body Parenting builds on the lessons of Beyond Behaviors and offers a radical new approach to parenting based on her clinical experiences as well as the most recent research in neuroscience and child psychology.  This book  is the topic of our conversation today.  

Rebecca Chandler Leege is a mother and the Chief Impact Officer at Worldreader, a US based global technology non-profit that expands vulnerable children's access to books.  Worldreader was born out of the belief that inexpensive technology and local content could help millions of children learn to read and ultimately create a better future for themselves. Since 2010, the company and its partners have distributed over 58 million digital books in 52 languages, to children and young adults in 100 countries.

Rebecca has more than 20 years of leadership experience and a proven track record of growing innovative organizations through creative collaborations, cross-sector partnerships, and strategic vision.  She is here today to discuss the work of Worldreader and the positive impact it is having on the lives of millions of children. 

In this Episode you will learn about:

• Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM) in the digital world
• The incredible harms of CSAM
• How Apple places user privacy above children protection
• The Heat Initiative’s efforts to push Apple to detect, report and remove  CSAM
• How our kids can get exposed to or themselves appear in CSAM
• Sextortion
• Generative AI and CSAM
• Online enticements
• How to talk to your kids about online safety

Lisa L. Lewis is mother to two children and a freelance journalist who covers the intersection of parenting, public health, and education. She has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Your Teen, among others. 

Her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive is an outgrowth of her previous work on  teens and sleep, including her role in helping get California’s landmark legislation on healthy school start times passed. 

This book is the topic of our conversation today.  

LaMonica Williams is mother to two children and the Director of Program, Pre K - 2 Division at Teaching Matters, a national professional learning organization dedicated to helping teachers and school leaders develop the skills they need to close the gaps created by a radically unequal education system.

La Monica’s expertise is in elementary literacy and she also manages the work of Teaching Matters to support educators and train them to use data to advance students’ reading and writing abilities.  

She joins us to discuss how Teaching Matters is creating a more equitable education landscape.

Sarah Jaffe is mother to one daughter.  She began her career as an attorney for children in the foster care system, advocating for some of the most vulnerable children in our nation, but it was not until she became a mother, that she took real stock of, and became deeply troubled by, the stark differences between the lives of the children she met at work and the lives of the children she met in her parenting life.  She began to question whether her only duty as a parent was to get “the best” for her own child or whether she had an obligation to make decisions that would help create a more equitable society for all children.

Her questions led her to write her first book, Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege, and Building a Just World.  This book is the topic of this episode.

Alkesh Shah is a Managing Director and Head of Web3, Crypto and Digital Assets Strategy at Bank of America Global Research. He drives thought leadership in the digital asset space and his research covers crypto-assets, including tokens and infrastructure companies, and applications, such as Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs).

He joins us today to discuss the digital asset economy and the future of money

Pamela Capalad is mother to one son, a certified financial planner, and an accredited financial counselor, who has been in the financial services industry since 2008. She is the founder of Brunch and Budget, a financial planning company with a bold mission, to create a revolutionary shift in the lives and prospects of marginalized communities by teaching them financial literacy and helping them understand and practice building generational wealth.

She joins us today today to help us learn how to raise our children to have a healthy relationship with money, and to inspire all of us to do our part to bring about true economic inclusion. Welcome Pamela to Parenting for the Future. 

Luma Mufleh is mother to two daughters and one son. She is a Syrian/Jordanian entrepreneur, a coach, and a thought leader in refugee and English Language Learner education. The daughter and granddaughter of Syrian refugees, Luma grew up in Amman, Jordan, where she was one of the only Arab students in her class at an American School and one of the only girls who played on her soccer team. As a young adult in a country where being gay was considered a crime, Luma came out to her parents and was disowned. Granted asylum in the US, Luma navigated the broken immigration system to build a life for herself, opening a coffee shop and coaching soccer.

She joins us today to discuss Fugees Family, the first accredited school for refugees in the United States, which she founded in 2006. The school has grown into a nationally acclaimed network of academies bringing educational equity to refugee resettlement communities across America. 

Dr. Jennifer Heisz is a mother to one daughter and an expert in brain health. She is associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University and directs the NeuroFit Lab which focuses on the effects of exercise on brain health. Jennifer received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from McMaster and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Brain Health and Aging at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Hospital. Her research examines the effects of physical activity on mental health and cognition in young adults, older adults and individuals with Alzheimer's disease.

She joins us today to discuss her first book, Move The Body, Heal The Mind, which explores her groundbreaking research on how fitness and exercise can combat mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, and dementia, as well as improve our focus, creativity and sleep.

Sophie Brickman is mother to two children, she's also a writer, reporter, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, as well as the Wall Street Journal. She wrote a monthly column for Elle, interviewing influential women, including Nancy Pelosi and Joyce Carol Oates about their paths to success and is currently a columnist at The Guardian. Sophie graduated with honors from Harvard College, studying social theory and philosophy.

She joins us today to discuss her first book, Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age. It is about the intersection of parenting and technology. 

For over two decades, Dr. Todd Jason Feltman has been working in the New York City public school system and in local independent schools. He has been a classroom teacher, mentor, literacy coach, citywide literacy achievement coach, and assistant principal. Todd has master's degrees in childhood education, literary education, and school supervision and administration. He received his doctorate in urban education from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

During Todd's career, he has come to understand exactly why some students succeed and why others fail. And he has written two wonderful interactive handbooks to help all elementary and middle school students succeed. His first handbook is for students and it is called a Student-Friendly Handbook for Navigating Success: You Need to Take Charge of Your Education! The second is for teachers of students in grades two through eight, and is called Mentoring My Elementary-and Middle-School Students to Become Powerful Navigators of Success.

He joins us today to discuss this second handbook.

Bill Brady is father to five children and the co-founder and CEO of Troomi Wireless, a cellular network, specifically designed for kids to give them a safe introduction to apps and the internet. In partnership with Samsung, Troomi has released two smartphones for kids, the Samsung Galaxy A12 and Samsung Galaxy A32, both come preloaded with Troomi's kids smart operating system. The system has built-in parental controls and empowers parents with kids ages seven and up to choose the websites their kids can access, set limits on activities like gaming and restrict access to inappropriate and dangerous content like pornography and apps which attract bullies and predators.

Bill joins us today to talk about his work to keep our kids safe on their smartphones and to help them engage with technology in healthy, productive ways. 

• Neuropsychiatrist
• Founder of Amen Clinics
• Author of 12 NYT Bestsellers
• Creator of “Scan my Brain”
• Produced 17 national public television shows about the brain 
• Education/Degrees

Stephanie Haynes is a mother, a veteran educator, and an education coach and consultant. Her expertise is in providing custom consulting and coaching to high school students and their parents, with an emphasis on post-high school pathway development, goal setting and time management. Stephanie's goal is to motivate her clients to create a compelling vision for their future, and develop actionable steps to build it into a reality.

She joins us today to discuss her thought-provoking new book, College is Not Mandatory: A Parent's Guide to Navigating all the Options Available to Our Kids After High School. 

Stephanie Malia Krauss is mother to two children. She has an extensive background in education, youth development, and social work, and has been a teacher, coach, school leader, and nonprofit executive. Today, she works at the intersection of education, human services, and workforce development with a relentless focus on what young people need to be ready for the world and what the world needs to be ready for them.

She joins us today to continue our conversation discussing her fascinating new book called Making It: What Today's Kids Need for Tomorrow's World. 

Stephanie Malia Krauss is mother to two children. She has an extensive background in education, youth development, and social work, and has been a teacher, coach, school leader, and nonprofit executive. Today, she works at the intersection of education, human services, and workforce development with a relentless focus on what young people need to be ready for the world and what the world needs to be ready for them.

She joins us today to discuss her fascinating new book called Making It: What Today's Kids Need for Tomorrow's World. The book goes beyond the question of what young people need to succeed in school, to ask what they need to be ready for life. Making It is the essential reading for anyone who wants to ensure that young people are prepared to thrive and make their unique contribution in the challenging and ever-changing world in which they will come of age. 

Dr. Rakesh Jain is stepfather to one son, a clinical professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Texas Tech University School of Medicine, and also has a private practice in Austin, Texas. Dr. Jain attended medical school at the University of Calcutta, India, and graduate school at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. He served a three year residency in psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, a two year fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, and completed a post doctoral fellowship in research psychiatry at the University of Texas Mental Science Institute. 

Dr. Jain has been involved in well over 100 research projects studying the effects of medications on short-term and longterm treatment of depression, anxiety, pain, mood overlap disorders, ADHD and psychosis in adult and child populations. He has co-authored six books that range from patient education to cutting edge neuro biological findings in psychiatry and mental health.

He joins us today to talk about ADHD in children, and share his advice for how parents of children with ADHD can ensure their wellbeing and that of their children during this challenging pandemic time.

Chris Tomkins is uncle to five children, a TEDx speaker, spiritual life coach, and LGBTQ inner advocate. Chris has been staunched LGBTQ+ advocate for over 15 years working organizations like the gay and lesbian Alliance against defamation or GLAAD.

What began as a letter, he wrote to his family to address a conversation that was not taking place, became an article, a TEDx talk, and is now a new book called Raising LGBTQ Allies. A Parent's Guide to Changing the Messages from the Playground. It is the first parenting book to focus on the prevention of homophobia, transphobia, and bullying, before they even begin.

He joins us today to shed light on on the deeper multifaceted layers of homophobia and his book that encourages families to have open and authentic conversations in a practical, timely, and inclusive way. 

Roni Nocon and Amy Sage each have two children and are co-founders of ParentingEQ, a new subscription service for parents of children ages four to 11, designed to help parents nurture emotional intelligence in their children by creating a culture of emotional wellbeing in their homes. 

Over the course of their careers as school counselors, they observed a decrease in children's overall wellbeing and an increase in depression, anxiety, self-harm, and negative self-worth. They found that a child's emotional health is greatly impacted by something over which schools have little influence, the family environment.

They join us today to discuss ParentingEQ's mission to bridge this gap through parent-led social-emotional activities, which focuses on the emotional intelligence skills children need to lead happy and successful lives. 

Stephanie Dua is mother to three kind and brilliant daughters. She is an education entrepreneur and the co-founder and president of HOMER, the only early learning program proven to increase reading scores with just 15 minutes a day.

Stephanie launched HOMER after struggling to find tools to help her own daughter learn to read despite being surrounded by some of the leading minds in education. HOMER raised $50 million from the biggest names in education and entertainment, including Sesame Workshop, LEGO Ventures and Gymboree Music and Play.  

Before HOMER, Stephanie served as CEO for the New York City Education Department's Fund for Public Schools, a senior advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She's a graduate of UCLA and the Harvard Kennedy School.  

She joins us today to share her journey to launching HOMER and her love of bringing learning to others.

Kaya Henderson is a force of nature. She has positively impacted the lives of thousands of children. She is the CEO of Reconstruction, a technology company delivering a K-12 supplemental curriculum that situates Black people, culture, and contributions in an authentic identity affirming way, so that students of all backgrounds benefit from a complete understanding of our shared history and society.

Kaya is also the host of the uber popular podcast Pod Save the People. From 2010 to 2016, Kaya served as chancellor of DC Public Schools. Her tenure was marked by consecutive years of enrollment growth, increased graduation rates, improvements in student satisfaction and teacher retention, increases in AP participation and pass rates, and the greatest growth of any urban district on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

She joins us today to talk about Reconstruction, and the impact it is designed to have. 

Jennifer Grant is mother to four children and an author. She has written six books for adults and several books for children including the picture book, Maybe God is Like That Too, Maybe I Can Love My Neighbor Too, and also A Little Blue Bottle.

Jennifer has written for several publications, including Woman's Day, Chicago Parent, and Patheos. For more than a decade, she wrote features for Sun-Times Media newspapers and was also a health and family columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She has a BA from Wheaton College and an MA in English and creative writing from Southern Methodist University.

She joins us today to talk about her latest book for children, Once Upon a Time Not So Long Ago, which is a picture book about the COVID pandemic. 

On this final episode of Season 4, we are joined by Whitnee Hawthorne is mom to two phenomenal sons and the founder of the very popular Savvy Working Mom web platform, which is dedicated to helping working mothers thrive in every arena of their lives.

Whitnee is certified in goal setting, project management, strategy performance and life coaching. She is also a professional speaker, a time management and productivity expert and widely known as a self-care guru.

She joins us on Parenting for the Future to share some of her proven strategies for thriving at life and at work, strategies that allow her to live her personal credo, that working mothers don't have to choose between personal and professional success. 

In this Episode you will learn about:

• How parents survive and thrive after the losing a child
• The power of ritual to sustain loved ones through and after pending death
• The importance of community
• The role of movement in navigating grief
• Tay-Sachs and how to screen for this disease
• The work of E-motion
• The work of Dr. Joanne Cacciatore
• The work of JScreen at Emory University

She joins us on Parenting for the Future to  discuss her first phonograph, Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art: Audacities of Color, and how lessons of Irma Stern's life can help our children become agents of change. 

Dr. Susan Fisher is mother to two daughters, a researcher, and professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For decades, she has been at the forefront of research on prenatal development. She has always been struck by the fact that while we parents teach our children about a lot of things, pregnancy is seldom one of those things. So, many of us grow into adulthood not fully understanding this most natural and consequential biological phenomena.

She joins us on Parenting for the Future to help break the pattern of secrecy and guesswork that surround pregnancy and birth, and to share the new trailblazing science and advice for safe births and healthy babies. She also discusses her new book called, Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy. This book is an indispensable guide to the revolutionary advances in the understanding of pregnancy and birth, and it is the topic of our conversation today.

Nadine Fonseca is mother to four children and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mighty Kind Kids  which publishes the amazing Mighty Kind Magazine. The magazine is a quarterly, anti-biased children's series that celebrates the role of kindness and compassion as the foundation for anti-biased learning and in bringing the human family closer together. Each issue is based on the premise that kindness, empathy, and compassion are teachable skills and readers learn fun facts about the world we share, read stories about kids doing good, and get actionable ideas for service and volunteer work. Mighty Kind has reached almost all 50 US states, as well as Mexico, Canada, Sri Lanka, France, Egypt, England, Ireland, Slovenia, Japan, and Finland.

She joins us on Parenting for the Future to talk about how Mighty Kind is building a global community of kids who care and serving as an indispensable resource to the parents and adults who mentor and raise them.

Melissa Fensterstock is mother to two wonderful children and a seasoned biotech, medtech and consumer product executive. She is the co-founder and CEO of Landsdowne Labs. The company's first product is ChildLok, a technology designed to deactivate button batteries following accidental ingestion. Button batteries are the small, round batteries found in mostly portable electronics coming in all of our homes like remote controls, thermometers, games and toys, watches, cameras, and musical greeting cards. Button batteries are tiny, they're shiny, and they are so appealing to children that over 35,000 children accidentally ingest them every year. 

She joins us on Parenting for the Future to discuss the button battery crisis and what she, through her work at Landsdowne Labs, is trying to do about it.