Parenting for the Future

Dr. Lisa Williams is internationally recognized as an academic trailblazer, founder of a multi-million dollar company, and an award winning speaker and author. Dr. Lisa attained unprecedented success by becoming the first female professor to receive a multi-million dollar endowed chair, the first African American professor to earn tenure at Penn State University, and the first African American to receive a doctorate in Logistics from The Ohio State.

At the height of her career, Dr. Lisa did the unthinkable when she left the academic life to blaze a new trail as an entrepreneur. In 2003, she founded the World of Entertainment, Publishing and Inspiration (World of EPI), LLC. EPI is the classic Cinderella story. Dr. Lisa grew the company from negative revenues into a multi-million dollar powerhouse. EPI is now a leading multi-cultural toy manufacturing and design firm with a global supply chain that crisscrosses the world from the US to China and other worldwide destinations. EPI's largest customer, Walmart recently awarded Dr. Lisa the Supplier of the Year Award for her visionary leadership. Working in partnership with Walmart, EPI touches the lives of an entire generation of children through its Positively Perfect Doll Line.

While featured in many magazines for her expertise in business, she is also known for her ability to motivate executives, future leaders and audiences of all sizes.In addition to winning numerous teaching awards from major universities such as Penn State, Ohio State and the University of Arkansas, she has been awarded the Outstanding Female Faculty Member of the Year from Penn State University, designated as an "Amazing Woman" by University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) and given the Trailblazer Award by the American Marketing Association PhD. Project.

In this episode we continue our conversation with Dr. Jill Walsh. In this conversation, we turn to COVID-19 and explore the roles technology and digital media play and will continue to play in our lives. We examine how we as parents can maintain our sanity and the wellbeing of our children and our families in this challenging screen-filled time, as well as the role we can play in addressing the serious structural inequities that the pandemic highlighted.

Our complex relationship with digital technology and social media has only been exacerbated with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year. Technology became our savior, allowing schools to teach, allowing parents to work, and allowing all of us kids and adults to maintain social and familial ties.

Dr. Jill Walsh is a researcher and lecturer at Boston University and an advocate for children. She is the founder of Digital Aged, a consultancy which re-frames the role of technology in the lives of children to promote healthier relationships between them and the adults in their lives. Jill has a BA from Harvard University. a master's in public policy from Brown University and a PhD sociology from Boston University.

Dr. Jill Walsh is a researcher and lecturer at Boston University and the founder of Digital Aged, a consultancy which re-frames the role of technology in the lives of children to promote healthier relationships between them and the adults in their lives. In this episode, we explore our children's relationship with digital technology and social media and how parents can best guide them, protect them, and help them use these tools to elevate their unique voices and connect to the world in a healthy way.

More about Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Julie Lythcott-Haims is a seventh generation real American. Her American ancestors were kidnapped from Africa, sold at auction like common animals and enslaved. As slaves, they were tortured and raped repeatedly by their white masters to produce children for slave labor. Their labor built America and made thousands of white Americans, as well as our entire country wealthy. When they were finally emancipated, they were freed, but not free. Not only were they never compensated for the theft of their labor, dignity, or lives, but federal, State, and local governments, under color of law, intentionally reinforced old and created new structures to subjugate them. These structures still plague the lives of all their descendants today.

Julie is also the author of the New York Times bestselling anti-helicopter parenting manifesto, How To Raise An Adult.

Petal's key takeaways:

If somebody came by and knocked on the door and said, "Do your parents treat black and brown people as fully equal to everyone else?" What evidence would your children point to in answering either yes or no? - Julie Lythcott Haims

What are you doing to make your world by which I mean your family, community, neighborhood, your city, your America, kinder and safer for black and brown people? Because action is required. Whiteness has been used as a weapon against the rest of us for centuries and we now seem to know enough about it. Historians have studied it. Scientists, social scientists can tell us what's happening in our heads around whiteness. We now have the information. We just have to take a deep breath and say, "You know what? Yep. I'm going to do what Dolly Chugh recommends which is move from being just a believer to being a builder. Build a new reality. Take part in that. - Julie Lythcott Haims

My very, very favorite story in this book is when you were 15 and you're in France on a trip, and you run into this little white girl who was playing in a park and you're walking by and she asks: "Why are you black?" And you respond, "because I am lucky." And to me, this is the essence of not only what I took away from Real American, it is what I think all parents of black children need to teach their children, that they are actually more than lucky. Because despite centuries of, to quote you, "the systemic dismemberment of black agency, the debasement of black men, the rape of black woman, the destruction of the black family, the ringing of energy and life out of our black forebears, despite all of that, these children are here. And what that means is that black people endured. And in that endurance is unparalleled strength, intelligence and a power that we ourselves are just beginning to understand. So black children have nothing to be ashamed of. They don't have anything to loathe in themselves. They are not the ones with something to be ashamed of. I personally hope that I live to see the day when every black child owns their own power. - Petal Modeste

No one is more knowledgeable about the scope of the SDGs than world-renowned economist, global leader in sustainable development and Columbia University Professor, Jeffrey Sachs. Professor Sachs is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, and has served as Special Advisor to every UN Secretary General appointed between 2001 and 2018.

Michael Gerrard, grandfather to a curious, vivacious granddaughter, is one of the world's leading environmental lawyers and Climate Change experts. Michael is the Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on environmental and energy law. He is also the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law which develops legal techniques to fight climate change, trains students and lawyers in the use of these techniques and provides up-to-date resources and thought leadership on key topics in Climate Change law and regulation. To date, Michael has authored or edited 13 books on Climate Change and Environmental Law, including a thought-provoking and inspiring new book called: Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States. He has also traversed the globe – from Malta to Chile to Taiwan to the Marshall Islands to lecture and advise leaders on Climate Change and Environmental Law.

To learn more about the impacts of climate change, please listen to Parenting for the Future's conversations with climate change experts Michael Gerrard (episode #5) and Jeffery Sachs (episode #13). You can find each within your podcast feed, or through the links below.

https://www.petalmodeste.com/episode-five-michael-gerard/

https://www.petalmodeste.com/episode-3-jeffrey-sachs/