Recent Speakers
Creating a Joyful Family Environment with Eve Rodsky
On October 24th, 2024 best-selling author Eve Rodsky joined SPEAK to share practical strategies for creating a joyful and balanced family environment. We learned how to cultivate happiness in our homes, create a "unicorn space" for personal fulfillment, and teach our children the value of ownership and responsibility. Eve also discussed essential policies that can support parents in their journey.
From Stress to Screentime, from Freak-Outs to Friendships: What Parents Need to Know (and DO!) about Worry, Anxiety and Depression
Lynn Lyons, The Anxiety Audit: What Parents Need to Know (and Do!) About Worry, Anxiety and Depression
Lynn Lyons is the co-host of the popular podcast Flusterclux and author/co-author of The Anxiety Audit and Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents
Current news about young people and mental health has created warranted concern, but the information can be overwhelming and hard to sort through. Parents need dependable strategies to help their children manage their anxiety, moods, and social pressures, including social media and screens. The ability to help guide our children requires – more than ever – an ability to recognize and address one’s own emotional management as we practice and model better skills to meet life’s challenges.
Based on current research and 35 years of clinical experience, Lynn Lyons talked about the common traps adults fall into, the role of smart phones and social media, and key adjustments needed to manage the current surge of anxiety and depression in our kids and ourselves.
Never Enough
Join SPEAK for a talk from award-winning author and journalist Jennifer Wallace, whose latest book, Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic - and What We Can Do About It, is a parental guide to help kids know that they matter.
Jennifer Wallace took a hard look at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide that we are facing today. She concluded that mattering is shockingly absent from our society - from individual households, schools, workplaces, and entire communities.
She broke open the floodgates with her Wall Street Journal article, “The Power of Mattering” at Work. With the Great Resignation on one hand and the rise in mental health challenges on the other, Wallace’s insights have endeared her to many. The incessant and relentless desire to matter drives individuals into spiraling cycles to prove they are “enough” while thirsting for achievement and approval.
Consequently, Wallace co-founded the Mattering Movement with a tangible sense of urgency. The goal of the Mattering Movement is to help people of all ages to learn the skills and tools to enact meaningful social change by identifying genuine needs, big or small.
How can parents and educators best support and maximize the strengths of “differently wired” children?
When more than 20% of young people today are neurodiverse, how can parents and educators best support and maximize the strengths of these "differently wired" children?
On Wednesday, March 29th from 7:00-8:00pm, parenting activist and podcaster Debbie Reber joined SPEAK in person at The San Francisco School to share her insights on the challenges neurodiverse and twice exceptional kids face in and out of school. Reber, founder of Tilt Parenting and author of Differently Wired: Raising an Exceptional Child in a Conventional World, also highlighted strategies to positively shift the way these children are seen, understood and supported.
Actions Matter: Combating Harassment in Our Community
While shopping you witness a Black teenager being followed by a sales associate. There are other people in there, but the sales associate only follows the Black teen. What do you do?
While waiting in line to buy coffee you see a man approach a customer in line and say, “why are you dressed like a sissy? Aren’t you a man?” The customer in line does not respond but the man continues and calls the customer in line a gay slur. What do you do?
Have you ever been in a situation where you witnessed a person being harassed but you froze and kept silent because you didn’t know what to do or how to help? Do you feel equipped to support your children on what to do if they witness harassment?
SPEAK and Right To Be hosted a very important interactive virtual training session for parents, guardians, teachers, and school administrators. Leveraging real-life scenarios participants learned how to respond and safely intervene when witnessing harassment with Right to Be’s proven methodology. Participants left the training with a toolbox of techniques and felt empowered to make a change with simple, creative, and effective action.
Three Tales Of Parenthood
On October 26th from 7:00pm-8:15pm SPEAK was thrilled to host Kelly Corrigan for an in person event at The Hamlin School.Kelly spoke about “Three Tales Of Parenthood”, a humorous yet insightful account of her personal journey of parenting children through elementary, high school, and now college.
Kelly has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the Ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “Voice of a Generation” from O Magazine. She is also the host of the highly popular podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders as well as the PBS hit show “Tell Me More” where she has interviewed some of the top change-makers in the world such as Jennifer Garner and Steve Kerr. This event covered a mixture of light-hearted and deep topics and was able to teach everyone a little something about parenting!