Now that you are becoming a parent, you are also becoming an educator to the most significant of students, so it is important you identify and learn from proven Parental Influencers. Before Instagram and Twitter, there were masters like Fred Rogers, Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett. Their mastery of teaching lessons of love and compassion through fictional, mystical characters, short-form skits and stories, and fantastical lands that humans could peer into and participate in, tapped into millions of children’s imaginations and subconscious.  

We know the power of these educators’ influence, because most of us grew up being shaped by their works. PBS just released a documentary about Fred Rogers called, "It’s You I Like", where Michael Keaton, Sara Silverman, Tom Hanks, John Lithgow, and YoYo Ma (to name just a few) talk about the impact Mister Rogers had on them. And in a trailer for Won't You Be My Neighbor, a new documentary that txplores the magic of ‘Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, Mister Rogers himself says, “What we see and hear on the screen is part of who we become.”

What our children see, hear and are exposed to lay the foundation for who they become, and we, as parents, are the stewards of information they receive in the most formative years. While that is a big job, the master educators leave more in their legacies than just their characters, they leave behind a pathway. When we as mothers and fathers harness our childhood imagination and creativity and pair them with the lessons of the purest of human hearts, we create the most profound and timeless lessons of all. It appears that actually awakening our own inner child, and teaching from that place, is where the magic happens. So one might say, in a true parental influencer master, the student has become the teacher.

Your Chief Mother Officer,

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