Tell us about yourself.
I started working as an early-childhood educator in the early ’90s, and within a decade, it was clear to me that kids didn’t seem very resilient. And not long into my career, I had some changes in my personal life that got me thinking a lot about the power of positivity.
My nephew, Mitchell, was born in 1994, and his mum passed away when he was about five-and-a-half years old. My brother fell apart, so my husband and I helped pick up that situation and started caring for Mitchell. We learnt a lot about how optimism can help a family navigate tough times, and I’ve also been involved with Camp Quality since about the age of sixteen. Camp Quality is for children with cancer. I’ve learnt a lot about life from those kids.
That all led me to study with Martin Seligman, who taught positive psychology, because I wanted to teach children positive habits of the mind, not just the stuff they learn at school. School is excellent, but they don’t teach this stuff.
By 2010, I was working as a guidance counsellor and teacher and I noticed things weren’t improving among young people. I don’t believe we will see an improvement unless we teach kids positive mental habits. And that’s not just about mindfulness—mindfulness isn’t the magic silver bullet people think, particularly for tweens and teens. Insight and empathy play a role in mindfulness, and they’re controlled by the frontal and prefrontal cortices of the brain, and those parts of the brain are still developing
