1. Orient Yourself
When you face a conversation you weren't prepared for, stop. Don't react. Use Family Throughlines to decide who you want to be in this moment.
Discover Your Timeless Compass
For Parenting in an Uncharted World.
It doesn't take a dramatic event to realize your parenting playbook is out of date. Sometimes, it's a series of stacked moments that reveal the gaps.
In a single week, my daughter made a logical case for Snapchat to survive socially, I testified about AI in schools, and both my kids spent hours hiding in a lockdown, terrified death was imminent.
Suddenly, the questions weren’t theoretical anymore. How do you help your child stay connected without being consumed by their phone? How do you prepare them for a world of AI? And how do you even begin to help them heal from a trauma you can barely comprehend? No parent can be an expert on all the new challenges our kids face.
It was a humbling realization: the most important conversations I needed to have with my kids were the ones nobody had ever taught me how to have.The good news is you don't need to be an expert on every modern challenge to guide your family. Family Throughlines gives you a way to bring the best of what you already know into the hardest conversations nobody prepared you to have.
Bridging the Gap: Timeless Guidance for Today's World
The world our kids are navigating is nearly unrecognizable from the one we grew up in and the institutions
that support our children are impossibly behind. It's on us to guide our kids through new challenges—from AI to social pressures—even when that feels impossibly hard.
But the wisdom you already possess, grounded in your family's enduring values, is more powerful than you realize. Discover a
two-pronged approach to conversation that empowers your family with clarity, connection, and confidence: timeless principles
for lasting resilience, and practical guides for navigating urgent challenges.
An Invitation
- • To rediscover and name the throughlines that serve as your family's compass.
- • To apply that compass to new terrain: AI, social pressures, attention traps, and polarized spaces.
- • To equip your family with the tools to navigate uncharted territories together.
- • To join a community of parents choosing to have the difficult talks our kids need us to have.
Your Family's Compass: Building Resilience & Responding to the Urgent
At the heart of Family Throughlines is a powerful approach designed to equip your family for any challenge, known or unknown. We combine enduring principles for long-term strength with practical, timely tools for immediate needs.
2. Set Conditions
Don't rush into the dark. Use Conversation Non-Negotiables like "Shared Reality" and "Curiosity" to create the safety needed to talk.
3. Choose Your Path
Identify your objective. Use Conversation Types to know if you are there to Discover, Connect, Triage, or Agree.
Our Guiding Principles for Every Conversation
- Start with a Shared Reality: agree on what's really happening before you try to solve it.
- Speak the Tension: name the pull you both feel without judgment so the real issue is on the table.
- Find the "And": frame talks as you and your kid vs. the problem, not you vs. them.
- Lead with Curiosity: begin with questions deepen understanding before bringing your authority.
- Make Space for Silence: let pauses breathe; big conversations rarely finish in one sitting.
The Conversations That Equip Your Family's Journey.
Our conversation guides serve as your essential "First Aid Kit," equipping you with both timeless wisdom and timely strategies for the modern world. They provide clear roadmaps to navigate specific, urgent topics while reinforcing your Family enduring Throughlines across every dimension of your child's life. framework:
Guiding Their Inner World
These conversations focus on building a strong foundation of self-awareness, emotional resilience, and authentic connection.
Guiding Their Digital World
These conversations directly address the opportunities and ethical dilemmas of our rapidly evolving, AI-driven digital landscape.
Guiding Their Path in the World
These conversations empower your child to confidently forge their own path, anchored in their values and contributing meaningfully to their community.
The book contains conversation guides on the social tightrope of being in-the-loop without constantly being in an app, how to balance the benefits and risks of AI as a study buddy, and approaches for helping kids recover from the trauma of a lockdown. Our mission is to continuously build a library of these "First Aid Kit" conversation guides, each designed to empower your family with timely insights and actionable strategies.
Get the Pocket Guide.
Family Throughlines are about bringing the connective threads that hold your parenting together into the conversations that matter most for your family. Send me a quick note and I'll send you the guide as a short field reference for the key concepts. I'm personally welcoming every family to the community.
- • The four parts of your compass you establish
- • The conversation non-negotiables you create
- • The five conversation objectives you pursue
Your Fellow Traveler
Hi, I'm Whit.
I'm not a world-renowned expert. I'm a parent, right there in the trenches with you. My approach is simple: I'm sharing what I'm learning as I adapt the best principles from my research and my experience helping team succeed - both in the corporate world and on the sports field - for my most important team: my family. My hope is to give you a starting point and community that helps you apply your Family Throughlines to more of these conversations that nobody prepared us for (but our kids need us to have) in a way that feels authentic to you.
Join the Community
This project grows through conversation. Send a short email to share who you are, what your kids are facing, and what brought you to the community. I read and reply to every note personally.
Email Whit & Join the CommunityWhat's Next
The guide and community invite are just the start. Coming next:
- • A parent-to-parent workbook that helps your family do the work together.
- • Live gatherings—small circles of connected parents both in-person and online.
- • Workshops for schools and organizations that want to equip their parent communities.