Mid-to-late January—this is when the year really begins. The initial enthusiasm about our New Years resolutions tends to fade, and what remains is the real work: living with the promises we made to ourselves. Whether they will fuel us or sabotage our confidence often comes down to mindset, routines, and the right support system.
Child-Centered Design is not an easy space (although very satisfying and promising). Most of us are here for the calling—we believe in the profound impact of shaping experiences for young humans. Lately, I’ve been asking myself: what if we loved our own growth the way we love nurturing theirs? What if we built sustainable practices for ourselves just as we design durable, meaningful experiences for children?
A Dream Visit to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center
Recently, I visited friends at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop—a career dream moment that can only be understood by people in our circles. As Michael Preston showed me around the office and introduced me to some of his colleagues, I had the opportunity to meet Louis Henry Mitchell, a Creative Director who has been with Sesame Workshop for 33 years. We chatted about two themes that are so important to me: how do we create value-driven, lasting impact for children, and how do we grow professionally while staying true to our hearts and intuitions? He writes about this kind of journey in his book, Creative EVOLution—with EVOL thoughtfully inverted into LOVE—two words that perfectly capture the essence of intentional growth and the energy that the best things for kids are made with.
Back home, I showed a friend the Elmo doll my Cooney Center friends gave me, and she told me that her daughter still secretly sleeps with the exact same doll—and she is 15 years old! This type of impact and fulfillment is what we are all here for.
Prioritizing Longevity and Evolution
Loving our growth isn’t selfish or a luxury. Standing in the hallway at Sesame Workshop, surrounded by decades of child-centered innovation and impact, I felt their deep commitment to designing for durability and integrity—both at the institutional and at the employee level—and how this shared, values-informed practice sustains long-term impact.
But not all of us work at Sesame Workshop. In our messy reality and real-world constraints, how can we still live by the same standards and commitments? How do we make room for our growth and lead with our heart, without burning out or bending our values?
Despite challenges, choosing to invest in sustained learning, surrounding ourselves with like-minded colleagues and communities, and evolving as we go can help make our work matter.
The Child Experience Bootcamp: A Space to Grow Together
This is exactly why I created the Child Experience Bootcamp—as a space where we can practice this kind of loving investment in our professional selves and tuning our work to childhoods, together.
The Bootcamp runs for four weeks, with weekly one-hour Zoom calls, daily micro-content and action items, and a private group for peer support. It’s built around a methodology I’ve been developing for years: Understand, Connect, Translate, and Sustain.
Week 1 – Understand: Who are the children we serve? How do we deepen our understanding of them, their contexts, their lives, and the meaningful people around them?
Week 2 – Connect: How can we be comfortable around children, build trust, and connect better in real time with the children we work with?
Week 3 – Translate: Now what? How do we integrate ideas and insights into our daily work and improve our outcomes?
Week 4 – Sustain: How do we keep going after the bootcamp ends? Creating routines and infrastructure that help us stay connected to child experience thinking.
This is for you if you’re in a role that involves understanding children’s needs, making creative or product decisions that affect children, and you don’t have limitless time and energy—but you still want to do your best.
The next cohort starts Monday, January 26, with new cohorts every couple of months. Check here for upcoming start dates.
Love Your Growth
Whether you join the Bootcamp, find your own community, or do it solo—however it works for you—the invitation is the same: make this year about loving your growth. Prioritize time for intentionality, nurturing your support systems, and skill-building. Choose to invest. Choose to cultivate. Choose to evolve.
Stay aligned to your inner compass and make the year worth living.
