Growing Humans explores how raising kids transforms us.
We are two developmental researchers and mothers, unpacking the science and practice of human growth in service of becoming wiser, as we help educate a new generation for a future we cannot even imagine.
We, Valerie Livesay (Ph.D.) and Alis Anagnostakis (Ph.D.) are both adult development researchers. We study how adults grow towards ever more complex stages of maturity throughout their lifetimes - what triggers and sustains such growth, what hinders it and why it is important in workplaces, families and societies. We spend our work lives accompanying leaders and teams across the world to step into transformative learning experiences and harness more of their developmental potential.
We are also both mothers - a choice that has profoundly changed our lives and transformed us in myriad ways. As we were both immersed in the research and practice of human development when we decided to step into parenthood, we soon recognised this new role as the biggest developmental challenge of our lives. Many years before we met and became friends, we each embarked on a journey of profound personal growth as we were striving to raise our children in the most conscious way we were capable of.
We soon learnt how messy this path was. We witnessed ourselves aspire to be wise parents, yet often found ourselves showing up from a place that was much less than we had hoped. We were faced with shadows of our past and darker corners inside ourselves we didn’t even know existed. We also accessed resources in ourselves we hadn’t been aware of and discovered facets of our identities and relationships that had been hidden before.
Knowing the theory of how grown-ups grow up has only somewhat eased our growing-up adventure, but the practices that have emerged from this theory have helped us to self-reflect, truly see ourselves at our best and at our worst, hold ourselves with more compassion when we couldn’t live up to our own expectations of who we wanted to be, and illuminated a path forward where parenthood became one of our most exciting learning projects, yet. As we now raise tweens and teens, we are both convinced, more than ever before, that they are raising us just as much as we are raising them.
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What will you find here?
This substack was born from our shared dream of creating a self-learning space for all adults who play a role in raising or educating children. This is not just for parents but for grandparents, uncles and aunties, teachers and educators of all kinds. It is a place for grown-ups to slow down, look inward and learn how they themselves are still growing up and what the next edge of their growth might be. Every week, we share articles or podcast episodes, turning the science of adult development into the practice of building wisdom for ourselves, as we nurture and support the children in our lives.
We aspire to not only share what we have discovered over our combined 40 years of research and practice but to also invite guests who hold precious knowledge to share their wisdom with us. Most importantly, we hope to create a community where all of us can learn from each other.
We aim to keep most of the content on in this space free, in service of our mission of democratising adult development in service of building a wiser world. If you choose to become a paying subscriber, you will have access to much more of our time and close interaction - through dedicated discusion threads, community webinars and fire-side chats.
As a paying subscriber, you will also receive a 50% discount on our self-led course - “Growing Humans: How Raising Kids Raises Us”. The course unpacks - in engaging and immersive ways - the research and practice from developmental and positive psychology, laying out a growth map for adults seeking to better know and purposefully grow themselves as they raise the children in their care.
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