Welcome to TinyMoves

Aug 5

3 min read

Across 30+ years in family support — at the federal, state, and local levels — and two decades of my own parenting journey, I've seen a lot of change.

When too much is…too much

A parent with a question about their eighteen-month-old's speech, or their nine-year-old's screen time, or their fourteen-year-old's anxiety now has immediate access to more content on that question than ever before — and few markers to help them understand what works.

It's not that parents can't find answers, it's that they're drowning in the search.

What gets drowned out

Meanwhile, thousands of peer-reviewed findings on child development sit in journals that few parents will ever open and no frontline worker has time to read. We're missing the translation layer that gets this research to parents through the channels they trust.

Trust is the missing currency

Just putting more information in front of parents is not the answer. You can fund a new platform in a quarter. You cannot fund your way to being the person a parent calls first.

Consider what the family support field actually is. Home visitors sitting in living rooms every week. Family resource centers that people walk into because they trust the person at the front desk. Kinship navigators. Parent educators. Head Start staff. CBCAP-funded programs in every state. That is not a small thing. That is trust built by being there for parents at the moments they need support.

The ideas underneath everything

While the context parents are parenting in is ever shifting some things remain the same.

Parenting is hard work. Parents and caregivers need every bit of support they can get, because the work isn't only hard, it's some of the most important work anyone does.
Families need information they can trust. Guidance backed by evidence, not by an algorithm optimizing for engagement. This sounds obvious but it means someone has to do the unglamorous work of reading the research, judging its quality, and translating it into something a tired caregiver can actually use.
The infrastructure already exists. We don't need new front doors. We need to put better tools in the hands of the programs and people who work with families every day.
Small changes are often what sticks. Families rarely need a breakthrough. They need a slightly different response to a tantrum, a question asked one more time, a conversation started a year earlier than it would have been otherwise. Small, repeatable, evidence-informed moves — made by parents, by practitioners, by systems — that compound.

That's the bet. Not a grand redesign. Tiny moves, done consistently, at scale.

What we’re building

Three initiatives, each a different bet on how to seed change, but always built in partnership with the field and with families on the ground.

ParentingMoves. A national daily campaign that turns peer-reviewed child development research into one specific, doable action a parent can take — every day, 365 days a year, free to every family support program in the country.

FutureProof. A national initiative helping parents of young children build the skills their kids will need for a digital world — starting now, while they're small. Delivered through the family support programs families already trust.

RootsBuilder. A revolving loan fund that pays for the repair a kinship family needs to get their home licensed. Licensing unlocks ongoing support; that support repays the loan; and the family is left with a safer home and a growing asset — while the fund moves on to the next family.

Different problems, one theory of change: build on the trusted relationships already in place and provide something simple that people can use.