We recently connected with Erin Walsh and have shared our conversation below.

Erin, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Every generation of parents has to redefine what it means to care for kids. Through workshops, writing, and online classes, we translate the latest discoveries in brain science into easy to understand language for parents and educators and offer practical strategies that work in the messy realities of our daily lives. We believe that parenting and teaching requires creativity and playfulness and we wanted a brand that reflected this. We created Spark & Stitch Institute to SPARK insight and understanding into what children and youth need to thrive and STITCH science to practical strategies for raising connected and courageous kids.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I never would have imagined as a young person that I would spend my career looking at media’s impact on child and adolescent health and development. When I was in high school, my dad started the first education and advocacy organization dedicated to maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms of media’s impact on children. As any good teenager does, I soundly rejected the value of my parents’ advice on these topics! Of course as I got older and started working with young people, I realized that the conversations that my parents had started were becoming only more relevant over time. We couldn’t have a meaningful conversation about youth and family thriving without taking into account the powerful role that screens and technology were having on our lives.

As any good “recovering adolescent” does in your early twenties, I returned to my parents early in my career and said, “Turns out you were on to something… and I would like to be a part of conversation.” We’ve been working together ever since. Our work has since broadened to include other issues related to child and adolescent development but we continue to focus on screens and technology and their impact on social emotional development.

Parents aren’t given a roadmap for how to navigate some of the emerging challenges of parenting today. Whether it is challenges related to mental health or when to get your child their first smartphone, parents are inundated with conflicting advice and fear-based soundbites. Spark & Stitch is committed to delivering warm, supportive, and accessible evidence and information that helps parents stay connected to their kids as their digital worlds expand. You will not find screen time shame or unrealistic expectations at Spark & Stitch – instead we focus on helping parents and educators understand what is going on inside children and teens as they grow. Equipped with this insight, our audience is better able to bring empathy, compassion, and connection to screen time challenges. We believe in helping families and schools build on their strengths and focus on what matters most – staying connected to kids.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our field is fairly crowded as parents receive support and information from organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as parenting bloggers online and everything in between. When it comes to navigating issues related to technology screen time, parents often receive conflicting information. Plus news organizations and parenting influencers looking for clicks often deliver sensationalized headlines that increase parental anxiety about screens and technology.

Over the last twenty years, we have built a strong reputation for delivering evidence-based content in a warm and understandable way. This commitment to science, evidence, and storytelling helps us stand out as a go-to resource for information and support that is both reliable and relatable. Prioritizing the data and our relationships with schools and families over sensational coverage of the issues has helped us build trust and authority in this space and it is something that we are really proud of!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

While we do run a business, first and foremost we are connectors and storytellers. We are at our best when we get to connect with people and authentically build solutions that meet their needs. While we have dabbled in online marketing, it makes sense given our strengths that our online and in-person classes and workshops continue to be our most effective strategy for growing our audience. We have the honor of speaking to parents and educators across the country and are hired largely through word of mouth. Getting the opportunity to be “in the room” with people allows us to build a strong relational beginning, establish trust and credibility, and invite people to engage with our other offerings.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sparkandstitchinstitute.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/sparkandstitch
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SparkandStitchInstitute
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-walsh-spark-and-stitch/
• Twitter: twitter.com/Erin_K_Walsh

Image Credits
Erin Walsh