About Us

Meghan has been an education leader and entrepreneur for over 25 years, and Brian is a product leader and social entrepreneur who has built impactful education products and programs for even longer. Together, we‘ve spent our careers in pursuit of helping kids thrive, well before our own (now 11, 13, and 15) were even born.

Together, our first answer was to build Tinkergarten. In 2010, we were concerned about the precipitous drop in kids’ access to play and time outdoors—two important inputs to their development and well being. This, alongside the rapid rise of alluring digital and social media. We worried about how those two trends together might negatively impact kids. And, it turns out, we were not alone.

We developed a rigorous training program for educators, crafted a beloved outdoor, play-based curriculum for kids, and cultivated a robust community that brought families in all 50 states outside in their local 3rd spaces for early learning. Over the next decade +, we trained over 5,000 educators, served hundreds of thousands of families, and reached millions with our lessons. Our network helped kids follow their curiosity, take risks and develop a sense of wonder, demonstrating to them and their caregivers how these skills could help them to become creative, compassionate, and resilient humans.

Now our kids are adolescents. And in a media rich, AI-driven, and even more isolating world, the ground beneath them is shifting faster than any of us can make sense of. It’s clear this generation need an additional set of skills to navigate their digitally rich world. The traditional instincts of parenting—protect, buffer, limit, ban—though tempting, are clearly no match for this moment.

We need effective ways to help kids build the real, human connections and the strong, internal systems required to navigate their world. That’s what we hope to uncover with a10d.

What you’ll find at a10d

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about our program designed uniquely for kids to learn about and command their own attention and build essential human skills. In the meantime, we’re building a community of parents and educators over at our a10d Substack to test and refine our ideas, share new insights, and support each other as we learn together. Each week, we’ll bring you:

• Fresh takes on the latest research on adolescence, attention, and the human skills kids need in order to flourish. Insights made digestible. And not just reasons to fear; plenty of hope, too.

• Doable (and we dare say fun) experiments you can try with the young people in your life to build attention and human relationship skills. Helping kids doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a whole series of small but powerful experiences.

• Conversations with experts about how our world is evolving, what that means for our attention, how we can preserve what makes us uniquely human, and how to support each other and the kids we love. This is nuanced stuff; the more voices the better.

Dive in

Here are a few articles that can help you get started:

• May you have your attention, please?

• Why does it feel so hard (and important) to define attention?

• AI for young people: clear eyes, full heart

• Try This: “I like you already...”

Join in

Tackling big challenges like this together means deeper learning, greater impact, and way more joy for everyone involved. We hope you’ll join in. We’d love your company!

• Join the waitlist

• Subscribe to a10d.substack.com

Thank you for visiting!