In this episode, we talk with Jessica Di Loreto, an educator and Willow Academy founder, she joins us to talk about how to raise confident, well-adjusted children and how to set them up to be resilient and have high self-esteem.

Jessica studied international education in university and has taught in four different countries: Canada, England, Italy, and Kenya. In our conversation, she’ll share with us the insights she learned teaching children from such vastly different cultures and what she thinks each of their approaches to education got right. Jessica is a strong proponent of social and emotional learning. She draws from the Scandinavian approach to education and believes that teaching children should begin with focusing on their emotional well-being and capacity to build good relationships with others before turning to subjects such as math and reading, as she believes this is the best way to set your children up for success in the long term.

We’ll speak in-depth about the amount of pressure that she sees parents putting on children nowadays to succeed not just academically but in a number of competitive extracurricular activities, and why this approach might be harming your child and their self-esteem more than it might be helping them. She’ll explain how, despite a parent’s best intentions, a highly structured life might actually be causing your children to have higher anxiety levels and what other dangers can come from helicopter parenting.