👋 friends!

Happy Friday. For many of us, we’re in the throws of back-to-school and all that comes with it: the morning routine, “tummy-ache” worries about new teachers and recess dynamics, the renewed onslaught of school emails and texts. Today’s glow note has a few tips to help you and your kiddos start the school year off with more calm and confidence.

In today’s note:

• Parenting in the AI era: AI features that encourage learning over straight-up answers, and AI tutors to improve civility and healthy discourse

• Connection spark: the power of micro-connections

• Hands on with AI: confidence-boosting personalized rock anthems to kick off the school year and a school email handler hack.

With that, here we go…

Future Ready Formula

Curiosity + Connection

Why? It’s overwhelming to be a parent in today’s stressful and chaotic world. Tune out the noise and prioritize curiosity and connection. Doing so will empower your kids to be co-pilots, not passengers and to have a healthy, confident, joyful edge in the AI era.

Parenting in the AI era

Study buddies: over the past few weeks, both ChatGPT and Gemini have launched new features designed to better support learning (as opposed to giving answers outright).

• The new modes (‘study and learn’ in ChatGPT and ‘guided learning’ in Gemini) combine questioning designed to foster critical thought, hints and quizzes, personalization, and self-reflection prompts all geared to encourage active learning.

• There are also ways to make it more fun and engaging. For example, get instant interactive flashcards on any topic. In ChatGPT try: “I want to test my knowledge about [enter topic]. Quiz me with [hard] questions using interactive QuizGPT flashcards.”

Parenting in the AI era

AI tutors for civility: There are emerging platforms (Dialogues from Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy, and Sway are two) that are essentially AI-assisted debate facilitators aiming to improve civility and encourage healthy discourse in high school and college classrooms.

While it seems the tools themselves are sparking debate given they could potentially be part of admissions packets - whether that’s appropriate and whether there are ways to “game the system,” - it feels like these types of tools are a promising use of AI, IMHO, and something much needed - bridge building between people with different points of view.

Hands-on with AI

The holy grail: a school email handler that actually handles it: every parent I know has been dreaming about this for years and I apologize for the headline because, no, we are not quite there yet. 🙄

However, over the past few months AI has come a long way in terms of quality and capability around this frustrating pain point. And so while I am still on a quest to find the perfect AI solution, in the meantime I recommend trying this very quick/easy set-up:

Go to ChatGPT, make sure it is connected to your Gmail and Calendar in “connected apps”, and prompt it to do the following (make sure to input your specifics in the brackets):

“Every [X day] at [X time] send me a concise digest summarizing the latest school emails. Search for my Gmail messages from these senders in the past week [add email addresses and/or email domains]. Only include content directly relevant to [X grade(s)]. Structure the summary exactly as:

1. Important Action Items – bullets with the task, who it’s for [X grade(s)], the due date if stated, and the original email subject in parentheses. Be sure to include any relevant links.

2. Important Dates – bullets with event name, who it’s for (include only X grade(s)), date and time if stated, location if stated, plus an Add to Google Calendar link using the standard template URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE&text=...&dates=START/END&details=...&location=...) with Mountain Time; use all‑day if time isn’t given. Link text should be “Add to Google Calendar”.

3. Other things to know – concise bullets with the most relevant non‑action/non‑event updates from those emails (still only if relevant to [X] grades). Be sure to include any relevant links.

   If nothing qualifies this week, say “No relevant updates this week.” Put a short header line: “School emails digest”

The weekly debrief includes one-click add-to-calendar events (while you can ask the AI to add the events/reminders to calendar directly, I prefer this route to give me more control).

Connection Spark ✨

Improving your social skills and relationships doesn't necessarily require dedicated time blocks or complicated exercises. The secret? Micro-connection. Simply paying more attention in those small, daily moments of interaction - with strangers, your kids, acquaintances at school drop-off - where you choose to be present and curious instead of distracted.

Try this: In 1-2 interactions today, make eye contact and ask a genuine question or offer a specific compliment. After doing this a few times, it’s incredible to see how it becomes more natural and intuitive and your social confidence grows.

The magic: These micro-moments (surprisingly, for many) can uplift your entire day—and theirs.

Personal note: As an introvert, I nervously tried this for a few days. The rapid boost in social confidence was shocking - and literally life-changing.

Hands-on with AI

🎶 Rock-on: To kick-off the school year, make your kid(s) their very own rock anthem to celebrate their awesomeness and boost their confidence. Bonus points if you listen to it when you’re in the car together.

Why it’s good: listening/singing together creates a unique opportunity for connection, the lyrics build pride and confidence in your kiddo, and music is shown to improve mood and has stress-reducing effects. My youngest, Leo, listens to his “anthem” every single day on the way to school and knows the lyrics by heart. ❤️

How to do it: go to Suno.com and enter a prompt similar to this “A rock anthem about my [6] year old child named [Leo] to boost their confidence heading back to school” Note: you can customize the prompt as little or as much as you like (e.g. specific skills or traits you want to highlight), and request any genre/style of music.