About

Spark & Stitch Institute is a Walsh family project. Created by Erin Walsh, her dad Dr. David Walsh, and a small but mighty team of collaborators and supporters.

To answer this question we have to go way back. Realizing that media and technology were becoming powerful forces in the lives of children and families, Dr. David Walsh started the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) in 1996. Its mission was to “maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of media’s impact on children’s health and development.” In the mid-nineties, it was hard to imagine the digital landscape that would soon unfold for families, schools, and policy makers in the coming decades. Guided by the belief that media are not inherently good or bad, but powerful, Dr. Dave and the Institute staff spent 14 years leading the national conversation about media’s impact on children and families.

As a teenager Erin was initially reluctant to acknowledge that media was impacting her generation. Before long she realized that technology was a powerful reorganizing force for youth, families, and schools. She quickly embraced the mission and joined forces with her dad after graduate school. During her time at NIMF she was instrumental to the development of the MediaWise movement – a national critical media literacy project.

You bet! When he isn’t biking or caring for his seven grandchildren, he is working with the Spark & Stitch Institute team. You will find his books, writing, online classes, and delightful storytelling here.

We are glad you asked! After the National Institute on Media and the Family closed in 2009, Dr. Dave and Erin went on to create Mind Positive Parenting. We focused mainly on bringing the information in Dr. Dave’s best selling books to communities across the country through speaking and keynote addresses. Ten years later, a few things have became abundantly clear:

• Dr. Dave and Erin are transitioning leadership roles as Erin’s national work in digital media’s impact on child and adolescent development, social justice education and equity, and positive youth development is increasingly guiding the work.
• We work as much with educators in schools as we do with parents and needed a brand that was more inclusive of our audiences and clients.
• We needed a brand that would allow us to grow, experiment, play, and collaborate as we create content and classes that evolve with the needs of today’s families and schools.

Every generation of parents has to redefine what it means to care for young people. Using brain science as our foundation and digital technologies as our focus, we created Spark & Stitch Institute to:

• Spark insight and understanding into what children and youth need to thrive
• Stitch together parent-child and educator-student relationships, the virtual and real worlds, research and practice.

Spark & Stitch is playful, creative and accessible. We believe that kids and grownups alike need and deserve this.

We are hardwired to connect. Study after study shows that warm and caring connections between kids and parents as well as students and educators are the active ingredient in healthy development and learning. Whether we are looking at Snapchat or Fortnite, teenage risk taking, or literacy development – connection is key.

We believe that courage is inextricably linked to connection. It takes courage to have difficult conversations with your teenager or set loving limits with your two-year-old. It takes courage to stand up to someone online or put your phone away to look into the hurt face of a friend. It takes courage to tackle the toxins to human connection – things like racism, sexism, homophobia, and other -isms.

While we focus a lot on media and technology, at the end of the day the research isn’t just about apps, tools, and games. It’s about what is means to be human.