Summit Agenda
Three days of keynotes, panels, workshops, and networking — explore the full programme below.
Day 1
Foundations & Mindset
Summit Opening: Why Representation in Play Matters
Welcome to the Pocketlings Parenting Virtual Summit. In this opening keynote, Osayi Lasisi shares the story behind Pocketlings and why culturally diverse toys and experiences are essential for raising confident children. When children see themselves reflected in the world around them, they develop a stronger sense of identity, belonging, and self-worth from the earliest years.
The Missing Piece of Emotional Regulation: Movement, Rhythm, and the Nervous System
You are doing all the right things to support emotional regulation, yet your child still melts down. You may simply be missing the body's role in regulation. This session, led by a pediatric occupational therapist, shows how movement and rhythm help the nervous system regulate, offering practical tools parents can use today.
Cliche Your Way Through Parenting
Rethink the everyday sayings we hear and turn them into real-life tools for raising emotionally healthy children. Common phrases like pick your battles, it takes a village, and you cannot pour from an empty cup are more than just catchy phrases. They are wisdom, boundaries, and emotional regulation strategies hidden in plain sight.
How to Help Kids with the BIG Feelings
This session explains why many children experience intense emotional reactions and how parents can effectively support them. Big feelings such as anger, frustration, sadness, and anxiety are a normal part of childhood development, especially for strong-willed, highly sensitive, and neurodiverse kids. Learn why these emotions show up as meltdowns and what parents can do about it.
Why Mothers Struggle Alone and How Community Changes Everything
Postpartum mental health challenges are often intensified by isolation and lack of support. This session explores how intentional community spaces, both online and offline, can dramatically impact maternal wellbeing. Through storytelling and real-world examples, discover how creating spaces for honest conversation and shared support can reduce anxiety and normalize the motherhood experience.
Lead Yourself First: The Hidden Skill Behind Raising Confident Kids
In a world that feels louder, faster, and more overwhelming, many parents search for better techniques to manage behavior. But the most powerful influence in any home is not a script or strategy, it is the parent's ability to lead themselves. Explore how self-leadership in emotionally charged moments shapes the emotional tone of a family.
How to Reduce Stress with Conscious Parenting
Explore how stress is stored in the body and the nervous system, with practical ways to regulate the body. This session covers overall energetics and how the energetic body functions, helping parents understand what conscious parenting means and how to apply it in daily life.
Disciplining With Empathy
Tired of repeating yourself over and over again? Do you find yourself threatening consequences without follow through? Does your child have meltdowns when you hold a boundary? Join us for a science-backed discussion about how to discipline with empathy, turning conflicts into moments of connection.
Raising Lifelong Learners
We spend far too much time telling kids what to learn and not enough time teaching them how to learn. Explore ways to instill a love of learning in your child that encourages them to become lifelong learners. In a constantly changing landscape, if children have the drive and skill to learn and persevere, they will be able to adapt to any possible future.
Raising Leaders at Home and at Work
Identity, belonging, and self-worth are not abstract concepts. They are formed daily in our homes, our work, and in the way we model leadership to the next generation. Explore how the same principles that build visibility and authority in business also shape confident, purpose-driven children.
Teaching Kids With Big Feelings to Be More Flexible
Many kids get upset when they cannot get what they want or when things go differently than expected. Simply encouraging flexible thinking is not effective. Learn a simple, engaging, step-by-step process to teach kids how to maturely handle the fact that things will not always go their way.
Taming the Chaos of Parenting Active Kids in Today's World
How to solve the problem of stress and mental overload from managing children's activities and education. The reality full-time working parents face is constant messages from schools, clubs, and sports combined with scheduling chaos. Learn how to organize and give yourself back time for what matters most: raising your kids hands-on.
Raising Confident Kids Through Family Change: Emotional Safety During Divorce and Transition
Family transitions such as divorce, separation, and major life changes can shake the foundation children depend on for security. This session explores how to maintain emotional safety for children during periods of family change, helping them feel confident, loved, and stable even when the family structure is shifting.
Day 1 Wrap Up
Osayi wraps up Day 1 with a brief reflection on the themes explored throughout the day, highlighting key moments and preparing attendees for what is ahead on Day 2.
Day 2
Practical Strategies
Day 2 Welcome: Practical Strategies for Everyday Parenting
Osayi opens Day 2 with a warm welcome and sets the stage for a day focused on practical strategies and concrete tools that parents can apply immediately in their homes.
Guidance with Grace: Shifting Our Mindset on Discipline
Discipline does not have to mean power struggles, punishment, or guilt. Learn how to shift from correcting behavior to guiding behavior with compassion, clarity, and confidence. Explore how children's behavior is rooted in communication and nervous system needs, and how responding with grace leads to more cooperation, trust, and emotional growth.
The Parent Reset: Decluttering for Busy Families
Between work, kids, schedules, and daily life, clutter can quietly take over and add to the mental load parents already carry. This session provides a realistic approach to letting go of excess and creating systems that support busy households. Learn how to decide what truly needs to stay, reduce overwhelm, and set up simple systems that actually work.
From Surviving to Systems: Practical Tools for Working Parents
The daily juggle of career and family can feel relentless without the right systems in place. This session provides a framework for creating routines, boundaries, and organizational systems that reduce the mental load and help working parents move from reactive chaos to intentional structure. Learn how small systems changes create outsized impact on family wellbeing.
From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Raising Confident Kids at the Dentist
Dental visits can be stressful and overwhelming for both children and parents. When her three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with ten cavities, Stacey realized the problem was not the parents but the lack of resources to prepare children and families. Learn play-based approaches to help children feel confident and prepared for dental care.
Practice the PAUSE: A Mindful Approach to Parenting with Connection and Confidence
Parenting today often feels rushed, reactive, and emotionally exhausting. This session introduces the PAUSE Process, a compassionate and practical framework designed to help parents slow down, respond with intention, and strengthen connection with their children through five simple yet powerful steps.
Career Relaunch Blueprint
If you are thinking about returning to the paid workforce after a career break, you know how overwhelming and lonely the process can feel. Learn how to see your unique value because of your career break, how to confidently communicate your skills and abilities, and walk away with valuable tips on navigating the emotional aspect of returning to work.
Discipline Through Connection: Why It Starts with You, Not Your Child
Children do not learn who they are from what we say but from who we are and the state we live in. In a world that is louder, faster, and more overstimulating than ever, many parents try to do it right using scripts and strategies. But what happens when your body is not calm? This session reveals the missing link in modern parenting.
Emotional Regulation and Nervous System Support
Emotional regulation starts with the parents. Children look to us for direction, and modeling appropriate behavior during stressful times sets the precedent for how a child should handle stress. Learn the necessary methods for self-regulation and co-regulation to help calm your child's nervous system during challenging moments.
Body-Safe Basics for Littles: Helping Young Kids Know Their Bodies, Trust Their Gut, and Speak Up
Keeping kids safe does not mean scary stories. It starts with simple rules, everyday skills, and trusted adults who know what to say and how to say it. Learn the five body-safe basics every young child should know, from using proper names for body parts to recognizing unsafe behavior. Build awareness, confidence, and real-world safety from the earliest years.
ABA in Child Development and Parenting
Applied Behavior Analysis in child development focuses on increasing helpful behaviors and improving communication, social skills, and independence through evidence-based, data-driven techniques. This session covers structured, positive reinforcement strategies to manage behavior, reduce family stress, and improve the parent-child relationship.
Building Confidence Through Early Independence: The Potty Training Journey
Sarah Mechling supports families navigating potty training and complex toileting challenges, working with young children as well as older children with special needs. Her work focuses on helping children build body awareness, self-initiation, and confidence during one of the earliest milestones of independence.
How to Talk About Money Before It Gets Weird
Money rarely becomes weird overnight. It becomes weird slowly through avoidance, guilt, comparison, and inconsistency. In the early years, children form beliefs about value, fairness, belonging, and self-worth. Learn how to normalize money conversations and raise financially mature children without entitlement.
Live Q&A: Your Parenting Questions Answered
Bring your questions from the sessions throughout Day 2. This live Q&A gives attendees the opportunity to dig deeper into the practical strategies discussed, ask follow-up questions, and get personalized guidance from the summit host.
Day 3
Community & Connection
Day 3 Welcome: Community and Connection
Osayi opens the final day of the summit with a welcome focused on community and connection, setting the stage for sessions that explore how relationships, play, and support systems shape confident children.
From Doing to Being: Emotional Regulation as the Key to Connection
Most parents know what they should do in hard moments. The challenge is doing it when emotions run high. This session explores why emotional regulation is less about techniques and more about shifting from doing mode to being mode. Learn how becoming present and grounded transforms the parent-child dynamic from reactive to connected.
Simple Screen Reset
This workshop guides parents through a practical 3-step reset for screen time challenges. Assess what is working and what is not, reimagine your ideal technology use, and choose one positive step forward in collaboration with your children. Focused on progress over perfection, this approach helps families use technology intentionally rather than being controlled by it.
Modeling Executive Functions at Home: What Children Learn from Our Systems
Children do not learn organization, planning, and follow-through from lectures. They learn by watching how the adults around them manage real life. Every calendar on the wall, every checklist by the door, and every moment of repair after a forgotten task becomes a live demonstration of executive functioning in action.
The Power of Caregivers: Shaping Children's Sense of Self
Explore how the words we choose and the way we show up in moments of stress shape children's developing sense of self. Learn what is happening in children's brains at different developmental stages and why their behavior is not about being difficult but about their nervous system trying to feel safe. Walk through the Three Pillars Framework for responsive parenting.
Reimagining Discipline
Time-outs. Calm down. Taking away screen time. Do your best efforts to discipline keep turning into power struggles, yelling, and threats? This session unpacks why traditional discipline often backfires, even when your intentions are good. Explore a practical, relationship-centered alternative built on trust and connection.
Play IS the Work: How 15 Minutes of Connection Regulates Your Child's Nervous System and Builds Lasting Confidence
In a world of constant stimulation and big expectations, your child's nervous system is working overtime. Meltdowns, defiance, and emotional overwhelm are not behavior problems but communication from a dysregulated brain. Discover why as little as 15 minutes of intentional play does more than any other parenting strategy, and walk away with simple, practical ways to play with your kids even when you are exhausted.
Play the Long Game: Using Family Play to Build Emotional Regulation and Real Confidence
In an overstimulated world, our kids need safe spaces to build frustration tolerance, flexibility, and emotional endurance. Family play is one of the most powerful regulation gyms we have. Learn how play builds emotional regulation skills, strengthens family bonds, and creates lasting confidence through everyday moments.
Calm Is Contagious: Nervous System Regulation for Parents and Families
Children learn how to regulate emotions by watching the adults around them. When a parent's nervous system feels supported, calm becomes something that can be shared. This session breaks down nervous system regulation in a parent-friendly way, explaining how stress responses affect behavior, connection, and emotional safety at home.
The Me in Home and the Home in Me
Parenting does not just shape our children, it shapes us. Explore the powerful relationship between a parent's inner world and the emotional culture of the home. How does our stress, self-talk, and nervous system state quietly influence our children? Learn to build a steadier home inside yourself so your children feel safe, confident, and secure.
Your Child Is Not Broken: A Nervous System Lens for Raising Confident Kids
In an overstimulated world, many young children are labeled as too sensitive, too intense, or too much. But what if those behaviors are not character flaws, just nervous systems asking for support? Learn a brain-based, strength-focused way of understanding big feelings and challenging moments, focusing on connection rather than fixing behavior.
The Hidden Pattern Behind Burnout: The Internal Dynamic That Makes Success and Parenting Feel Harder Than It Should
You are good at what you do. You have worked hard for this career. And you love your children. Lately, though, it can feel like those two truths are colliding. The role has expanded, the stakes are higher, the mental load is constant. This session explores the hidden pattern behind burnout and offers a path beyond the push-harder-or-step-back dilemma.
Thank You and Closing: Carrying the Summit Forward
Osayi closes the Pocketlings Parenting Virtual Summit with heartfelt gratitude for the speakers, attendees, and community. Joined by Yvonne Knap (StarKid Universe) for a shared moment of reflection, this final session looks back at the journey across all three days and offers encouragement for carrying the insights, connections, and renewed confidence into everyday family life.