25 Mar The Fluent-Kinsome Collaboration: Strengthening Family Wellbeing Through Heart-Centered Tech
Family wellbeing is a guiding pillar of our work at Fluent. It guided our work with Google on the Digital Wellbeing of Families, our research for the Jed Foundation on Mental Health, and our award-winning documentary series, “Family Strong”. Most recently, family wellbeing guided us to a new and exciting collaboration with a kindred spirit, Kinsome.
A member of AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative™, Kinsome has the audacious but, we believe, achievable goal of leveraging technology to strengthen family relationships across generations. Their heart-centered technology is a creative and concrete response to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 alarm bell, signaling an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness. Isolation and loneliness fundamentally affect mental and physical health, which have been deteriorating in the U.S. and abroad for some time, even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. An increasing number of young people report feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness, and anxiety and depression are widespread for all age groups.
Well families are the wellspring of human health and optimal development. And at the heart of family wellbeing are strong and vibrant relationships, from the beginning of life through the end of life. Those relationships are not a “nice to have”. Human health and optimal development across the lifespan are completely dependent on them. Early in life, development is so rapid that our species evolved a “village of stable care” to meet the abundant needs of infants and children for comfort, affection, and play. Multiple responsive caregivers, such as grandparents, were readily on-hand for guidance and mentoring. While our village of care obviously benefited young life, it was just as vital to the wellbeing of older life. For humans of all ages need strong—welcoming, responsive, and supportive—relationships.
Human connection—the essential mechanism for strengthening family wellbeing—is the focus of Kinsome’s mission and AI-powered app. Today families are spread out across time and space. They have competing demands and call different places and time zones home, making strong and vibrant family relationships immensely difficult to maintain. Kinsome envisioned a technology with the power to help families transcend time and space, reduce the challenges of distance in the grandparent-grandchild bond, and strengthen human connection across generations.
All of us at Fluent are thrilled to be partnering with Kinsome and their deeply creative and caring founders, Eben Pingree and Mike Gerbush. We launched our collaboration in earnest this past February with a couple fun and productive sessions at Research Camp. Campers took a break from the woods to form design teams and create ways for kids and grandparents to stay close when they are not together. Through the lens of children, we got to examine intergenerational bonds and how best to strengthen them. The sessions were as much affirming of Kinsome’s vision as they were informative about how to dial-in the child’s experience so that every shared story and laugh brings them closer to their grandparents. We are grateful and excited to be on this journey with Kinsome, strengthening human connection and family wellbeing through heart-centered tech.
By Amy Warren, Senior Child Development Researcher
References:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2023). New Surgeon General Advisory Raises Alarm about the Devastating Impact of the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States.
National Research Council (2013). U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2009). Doing better for children. Paris: OECD Publishing.
UNICEF (2007). Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations, Report Card 7. Florence, Italy: United Nations Children’s Fund Innocenti Research Centre.
See Global Wellness Institute for an array of Happiness and Wellbeing Indices.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2023). Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Data Summary and Trends Report, 2011-2021.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (1999). Mental health: A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: Center for Mental Health Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health.
See Narvaez, D., & Bradshaw, G.A. (2023). The Evolved nest: Nature’s Way Of Raising Children And Creating Connected Communities. North Atlantic Books.
Narvaez, D., Valentino, K., Fuentes, A., McKenna, J. J., & Gray, P. (Eds.). (2014). Ancestral landscapes in human evolution: Culture, childrearing and social wellbeing. Oxford University Press.
Hrdy, S. B. (2001). Mothers and others. Natural History, 110(4), 50-62.
Hrdy, S. B. (2015). Allomothers across species, across cultures, and through time.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. Norton Professional Books.
Narvaez, D. (2022). Allomothers: We were never meant to mother alone. Kindred Media.
Narvaez, D. (2019). What Wise Elders Know. Psychology Today.
Meehan, C.L. (2014). Allomothers and Child Well-Being. In A. Ben-Arieh, F. Casas, I. Frønes, & J. Korbin (Eds.), Handbook of Child Well-Being. Springer, Dordrecht.