About

I'm Ian. I help parents finally understand their child.

I know what it is like to be loved by your parents and still feel like nobody sees you. That is the gap I spend my time closing.

Mission

To close the gap between loving a child and knowing how to reach them.

Almost every parent I meet really loves their kids. The problem is nobody ever shows them how to understand them, and that is the part I show you.

Ian as a boy at a desk with playing cards laid out

Ian as a boy crouching on a log at the edge of a river

Origins

My parents moved from Taiwan to Canada when I was a year and a half old. A few years later, families back home started sending their children to live with us, and by the time I was in elementary school there were five or six of us under one roof. My parents worked full days just to provide for us. There was so much love in that house and almost no time to put it anywhere.

I was loved, and I still felt completely invisible.

By Grade 8 I had decided I did not want to be here anymore. I wrote a note and left it under the chessboard in the living room, and my mom found it while she was cleaning. What she said to me that night has stayed between the two of us. It was the right thing, at the right moment, and it kept me here.

My parents loved me with their whole hearts, and love alone was not enough to reach me. That gap is the reason I do this work.

“I want to create a world where every child grows up feeling safe, seen, and loved inside their own home. Because when a child has that, everything downstream changes.”

The world I'm building toward

Confucius wrote about a world of great harmony. In a similar sense, I'm trying to create that. A parent sends their child off to school without wondering who is waiting for them there, because there are no bullies left to worry about. The child who would have become one went home every day to a house where they felt loved, so they never needed to take anything out on anyone.

Almost every hard thing an adult carries traces back to a childhood where they did not feel loved. The anxiety, the loneliness, the marriages that come apart, the people who end up going down a dark road because nothing steady was ever built underneath them. When a child gets what they need growing up, they don't carry it into adulthood, and they don't pass it on to their own kids.

That is why I do not believe the world changes through politics or through whoever happens to hold power. Families are what the world is made of. Change what happens inside them and you change what the next generation has to build on.

A young child standing in a field of dandelions at sunset