REGISTER HERE! Our second Confident Parents | Remarkable Students speaker event for SUA families with Meagan Francis: Beyond Honor Cords: Rethinking Pride in Parenting Teens and Young Adults will take place on Thursday, January 29 at 7:00 pm virtually.

When graduation season arrives, our feeds overflow with photos of honor cords, college sweatshirts, and shiny awards. But those highlight reels rarely capture the whole picture of parenting teens and young adults: the struggles, detours, and quiet wins that don’t fit neatly into a celebratory post.

Join us as Meagan Francis, author of The Last Parenting Book You'll Ever Read, explores how cultural messages about success shape our feelings of pride and shame as parents—and why it’s so easy to slip into the role of our kids’ “publicist” rather than their parents. Together, we’ll dig into the tricky emotions that come up when one child shines while another stumbles, when social media amplifies comparison, and when our kids’ choices feel tangled up with our own identity. Most importantly, we’ll expand the definition of what parents can be proud of. From the unseen resilience it takes for a teen to struggle through a hated class, to the awkward courage it takes to just keep showing up in an uncomfortable world, there are countless ways our kids (and we as parents) are growing every day.

This session will offer perspective, practical encouragement, and a re-imagining of parental pride, helping us release the pressure to manage our kids’ image, separate their choices from our self-worth, and celebrate the everyday, unsung accomplishments that matter most.