Welcome to a10d
Attention is the gateway to our lived experience. It’s how we filter the world around us, choose to spend our limited time, and nurture the connections and relationships that sustain us—everything we need to live meaningfully. And right now, it’s under siege.
Though true for all of us, this has the greatest impact on the adolescents we love. They are navigating a window in life that is defined by both unparalleled opportunity and real vulnerability — all at the same time they are defining the architecture on which they’ll build adult lives.
That’s why we’re building a10d (”attend”) — a new way to help kids to take charge of their attention and develop the skills and mindsets they’ll need to flourish as humans in a digitally-driven world.
Come join us as we discover, learn about, and work to ensure our next generation thrives. Learn and contribute right here on our Substack.
More about us
I’ve been an education leader for over 25 years, and my husband is a social entrepreneur who has built impactful education products and programs for even longer. Together, we‘ve spent our careers in pursuit of helping kids thrive, well before our own (now 11, 13, and 15) were even born.
Together, our first answer was to build Tinkergarten. We had a hunch that spending more time outdoors, in community with others, helping kids to take risks and developing a sense of wonder could help them to grow into creative, compassionate, and resilient humans. And, it turns out, we weren’t alone. We raised our young kids as we co-created a lasting, nationwide movement of thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of families who felt the same.
Now our kids are adolescents. And in a media rich, AI-driven, and increasingly isolating world, the ground beneath them is shifting faster than any of us can make sense of. It’s clear this generation need an additional set of skills to navigate their digitally rich world. The traditional instincts of parenting—protect, buffer, limit, ban—though tempting, are clearly no match for this moment.
We need effective ways to help kids build the real, human connections and the strong, internal systems required to navigate their world. That’s what we hope to uncover with a10d.
What you’ll find here
This is a place to share what we’re learning with you and others along this journey. Each week, we’ll bring you:
Fresh takes on the latest research on adolescence, attention, and the human skills kids need in order to flourish. Insights made digestible. And not just reasons to fear; plenty of hope, too.
Doable (and we dare say fun) experiments you can try with the young people in your life to build attention and human relationship skills. Helping kids doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a whole series of small but powerful experiences.
Conversations with experts about how our world is evolving, what that means for our attention, how we can preserve what makes us uniquely human, and how to support each other and the kids we love. This is nuanced stuff; the more voices the better.
Tackling big challenges like this together means deeper learning, greater impact, and way more joy for everyone involved. We hope you’ll join in. We’d love your company!
—Meghan Fitzgerald, a10d Founder
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
