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About the author
Ivy Giwah is a family development specialist with over eighteen years of experience working with adolescents, parents, and families across educational and clinical settings. She holds a Master of Science in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where her graduate research focused on parent-teen communication patterns and their impact on adolescent mental health outcomes.
Giwah began her career as a high school counselor in the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina, where she worked directly with hundreds of teenagers navigating academic pressure, social dynamics, identity formation, and mental health challenges. It was in this role that she witnessed firsthand the gap between the support parents wanted to offer their teens and the tools they actually had. This observation led her to develop a series of parent education workshops that eventually reached over twelve thousand participants across school districts, community centers, and corporate family wellness programs.
In 2016, she founded The Anchor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing evidence-based parenting resources and support groups for parents of adolescents. Under her leadership, the organization expanded to twenty-three states, offering free workshops, online courses, and peer support networks for parents struggling to connect with their teenagers. She has been a featured speaker at the National Council on Family Relations annual conference, the American School Counselor Association conference, and multiple regional parenting summits.
Giwah's writing on adolescent development and family dynamics has appeared in *Psychology Today*, *The Gottman Institute Blog*, and *Parents* magazine. She is also the author of *Before the Blast: Building a Strong Foundation with Your Pre-Teen*, a guide for parents of children ages nine to twelve. Her work is grounded in attachment theory, family systems theory, and the growing body of research on adolescent brain development, which she translates into practical, accessible strategies for real families.
She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and three children, including a teenager who provides daily real-world testing of every principle in this book. When she is not writing or working with families, she can be found reading young adult fiction (for research, she insists), running trails in the Eno River State Park, and trying to keep her houseplants alive.
