ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Kaleesha Washington didn’t stumble into this work. She was built for it.

For nearly two decades, Kaleesha worked in education as a teacher, instructional coach, assistant principal, principal, and a graduate school professor. She began her career as a Teach For America Corps Member in Los Angeles and went on to teach children, coach teachers, lead schools, develop educators, and build and manage teams of more than 100 people. Over the years, she began noticing the same pattern again and again: many of the struggles she saw in adults could be traced back to experiences, beliefs, and patterns established during childhood. The more she worked with both children and adults, the more clearly she saw how profoundly childhood shapes the person who eventually enters adulthood. That realization became one of the driving forces behind her work.

Her academic background gave her another lens through which to understand what she was seeing. Kaleesha earned degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Southern California, a Master of Arts in Elementary Education from Loyola Marymount University, and an MBA from Keller Graduate School. Her education, combined with years spent inside classrooms and schools, gave her a deep understanding of how children learn, how environments shape behavior, how leadership influences culture, and how the decisions adults make affect the children entrusted to their care.

Parenting Paradigms was not born from degrees or job titles alone.

Kaleesha has been a parent for more than 30 years and is now a grandmother of five. She understands that parenting does not happen in theory. It happens in real homes, with real children, under real pressure. It happens when we are tired, frustrated, overwhelmed, or unsure of what to do next. Sometimes, it also happens while we are carrying beliefs and practices from our own childhoods that we have never stopped to examine.

Parenting Paradigms brings together decades of education, leadership, research, and lived experience to help parents think more deeply about how they raise their children. Kaleesha created it to challenge adults to examine not only what they do with children, but why they do it and what those choices may be teaching.

Parenting is about more than getting a child to behave today. The way we raise children today helps shape who they become tomorrow.