Petal Modeste: What if we could create a social media platform for our Gen. Zs, that is fun engaging, free of ads and algorithms that push unwanted and harmful content to them, and also serves as an ecosystem where they can have access to mental health resources, opportunities to use their voices and make authentic connections? Look no further, because Promly, a new social media platform designed by Gen. Zs for Gen. Zs ages 13 to 19, does just that!  Promly is the brainchild of our guest today. Jen Libby, who is a psychotherapist with an expertise in teen mental health. In response to the massive increase in teen suicides. Jen joined a team of Gen. Z Leaders to marry her clinical approaches to mental health challenges with a scalable digital solution and social movement. And  so Promly, a public benefit corporation and nonprofit was born. It gives young people genuine peer connection and voice and mitigates the mental health and suicide crises.  Jen is a mom to four  daughters and has a BA. From the University of New Hampshire and an MSW from Smith College. Welcome, my friend, to Parenting for the Future. We are so honored to have you here.

Jen Libby: Petal,  I am so honored to be here, and I love the introduction that you just gave for Promly. So, thank you. I’m going hit you up for that again.

Petal Modeste: Anytime. So, I always like to start these conversations, Jen, by understanding a little bit about my guests, background and the people and experiences that shaped you. Now,  understand that your dad was a minister of religion or a preacher like we like to see here in the US and  it was very common for your family to take in people in need and your family, even at one  point, lost all of its material possessions in a home fire but that didn’t stop you all from being welcoming. So how did your upbringing shape, you and the passion you developed for working with at-risk teens, and young people?

Jen Libby: What’s interesting, when you say you know my dad was a minister. He was a preacher. I think one of the things that my father would say to all of us was that, listen! Nobody wants to be preached at, you know. Never, never be preachy. That’s kind of like gives you the ick. Your best bet is to lead by example. And so, if you’re going to be a leader. what are you going to do to be a leader? How are you going to make choices in your life. And so, when I think of like that level of upbringing, probably starting, in kindergarten with that kind of mindset of, you know, just lead by example, and really lead from a place of love, and other than that, you know you’re fine. I would say to you, know then, my parents really both of them being the example, the model of that leadership through love . where they truly open their home. You know not. I don’t think it was always so intentional. I feel like sometimes, you know, my dad was one of those people that would pick up hitchhikers. That was kind of like the norm, you know, and most times people would say, maybe that’s not a good choice. But I remember very vividly  my dad pulling over and being like, well, you can’t just leave somebody like walking. It’s nighttime, you know. This is a woman. She’s on the side of the road. We don’t know her story like she’s hitchhiking. She probably needs to get somewhere, and sure enough, she ran out of gas, and you know, was in the middle of nowhere. But that was sort of the norm is just that, seeing somebody in need and not knowing what to do, but offering whatever you could was a model that I grew up with, and I can say they live very authentically. And so, as a result, obviously meeting different folks in, you know, unhoused situations. you know they my parents didn’t have a lot of money, obviously, but they had a home and so they would open up their home.

Petal Modeste: So, you ended up like I said, working with at risk teens and young people. When did you decide that that was what you wanted to do professionally?

Jen Libby: I guess, in like 5th grade or so, and I think that’s at the time where my father actually realized that living in a rural area, and you know you don’t think of Massachusetts as having rural areas. But for us, the closest hospital, let’s say, would be about 45 min away.  And so, the lack of mental health resources in the area that I grew up in was significant. Not that mental health was talked about in the eighties, and you know, nineties, anyway. But what my father was saying is that people would come to the church first in crisis- in mental health crisis or in, you know, personal crisis. But he’s at a certain point realized. I’m not really well educated, like theology. It’s great, but it doesn’t really teach you about major mental health disorders, that he, as a minister, was seeing kind of all by himself, and so ended up going back to school to really learn how to, you know, help people to get his master’s and really become more like a therapist. And he did actually eventually open a private practice after a whole lot of schooling. The fortunate part is that I got to be the guinea pig on, you know, when he would be studying in school Inkblot and the thematic perception tests and all these different psychological tests. Since I was the youngest kid and I was home. He’s like Jennifer, after dinner. How about you? Just sit down and take this test, you know. And so, my interest in psychology really started at a young age and so, we would have these deep conversations that were new for him and new for me. And so, I think, even by 8th grade, I was like I’m going to be an art therapist, that’s what I’m going to do. And so, I, at a pretty young age, was pretty determined that that was the path that I was going to choose.

Petal Modeste: Now, in 2015, you unexpectedly lost your son. He was just 9 months old at the time. How did such a loss impact the trajectory of your life and career?

Jen Libby: Dramatically, and I think you know, Petal, you even say it. And I you think it’s 10 years later, and that I wouldn’t get tears in my eyes right. But profound loss of a child is, most people can’t think of anything worse. I certainly I mean, I know there’s always something worse. But you know, I’ve spent so much of my career working with parents who have lost children or working with kids who are very high risk, suicidal, homicidal kids in pretty significant situations and never did I think that I would be a person who’s on the other side of grieving right and when my son died from sudden, unexplained deaths, and very unexpectedly, at 9 months old my life changed forever. And my loss and that emptiness, it just it never goes away. And so I don’t think I understood at the time how profound that experience would be. When I went back to work, kids would say to me, pretty regularly, Jen, like adults, created social media. They know it’s harming kids. They know it’s even killing kids. Why aren’t the adults stepping up to fix it like, would they just not care about us? Are we just some kind of experiment generation? And this is at the same time when we started to see the suicide and mental health crisis really like emerge where when I first started in this area, there were only 3 teen suicides in a 6-year period, and then starting around 2009 in the same exact geographic area, we increased to about 6 to 9 teen suicides every single year for 10 years. In 2020, We landed at 15 in the same exact geographic area. So, we talk about the suicide and mental health crisis being real. Oh, it’s real like it’s real. And kids were saying to me, now I’m the adult, and I just lost a child. And they’re like, why aren’t the adults doing anything? And it became hard to look them in the eye and be like, Yeah, I’m just going to sit here, knowing how much they’re suffering, knowing how many kids were losing. Knowing therapy in itself was typically like inaccessible for most people. It’s expensive. I had a wait list like 40 people long before anything ever happened with COVID, you know. I mean, it was just like there was just like, not great access. And I was like, there’s and kids aren’t using mental health apps the way that we would love for them to use them. So, it was like, we have to think of a different way to reach kids, and so that that loss. I would say, was the change agent on my life.  Losing. Patrick, was just huge, changed everything.

Petal Modeste: You’re talking to the teens you’re working with; you really are now determined that no other parent actually goes through what you went through. You really want to step in to do something. How did you decide that you would partner with Gen. Zs themselves to try to find solutions to these risks that you know the mainstream social media posed. You know the suicide risk in particular, and the risk to their mental health. How did you decide to work with them directly versus just, you know, finding other adults to partner with, let’s say  to build something?

Jen Libby: Well, first of all, I’m a super fan of Gen. Z. I love the alphas behind them as well, but I have been so impressed with this generation. And I think because I have the privilege of sitting with them and hearing like the real stories, so to speak, and seeing how their ability to figure out workarounds and their kind of sarcastic ways. And this like. First of all like, I always say, like 95% of the time when I think I have a good idea, and then I bring it back to our Gen. Z. Team, I’m wrong.  And so I know enough well, if you’re going to try to do something for Gen. Z,  it’s probably a good idea to work directly with Gen. Z because my experience has shown me that I’m wrong a lot of times. The other thing was, kids would always hit me up for internships so at a certain point I had a long list of kids that were like, Is there anything I can do? . I want to go into psychology. I want to do this stuff. So I talked to a friend of mine who I was joking about like I want to do this startup, he was like, that’s actually a good idea. Because I was like, I don’t think kids will use a mental health app, but they will use the social networking app, and we could build in mental health into it. He’s like, “that’s a good idea. Do you know, I build apps?”. And I was like no bro like I had no idea that that’s what you do”.  And so, then he was like, yeah, here’s how you do that. And so we really started just like a group of like 20 kids brainstorming,  like, what would you guys even want? And they’re like, “well, we want a new social media.” I’m like,  “to compete with Facebook. That’s going to be wildly successful, I’m sure.” But I but at the time we were looking at this like community crisis of these kids who were really like amped up about doing something because they’re grieving in the face of loss. And while they might not have lost one of their close friends. Some of our interns have. Every single kid in our community was impacted by this suicide crisis.  Really. And then the kids, you know, would know way before any school administrators or any parents. You know all this stuff goes on social media so fast and so that’s kind of, you know, like how we started.

Petal Modeste: Yeah. So, let’s dig into Promly itself, now. As I understand it, you, it’s an ecosystem. You have an app. You have a publication. You have a podcast and you have a policy advocacy platform. I think this is all quite impressive Jen. And I did also mention that probably is a public benefit corporation as well as a nonprofit. Why was it important that it be a public benefit corporation? What does that mean for our listeners?

Jen Libby: Well, Petal, I most people don’t even know that public benefit corporations necessarily exist.  At the time when we were looking to incorporate, Facebook and other big tech organizations were  buying apps like ours that would be even maybe you know, some sort of competitor in the sense of they would be, you know, trying other ways to match kids like more effectively. They were buying apps like ours and then disintegrating them within a couple of weeks, and so at the time was like, “well, I don’t want that to happen”. And we also know all the other social media platforms are relying heavily on advertising and sometimes inappropriate advertising, algorithmic advertising things like that. So, 97, 98% of their profits come from that. And we know that that can be really harmful right for kids, especially when we look at like how algorithms work, how dopamine works in the brain So we knew we needed to think through what we know of adolescent brain development and the unique identifiers there and figure something out that could help kids brains not hurt their brains. But that’s not an easy sell, because we’re not going to throw advertising in on that. We’re not going to use the same revenue models. So, we really needed to think through how to be a public benefit Corp, where even though you can bring in investors, the investors all understand that the first priority is truly creating something for the public benefit. Now, that means you’re only going to get investor. You know, you’re going to get the good guys right like you’re going to get. You know, investors that really are heroes. They really are the social impact people. They really are the thought leaders. But then, you know, but then we also built our nonprofit, and part of it was that, yes, we could do the public benefit alone. But we wanted to build out the mental health piece where we could truly reach more kids. I know of a million mental health apps. I know of a million mental health nonprofits, but your average 15-year-old has no awareness of these things. And so, we really wanted to structure the ecosystem so that we could partner with other nonprofits. And ultimately, we could create a true social enterprise where we can be profitable but then we can also fund our partner nonprofits, amplify their reach through our technology. They don’t have to pay for the technology. We can kind of cover that, not just for ourselves, but for all these great resources that are many times not even shared. I’m always like, I’m not the expert on all these different things. But so many of these nonprofits are amazing, doing amazing things but nobody knows they exist. And so, we wanted to solve for that. At the same time

Petal Modeste: So, the app itself, among other things, it offers layers of mental health support, including the ability to monitor, anxiety and panic heart rate and receive coping tools. Tell us a little bit more about this. How does that work? And is the app free and easily available to any 13- to 19-year-old?

Jen Libby: Yes, yes, and yes. So, one of the things I found was that post COVID. We saw a 65% increase in kids avoiding class and avoiding school. And I used to work in school systems, and I know panic very well, and I know school avoidance very well. And so, one of the things I’ve always been familiar with is biofeedback, you’re monitoring feedback about your biology and certainly there’s, you know. Apple watches, you know, can do a certain amount of this. But a lot of kids don’t wear Apple watches, and so I would work with kids, and you know, they would be able to figure out they’d monitor their heart rate during a panic episode, or even if they were just anxious, where they could just feel themselves getting more nervous once we teach them how to both monitor how their heart rate is going, but then teach them how to disrupt that parasympathetic, nervous system with breathing strategies that are very effective, we can help them to kind of keep that in check. That technology isn’t that monumental people usually charge, you know, $20 a year or something like that for it. But we could take that technology and build it into the Promly app to make it truly accessible for everybody. So we can get a grant for this technology that then we are able to reach millions of kids right. We just partnered Feed.fm, which comes out of Stanford looking at music as medicine, looking at the brain research behind how we use certain music tones for better sleep, for decreased anxiety. There’s music for focus. So, kids with more struggles with focus and ADHD . And they partner with some of the best gyms in the world, working with like high-performance athletes to help the brain develop from an elite athlete standpoint. And so, we are able to build in those partnerships. We also work with UCSF’s neuroscience lab to build different digital therapeutics. And we’re working with another game “Shadows Edge” which we turned into a web-based version which is really a resilience building, psychology game that we’re able to also build into the ecosystem. So, we have this cool social media app. But then we’re using this ecosystem to then offer kids, tools to really help them get their mental health and mental wellness at an early age, more in check using technology.

Petal Modeste: Now we’ve been talking a little bit about the suicide rates, you know, heart-rending statistics that have been on the rise since before COVID. According to Jed, suicide was the second leading cause of death for teens and young adults, ages 10 to 34, in 2023. 22% of high schoolers reported that they considered suicide that year, 10% attempted it. And then when we dig deeper, the numbers get a little more terrifying, actually, because 30% of female identified teens considered suicide, 13% attempted it. 27% of native American teens considered suicide, 16% attempted it and 45% of lesbian, gay and bisexual teens considered suicide, with 22% attempting it. We also know that experts consider teen suicides to be impulsive acts with 25 to 40% of them being planned just 5 to 10 min before. So how does the app provide the kind of intervention that can interrupt these impulses?

Jen Libby: So one of the things, you know, when we look at a using certain content moderation, I think that’s the other thing with technology, right when you’re willing to step up and say we can actually use AI for good where we can pick up on self-harm and  you know certain risks when kids are messaging other kids and things like that. And then we can build in various interventions. The other piece of the equation here, we also do a lot of policy work. And we’ve built in like a very actionable path to civic action. Because to your point, kids are so aware of all of these different risks, all the different tools, the different trends. And so, even when we see these like large increases in suicide, especially in an impulsive way, we know and we work directly to try to impact tech policy, to create a better path to understanding exactly what the risks are for kids, because when you are sitting and you’re talking to kids, you know, it doesn’t take them very long to tell you exactly how a kid is being triggered. What the content is that they’re looking at. And you know the fact that YouTube still keeps up the “how to’s” on YouTube today in 2025. They’re still there and so when a kid is triggered, the fact that they can quickly type into their phone how to end their life, without any real stops in place, it’s a heavy burden, right for any one organization to get around. So we do everything that we can to create a safer space. We do AI age recognition. So, we really try to keep the sugar daddies off, and the pedophiles and sex traffickers. At the same time, we put in content moderation so we’re able to pick up on concerning self-harming things. We can do interventions but let’s be clear, they can easily leave Promly and go somewhere else. And so, if our goal is to reduce teen suicide globally by 35% in the next 5 years, we have to look at the policies as well that are monitoring big tech. We really need to look at a more systemic level of how to build better tech policy oversight so that we can force big tech to do the right thing and remove some of these videos that we know are impacting child suicides.  Child suicides  ages 5 to 11 have increased by 6 x in the last 5 years. We know adolescent brains are impulsive. Why? Because they think in black and white terms, rewards outweigh consequences in the teenage brain by 14 times. So, when a kid is triggered by their friends, just all rejected them. Or you know, somebody sent them a bully text or something like that. Yeah, it’s really pretty normal for a kid to then go to an extreme. And sometimes that extreme is thinking about suicide.) And so even every 30 seconds that we can delay access to the means we’re going to get closer to saving those kids.

Petal Modeste: I’m glad you talked about how you keep the platform safe your security and verification measures, because that was a that was a question that I had. So, thank you for mentioning that. In what other ways does Promly resemble other social media platforms. We kind of already know how it’s different. But does it resemble other social media platforms in any way?

Jen Libby: Yeah, sure. We’re not a mental health app. We’re, a social networking ecosystem. And we like to say, we’re everything you need in high school friends, internships, anxiety, redux, and maybe even a prom date. We got you, right. We match kids based on 20 things they want to do before they’re 20. Their life goals, their interests or school clubs. So, we look at like, you know, introducing kids in that way to each other, in in a safer environment. At the same time, we also build in the real-life opportunities. So things like internships, jobs, you know, easy access to accessible civic action. So their voice are heard, even if they don’t consider themselves like a civic action kid, we push out regular surveys to be able to amplify the Gen. Z. Voice and bring that back to policy teams so that the government can understand a little bit more about what’s actually happening in real time. We also build in early financial literacy. I was just giving a talk yesterday, and I thought it was amazing that the kids, you know, wanted to learn about investing at a younger age, and how to build wealth starting in high school. And so, we partner with a lot of these other. You know, Fintech startups that are doing great things, making $2 investments very accessible for young people, Stockpile being one of them. They have a new bank card, save investor spend. So, you really have a choice every time that you’re given money or earn money on what you’re going to do with that. when we look at building this healthy adulthood, it’s taking all of those really cool, Ed Tech, Fintech, travel  startups that may not live on a Gen Zers phone, but they live within the Promly ecosystem. So, we don’t just amplify the nonprofits that are doing great work. But we amplify these other tools that kids will think are amazing. All those kinds of things are built into the ecosystem

Petal Modeste: That’s really great. So, you also have a podcast. What topics do you cover?

Jen Libby: So, you know, it’s funny because our interns were like, we should start a podcast. And I was like, okay, guys have at it. Not really knowing anything about podcasts. And then I’m so surprised. we’ve got a lot of downloads. One of the things we do do is interview up and coming Gen. Z. Artists.  One of my favorite podcast guests was Hans Williams. Hans, maybe started out with like 200,000 followers on Spotify. Now he’s like over a million. I think he’s going to be huge. But one thing I love about him is just authenticity, but also his commitment to mental health, and really using his music and his voice and his platform to be a leader in the mental health space. He went to Tulane, and maybe a few days into being there one of the kids on his floor took his life. And Hans was one of those people who was faced with that trauma. But he sings a song, “Body on my shoulders”. And this idea of like living with that trauma like is he going to be okay, you know, like he barely knew this kid but then, you know, this tragedy happened. And so how is this going to shape his life. And such a compelling story and question.

Petal Modeste: What about your publication?  They’re very interesting topic areas that people who send in articles can write under. You have things like:

• Hustle, do something”
• Adventure – find it secret, make it happen”
• “Serve – give back change outcomes”
• “You do you. The world is yours”

So, who writes the articles? How are they solicited? And why is this aspect of Promly so important?

Jen Libby:   Part of our mission is amplifying the Gen. Z. Voice, and so we’ll throw it out to the interns and say, guys, you know, does anybody want to write an article? We also just ask, “does anybody know anybody who wants to write an article?” You know something that they’re passionate about, something that they want to share with the world. We want to help them amplify. And so that means I’m going to publish their work.  Case in point. The other day, one of my interns surprised me. She’s like after the meeting “Can I talk to you for a little bit?” Yeah, no problem. Turns out she’s publishing a book. She’s like, “do you think I could be on the podcast?”’ Yes, of course, you could be on the podcast. And let’s write an article. But it’s amazing. I mean, this kid is not even done with high school, and the book will be published. all about her journey with OCD. And thriving even in the midst of having a very severe form of OCD. People can write into our website, and they can send us an article, and you know, so long as it’s done by a Gen. Zer, we will publish it, so I certainly encourage folks who want to get their voice heard.   Even we had one kid write about and he’s like more in the technical, like coding term. And so he wrote an article about how anybody can, you know, create an AI to detect skin cancer.  He’s like, no, Jen, it’s so easy, step by step. Here, let me write this out in an article.  I was like “great, we’ll publish it, but I’m just telling you, maybe out of my out of my skill set”

Petal Modeste: So. let’s talk a little bit now about the policy advocacy, aspect of Promly. You have a separate hub that’s called “Forchangemakers.org” where change-makers and policy leaders can collaborate. So, what are the contours of that collaboration?

Jen Libby: I was asked to speak before Congress in 2021, about what I was seeing boots on the ground with these “How to videos”  that YouTube is continuing to supply to kids and how that was impacting particularly young women suicides, ages 10 to 19. And I learned an awful lot about how powerful lobbying is – just felt like I was doing the right thing for humanity right? Somebody at the top should know that this is happening because I do suicide assessments every day, and I’m seeing kids are going directly to YouTube for how to do these things. And it’s resulting in more loss of life. But big tech is so powerful in terms of their influence over policy. And my COO at the time, she’s like you need a lobbying firm. And I had a really negative view of lobbying and she’s like, “if you want to do anything in DC, you’re going to need a lobbying firm”. And we were very blessed to get a lobbying firm to represent us pro bono in DC,  which they still do, and they were very clear with us and saying we can’t help you on the YouTube issue, but we can help you change tech policy. So that really started our journey.  I really give Senator Blackburn and Senator Blumenthal credit because they said, can you write up a formal policy, and  we had some exceptional Gen Zers  who were able to contribute to that. And really, write out the Kids Advisory Council. Really looking at a way to do multigenerational collaboration  to bring the voices together. to be able to create a better policy to me. What I didn’t realize is that that’s the first time we’ve ever given 16-to-25-year a seat at the table. And in fact, those under 25-year-olds, they take up an awful lot of the vote, but they can’t even run for office until they’re over 25, and not for nothing, they don’t have lobbying representation. And nonprofits that are doing youth advocacy work  they often  may have some level of lobbying, but they don’t have the resources, the influence in the same way. And I’m like we’ve got to be able to meld this better. And so, when we were able to get the Kids Advisory Council built into the Kids Online Safety Act, and that passed in the Senate, we want it to pass in the House.  But even still, we take that piece of policy., Youth Advisory Council, and that can be replicated in other policies that directly impact young people. Further, what we’re able to do through the scalable Promly app is to turn around insights very quickly using technology. So, turn around those insights from survey data and turn those around through the work that we do in DC to amplify that youth voice. So, we can then directly utilize the lobbying support that we have to share insights, lived experience, trends, that are really important sooner versus waiting for some research to come out 5 years from now to be able to better inform how we’re creating policies so that they are more effective and more reflective of actual experience of young people

Petal Modeste: An actual need. The kids Online Safety Act – obviously one of the policy wins that you’re most proud of.  What else is on your immediate sort of bucket-list of policies that you want to see?

Jen Libby: We really want to look at the Youth Mental Health Research Act. I would love to see that get passed. Mental health is a bipartisan issue, and I think most people can get their head around that . We hope that goes through. But we look at even the replication of that youth advisory. We want that to be put into other policies, both at the United States level. But we also are working with the UN in terms of introducing that model. We’re also working with other countries who are also interested in the model that we’ve created. So, we’ve all had a lot of interest from other organizations around the globe who want to take that piece of policy. We’re looking to help solve for a lot of the distrust, the disillusionment and that idea that young people don’t feel like they have a voice, or that the people in charge aren’t stepping up for them.

Petal Modeste: So you know, Jen, our goal on this podcast is to give all who parent a better understanding of the forces, shaping the future as well as cutting edge, parenting, tools and resources, all of which they can leverage as they raise their children to thrive and to positively impact the world, to lead in the way that your dad taught you. And of course, our kids cannot thrive if they are not physically and mentally healthy, and they cannot thrive if those who are in positions of power and influence do not hear from them, and do not know how to structure policies and protocols in our everyday lives in a way that serves them well. And while it’s true that Gen. Z Is probably the most empathetic and psychologically aware generation in history, the assaults on their well-being, from political polarization to failing governments, to the reversal of human and civil rights, to technology overwhelm to the climate crisis. All of these assaults mean that they’re most susceptible, as we know, to depression, to anxiety, impulsivity, and suicide. So, just when we need to take care of their mental health, we know that there is around the globe a shortage of mental health providers. In some areas, you know, 60% of mental health providers report they have no openings at all. And so without Promly and without organizations like yours, who are really working with Gen. Zs and trying to respond to the things that they need, I just worry. I worry about all of them. At the same time, teens are using screens. They’re on social media. I think Common Sense Media’s latest survey said that kids in the US between 12 and 18 can spend as much as 8 and a half hours a day

Jen Libby: Oh, yeah.

Petal Modeste: So, so as we think about increased screen use, you know, these videos, these, how to end your life videos in case listeners were not sure what exactly they were about that are on YouTube. You know all of these things are continuing to sort of escalate, and there are gaps in mental health. So, drawing on your own work and of course, as a mom yourself, how can all of us who parent best help. Our kids both understand the importance of mental well-being and share tools with them? How can we do that effectively, including reducing screen time, so that they can maintain their mental well-being?

Jen Libby: I would draw back to something sort of simple, right? And I’ve treated lots of very serious situations. And kids who have, failed out of multiple residential treatment facilities and things like that. And if I had to name one thing that is the change agent: it’s connectedness. And now that sounds very simple, right? But when we look at building connectedness with yourself,  in your relationships with other people, with your purpose, coming outside of yourself, with travel, it’s really simple things like just making eye to eye contact. We know that the brain responds when we’re making more meaningful eye to eye contact even with an animal. We get better levels of oxytocin from that kind of connectedness building. We didn’t build Promly to be an addictive social media. We built it as a tool. We actually want kids off the phones. In fact, we gameify challenges to get them off their phones, to go and do the things that we know are going to actually impact the brain in a positive way.  From a parenting perspective, it’s even just taking 15 seconds to just even look at your child with meaningful eye to eye contact, and just be able to say,, just so we’re clear, like I love you so much.  Doesn’t have to come from anywhere, you know. It doesn’t have to have an agenda associated with it. But just we don’t do that enough, and I know I hear from kids all the time. They don’t hear it enough. We really have to take those moments to just connect. Sounds again very basic but  I just can’t tell you how often I hear from kids that that never happens for them.

So connectedness, connectedness, connectedness. I can’t say that enough.

Petal Modeste: I love the simplicity of it because the simplicity makes it doable and makes it easy for people to see that they can do it, regardless of how busy they are, regardless of how demanding and challenging life might be. What are the best ways for the Gen. Zs in our lives to find Promly and become part of its ecosystem?

Jen Libby: Sure. So one is promly.org, certainly check out the website.  From there, follow us on Instagram at Promly app and then download the Promly app on the app store. We are on the app store under “ Promly: Everything you need in high school – friends, internships, anxiety, redux, and maybe even a prom date. We got you!”

Petal Modeste: Thank you so much Jen, for sharing yourself with us today, sharing Promly.  We appreciate your candor. We appreciate your courage and your close partnership with Gen Zs because we know it will inevitably benefit them, but also future generations. We’re honored to call you a friend here on Parenting for the Future  and we hope you continue to come back and keep us up to date on what’s happening with Promly.

Jen Libby: Thank you so much, Petal. I will come back anytime, and every time. Thank you!

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Jen Libby

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