What if We Raised Children Like We Were Building Leaders, Because We Are
- Jun 30
- 6 min read
Annie Paraison, the visionary behind Love Before ALL, is a Cultural Architect who leverages over 17 years of leadership experience to demonstrate that love is a strategic necessity. She helps leaders, businesses, and communities operationalize love to optimize personal, organizational, and communal wellness and collective success.
What if the boardroom and the playroom were never as far apart as we assumed? What if the leader who melts down in a high-stakes meeting and the toddler who melts down on the kitchen floor are running the exact same nervous system script, just with better vocabulary? Step into a different question about where leadership actually begins.
A question I cannot stop asking
What if we have been building leadership development programs for adults that try to repair what childhood was never given the room to build in the first place?
At Love Before ALL, our work is rooted in a simple yet powerful truth, lasting change begins from the inside out. We support executives, founders, and HR leaders to regulate their nervous systems so they can stop unconsciously passing chronic stress and urgency down to the people they lead. The longer this work lives, the more a different question follows in every session. What if we stopped treating childhood as a holding pattern before the real work of leadership begins and started treating it as the actual foundation?
This is a "What If" article. I do not have a tidy five-step solution for you. What I have is a framework, a body of research, and a lived conviction that the way we raise children is workforce development, public health strategy, and community design, whether we name it that way or not.
The premise: Children are already whole
At Love Before ALL, one of our founding beliefs is that all human beings, children and adults alike, are whole individuals who are experts on the self. This is not a sentimental idea. It is a structural one. If a child is treated as an incomplete adult who needs to be molded into compliance, the lesson they absorb early is that their worth depends on how well they perform for the adults around them. That lesson does not stay in childhood. It walks straight into the workplace as toxic productivity, the belief that a person's value is equal to their output.
What if, instead, we let children be whole from the start? What if we gave them room to play, to test their own preferences, and to learn who they are inside the context of their own environment, rather than inside the context of what makes adults comfortable? Researchers studying executive function development have found that children's task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and cognitive flexibility are directly shaped by child-led play and positive parenting, not by compliance training. Executive functions such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, creativity, and cognitive flexibility are affected by child-led play as well as positive parenting.
That is not a small finding. That is the architecture of self-leadership, being built before a child can tie their shoes.
What "grow the me" looks like at age five
Our LBA framework moves through three tiers, Grow the Me, Grow the We, and Grow the Collective. We usually apply this to adult leaders. But what if Grow the Me actually starts in a sandbox?
Researchers connect pretend play directly to self-regulation, the same regulation we coach executives to build decades later. Rules included in pretend play lead children to act against immediate impulses, thereby training their self-regulatory skills, and this kind of play helps children develop an internal system for guiding their own behavior rather than depending entirely on external control. Less restrictive forms of play, the free and self-directed kind, may matter even more because children have to make their own decisions, guide their own behavior, and regulate their actions toward a goal during the activities.
What if we read that again as a leadership competency? Making your own decisions. Guiding your own behavior. Regulating your actions toward a goal. We pay consultants like me a great deal of money to help grown leaders rebuild what unstructured childhood play was already designed to install.
The science backs this up at the level of brain development itself. The prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for executive function, develops rapidly in childhood and is not fully developed until well into adulthood, and that development depends heavily on the adults around children, who continue to practice and develop regulation-related skills themselves. In other words, a child's capacity for self-regulation is co-created with an adult's capacity for self-regulation. This is Grow the Me and Grow the We happening in the same room, often before breakfast.
What if discipline were replaced with repair
In our work with organizations, we talk about institutionalizing the pause, building formalized repair frameworks instead of relying on punitive measures when something ruptures. What if we extended that same belief to parenting and early childhood education?
Dr. Shawn Ginwright, a Harvard scholar whose work for over three decades has centered on the well-being of young people, particularly African American youth, offers language I return to often. He distinguishes between a deficit-based question, asking what is wrong with a child, and a strength-based question, asking what is right with them, then building from there. Deficit-based, trauma-informed care focuses on the injury, the harm that was done, and asks what happened to you, while healing-centered engagement asks what is right with you. He also reminds us that people are not harmed in a vacuum, and well-being comes from participating in transforming the root causes of harm within institutions.
What if our institutions, starting with the home and the classroom, asked that same question of every child? Not what is wrong with you, but what is right with you, and how can we build from there?
The ripple we already know is real
I have written before about how a depleted, dysregulated leader brings that same exhausted nervous system home to their family, modeling that love and worth must be earned through relentless achievement. The reverse is just as true, and it is the heart of this What If. A child raised with room to be whole, to play, to self-regulate, and to be met with repair instead of punishment grows into the adult who does not need a 20,000 dollar organizational consulting contract to learn psychological safety. They already carry it.
The cost of not doing this work is not abstract. Globally, low workplace engagement costs the economy an estimated 8.8 trillion dollars in lost productivity, roughly 9 percent of global gross domestic product. That is not simply a management failure. That is generations of nervous systems that were never given the conditions to regulate, showing up exhausted at work, leading exhausted teams, and raising exhausted children. The cycle does not break itself.
Where I land, for now
What if the most strategic investment a company, a school district, or a nation could make in its future workforce is not another leadership retreat, but a serious recommitment to how we let children play, rest, and be witnessed as whole?
This is the question I am building the next phase of my work around, and the question at the heart of the book I am currently writing. I do not believe leadership development should begin in a person's first management role. I believe it begins in the first moments a child is given the room to discover who they are inside their own environment, supported rather than shaped into compliance.
Love is not simply an idea or a sentiment. It is a strategy we live by, starting in the nursery and ending nowhere, because it should never end.
Join the movement
If this question is one you are sitting with too, I would love to hear from you. Connect with me here or visit this to explore the Grow the Me, Grow the We, and Grow the Collective framework and to access free resources designed to help you lead and parent from the inside out.
Read more from Annie Paraison
Annie Paraison, Founder of Love Before ALL LLC
Annie Paraison is the visionary behind Love Before ALL, a consultancy optimizing wellness through the power of relationships. A proud Haitian-born leader, she journeyed from New York City to Vanderbilt University, igniting a passion for harnessing human potential and building "Beloved Community." With over 17 years of leadership experience and an Executive MBA, she challenges the status quo by proving that love is a rigorous life and business strategy. She ensures no leader has to choose between impact and well-being by supporting the transformation of unconscious patterns into conscious compassion. Grounded in faith and guided by hope, Annie is committed to a world where personal and collective success are inextricably linked.
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