how connected we are and how similar our experiences in our lives and our lessons and our relationships with our matters are no matter where we are or how old we are.

And it's beautiful to see that a mom on a farm in Nepal and a mom somewhere in Tanzania and a mom in Switzerland

goes through similar battles and challenges and thus teaches similar lessons.

Hi, this is Dene. I'm the founder of Simple Families. Simple Families is an online community for parents who are seeking a simpler, more intentional life.

In this show, we focus on minimalism with kids, positive parenting, family wellness and decreasing the mental load.

My perspectives are based in my firsthand experience raising kids, but also rooted in my PhD in child development.

So you're going to hear conversations that are based in research, but more importantly, real life. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for tuning in. I'm so happy to have you here. The voice that you heard in the intro is on a tighter.

Now to give you a little background on how I choose guests for the podcast, I get dozens and dozens of PR agents sending me potential guests every week.

And it is hard to sort through them all. So honestly, I don't very often invite or respond to guests that are pitched to me, mostly just because I'm overwhelmed, not because they're not good or they're not worthy, just because it's a lot to sort through.

So I prefer to go out and find the guests that seem interesting to me or that I think would be interesting to you.

Now, on a sent me an email a couple weeks ago and it immediately caught my attention. She told me a little bit about her project, which is a podcast called Thank You Mama.

She launched it in 2020 and she interviews women around the world about the lessons that they learned from their own mothers.

And I think this is a fascinating topic because the world that we're living in right now, we often undervalue the lessons from the generations that have come before us because the world has changed so dramatically in so many ways.

At least that's my rationale for it. Many of us parenting today are more likely to go to a Facebook group to get advice than to our mothers or to our grandmothers.

And to take it a step further than that, the natural negativity bias that the human brain has often leads us to notice and to attend to all the negative things that we got from our own parents, all those negative lessons, all the things we don't want to repeat.

So it can be harder to find the strengths and to notice the strengths and to appreciate the strengths and the lessons from the generations that have come before us.

And that's what Anna is doing and she's doing it in such a beautiful way by collecting stories from women throughout the world from different cultures, different backgrounds that are still so wonderfully connected in many ways.

So a little bit about Anna. Anna was born in Zagreb, Croatia, the former Yugoslavia, and had to flee when bombs reached her hometown at the age of 17.

She continued her education in Austria and became an accomplished author and journalist. She contributes to German, Austrian, Croatian magazines and newspapers.

And now this wonderful podcast. Thank you, Mama.

This episode today, Anna is sharing more about her project and more importantly, she's sharing the story and the lessons from her own mother, who was a Yugoslavia and actress and artist.

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