We're still learning. And we're in it together.
For more than 25 years, I've helped build and operate a family-focused consumer brand. I've worked across nearly every part of the business: operations, product development, wholesale, retail, e-commerce, marketing, partnerships, customer care, technology, and the endless problem-solving that keeps a small company moving forward. I have built systems from scratch, figured out tools I was never formally taught to use, managed complicated projects, recovered from expensive mistakes, and learned how to keep creating when the path ahead was anything but clear.
But the education that changed me most did not happen in a boardroom, a classroom, or a business seminar.
It happened while parenting through crisis.
One of my children, General, has required levels of mental health care and intervention that most families never imagine they will have to navigate. Our family's experience has included emergency rooms, residential treatment, insurance battles, legal systems, placement decisions, endless phone calls, conflicting professional opinions, and the impossible emotional reality of trying to protect and advocate for a child when there are no simple or painless choices.
It has meant learning an entirely new language while already overwhelmed. It has meant understanding that loving your child fiercely does not automatically give you access to the care, information, cooperation, or answers they need. It has meant becoming the person who keeps the records, asks the uncomfortable questions, reads the fine print, documents every conversation, and continues pushing after being told there is nothing else that can be done.
It has also meant carrying grief, hope, fear, anger, love, and responsibility at the same time.
I began sharing parts of our story because I could not find enough honest conversations about what this kind of parenting actually looks like. Too much of the available advice felt sanitized, theoretical, or written from the other side of a resolution our family had not reached. I wanted to speak from the middle of it — the confusing, unfinished place where many families are still making decisions, waiting for calls, questioning themselves, and trying to get through one more day.
That honesty found a community.
Today, more than 138,000 people follow Gen3ralEducation™ on TikTok. Some are parents navigating serious mental illness, residential care, addiction, trauma, disability, family separation, or the juvenile justice system. Some are adult children recognizing their own childhoods in the stories. Some are professionals who want to understand what these systems feel like from the family's side. Others are simply people who know what it is to love someone through circumstances they cannot fix.
Although General's story is where this platform began, Gen3ralEducation™ is not only about one child, one diagnosis, or one family.
It is about what happens when real life becomes more complicated than the advice we were given.
It is about parenting without a reliable roadmap. It is about navigating institutions that were not designed to communicate with one another. It is about learning to advocate without losing yourself entirely. It is about relationships, resilience, work, identity, travel, faith, humor, failure, reinvention, and the strange ordinary moments that continue even when part of your life is in crisis.
It is also about building something from what you have learned.
I believe difficult experiences can become useful without pretending they were necessary, beautiful, or secretly a blessing. We do not have to romanticize pain to recognize that it teaches us things. Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do with hard-won knowledge is make it easier for the next person to find.
That is what I am building here.
Gen3ralEducation™ is a place for honest stories, practical resources, straightforward guides, and conversations that leave room for complexity. You will find support for navigating crisis care and residential treatment, tools for organizing medical and behavioral health information, questions to ask professionals, lessons from building a business and online platform, and pieces of everyday life that remind us we are more than the hardest thing happening to us.
I am not here as a clinician, attorney, or person claiming to have every answer. I am here as a mother, an operator, a researcher, a relentless note-taker, and someone who has spent years learning how to ask better questions.
I will tell you what helped us, what did not, what I wish I had known earlier, and where you may need qualified professional guidance. I will be honest when a system fails, when a decision has no good option, and when the answer is still unfolding.
You do not need to have the same story as mine to belong here.
Maybe you are facing your first crisis and do not know what to do next. Maybe you have been doing this for years and are exhausted from explaining your life to people who cannot understand it. Maybe you are building a business, raising a family, starting over, or trying to turn your own experience into something that helps others.
Whatever brought you here, you do not have to arrive with everything figured out.
We are still learning.
And we are in it together.
The name began with my son, General III.
Before there was a website, a resource library, or any plan to create a formal brand, there was simply a mother trying to understand what was happening to her child and trying to help other people understand it too.
I began sharing our family's experience online under the name Gen3ralEducation because so much of my life had become an education in General — his needs, his care, the systems surrounding him, and the realities families like ours are rarely taught about until they are already living them.
The "3" made the name distinct and called back to his prized generational suffix, but the meaning quickly became bigger than a username.
This started as an education about General. It became a general education about life.
There are subjects we are expected to understand without ever being taught: how to advocate during a crisis, how to choose between imperfect options, how to challenge a professional respectfully, how to organize years of medical information, how to keep a family functioning under extraordinary pressure, and how to rebuild an identity after life changes shape. These are lessons that belong in a classroom, yet most of us learn them through experience — often while exhausted, scared, and completely unprepared.
My own "general education" extends well beyond parenting. I have spent more than 25 years operating and growing a business, building brands, developing products, creating partnerships, adopting new technology, and figuring things out long before I felt qualified to do them. I have been the strategist, salesperson, researcher, writer, customer service department, project manager, fixer, and person still working after everyone else has gone to bed.
I am also an eldest daughter, a recovering GATE kid, a certified overachiever, and a woman who has spent much of her life turning uncertainty into action. I learn by researching, testing, building, documenting, and sharing. That instinct shows up in everything I do — from navigating mental health systems to rebuilding websites and developing new business ideas.
Gen3ralEducation™ is where all of those experiences meet.
The name honors where this began without limiting where it can go. It leaves space for General's story, my story, and the stories of the people who have gathered around this community. It represents the belief that knowledge does not have to come from a traditional classroom to be valuable — and that lived experience deserves to be documented, respected, and shared.
This is not a course in having everything figured out. It is an ongoing education in what it means to keep showing up, keep asking questions, and keep learning from the life directly in front of us.
Follow along
The main conversation happens on TikTok, but Gen3ralEducation lives across a few other places too.