Family Action Network
Catherine Cook is a member of the Family Action Network (FAN). FAN connects parents, students, educators, civic leaders, and professionals through collaborative programming that educates, inspires and positively impacts the broader community. Being a member of this network allows Catherine Cook to attend speaker events hosted throughout Chicago and the Northern Suburbs during the school year. Interested in learning more? Please contact Kimberly Edison.
Upcoming FAN Events
- Oct 2: American Hagwon: An Evening with Min Jin Lee
- Oct 8: Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives
- Oct 9: Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress
- Oct 12: Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis
- Oct 15: Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World
Oct 2: American Hagwon: An Evening with Min Jin Lee
Date and Time
Friday, October 2 | 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Presenters
Min Jin Lee | Bestselling author of "Free Food for Millionaires" and "Pachinko"
Megan Bang, Ph.D. | James E. Johnson Professor of the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy
Location
Evanston Township High School Auditorium | 1600 Dodge Ave., Evanston, IL 60201
Description
Min Jin Lee, the National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko, returns with American Hagwon, a breathtaking contemporary epic, by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children―Bo, DH, and Mido―find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California―where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice―for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers―is a kind of prayer.
Through her three masterful novels—part of a planned quartet on the Korean diaspora—Lee gives shape to history’s seismic shifts, refracting generational change through characters you can’t help but root for. American Hagwon is both a classic in the making and a novel distinctly of our moment, one that helps us find firmer ground in a world unmoored from a most basic concern: how do we care for one another?
Lee will be in conversation with Megan Bang, Ph.D., the James E. Johnson Professor of the Learning Sciences and the former Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University.
Book Giveaway
FAN is giving away copies of American Hogwon to attendees while supplies last!
Oct 8: Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives
Date and Time
Thursday, October 8 | 7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Presenter
Darby Saxbe, Ph.D. | Clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California
Richard V. Reeves, Ph.D. | Founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men
Location
Virtual Event | Click here to register!
Description
When we talk about the transformative experience of becoming a parent, we almost always talk about mothers. Research on birth and parenting has focused overwhelmingly on how women’s bodies and brains change, while popular culture still casts dads as well-meaning bumblers muddling through a diaper change. The old assumption persists: mothers are natural parents, and fathers are something less.
In Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology Darby Saxbe, Ph.D., inspired in part by her own hands-on, solo father, draws on fifteen years of studying fathers to overturn that assumption. Sharing new findings from her own laboratory at the University of Southern California, from neuroimaging scans and hormone samples to observations of fathers with their children, along with interviews with dozens of first-time dads and scientists around the world, Saxbe shows that “dad brain” is real: becoming a father changes men’s brains and bodies, too. Along the way she explores how fatherhood varies across cultures, why the panic over low testosterone misreads the science, how paternity leave policy can draw fathers in, and what hands-on caregiving means for our ideas about masculinity.
Saxbe argues that taking fatherhood seriously as a science is not a distraction from mothers’ needs but a path to equal partnership, with benefits for children, families, workplaces, and society.
Saxbe will be in conversation with Richard V. Reeves, Ph.D. (FAN ’26), the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which grew out of his work as a policy expert and his own experience as a father. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he previously held the Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies. He’s the author of Of Boys and Men and Dream Hoarders, and his current work focuses on fatherhood and on gender gaps in education.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Book Giveaway
FAN is giving away copies of Dad Brain to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
Oct 9: Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress
Date and Time
Friday, October 9 | 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Presenter
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D. | Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Positive Psychology Center
James O. Pawelski, Ph.D. | Professor of practice and director of education in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania
Location
Virtual Event | Click here to register!
Description
What drives human progress, and why does it surge in some eras and stall in others, even under similar conditions? In Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., the founder of positive psychology, offers a bold answer: the missing variable is not economic, political, or geographic, but psychological. Across 2,500 years of history, Seligman identifies agency, the belief that we can shape our own future, as the hidden engine behind innovation, resilience, and societal flourishing.
Drawing on six decades of research, Seligman breaks agency into three components: efficacy, the confidence to act now; optimism, the expectation that effort will pay off; and imagination, the ability to envision new possibilities. From ancient Athens and the Enlightenment to the Civil Rights Movement and today’s AI revolution, he traces how the rise and fall of these forces has quietly shaped the course of civilizations and why strengthening them matters so much now.
As concern grows about mental health, the attention crisis, and the future of work, Seligman makes the case for shifting from a model focused on pathology to one centered on human potential. He also explores how emerging technologies, including AI, might measure and amplify agency at scale, for personal growth, clinical practice, and collective progress.
Seligman is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center, and a former president of the American Psychological Association. He will be in conversation with his Penn colleague James O. Pawelski, Ph.D., professor of practice and director of education in the Positive Psychology Center.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Book Giveaway
FAN is giving away copies of Agency to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
Oct 12: Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis
Date and Time
Monday, October 12 | 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Presenter
Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, MD | Psychiatrist and Founding Director of the Academy for Medicine and the Humanities at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Erica Ghignone, MD | Medical Director at Compass Health Center Chicago
Location
North Shore Country Day Auditorium | 310 Green Bay Rd., Winnetka, IL 60093
Description
Over the past decade, psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, MD, has noticed a striking shift in her practice. The girls and young women who come to her increasingly describe their pain, their conflicts, and the ordinary challenges of growing up in the language of diagnosis: anxiety, trauma, ADHD, dysregulation. Yet they struggle to put their feelings into words outside those labels, and in medicalizing their pain they often both dramatize and minimize it, obscuring what they are really facing.
In Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis, Garfinkle-Crowell offers a compassionate, unabashedly pro-girl look at what it is like to be a young woman today. Blending clinical insight, cultural criticism, and intimate stories from the therapy room, she argues that therapy speak is something medicine and society handed to girls that is now alienating them from themselves and from the people who love them. She is clear-eyed about psychiatry’s pitfalls, from its gendered history to the rush to medicalize normal teenage emotion, while honoring its power to help and heal.
Neither anti-therapy nor uncritically pro-diagnosis, Garfinkle-Crowell equips parents and girls with the language for better, more meaningful conversations.
Garfinkle-Crowell will be in conversation with Erica Ghignone, MD, medical director at Compass Health Center Chicago and a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in addiction psychiatry.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded but not live streamed and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Book Giveaway
FAN is giving away copies of Girlhood, Translated at the event while supplies last.
Oct 15: Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World
Date and Time
Thursday, October 15 | 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Presenters
Adam Grant, Ph.D. | Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Greta Johnsen | Interviewer, podcast host, event moderator, and book person
Location
Francis W. Parker School, Heller Auditorium | 2233 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60614
Description
When we vibe with other people, it fuels our happiness and success. Yet building meaningful ties is one of the most pressing problems of our time. As face-to-face interaction gives way to digital screens, communication gets outsourced to AI, and the world becomes more polarized, our loneliness crisis shows no signs of slowing.
To reveal how we can forge faster, stronger, and longer bonds, #1 New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant, Ph.D. (FAN ’14, ’16), offers groundbreaking studies, expert insights, and myth-busting stories. Grant’s new book Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World is filled with the eye-opening takeaways that have brought millions of readers to his books. Vibe teaches us that similarity is not necessary for solidarity, chemistry doesn’t always happen quickly, and closeness doesn’t always take time.
Along the way, Grant introduces us to a crew of astronauts who learned to trust people they don’t like, a comedy troupe that swears by taking time apart as a key to staying together, a band that grew closer by learning to fight more, and a journalist who designed a gathering that led to seventy-eight marriages. He also opens up about his personal struggles to find his place as a shy introvert and the lessons that propelled his transformation into an enthusiastic convener. Through these examples and more, Grant uncovers the keys to creating deeper relationships and tighter communities.
Vibe will change how you interact with people. No matter how good you are at connecting, you can always get better—and help others get better too.
Grant will be in conversation with Greta Johnsen, an interviewer, podcast host, event moderator, and book person. She co-hosts HBO’s Official Game of Thrones Podcast, writes the GRETAGRAM newsletter on Substack, and is host and creator of the podcast Happy To Be Here. She also hosts the Hatch podcast The Nightly, a call-in show to help people fall asleep.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded but not live streamed and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Book Giveaway
FAN is giving away copies of Vibe to attendees while supplies last! We are grateful for the financial support of Compass Health Center for this giveaway.