Dear Tween with Allison Ochs

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About this podcast

What if your child could sit down with one of the world’s leading online safety experts and ask her anything? No filters. No awkward silences. Just real questions — and the answers every family needs to hear. That’s exactly what Dear Tween is. Every week, social worker and pedagogist Allison Ochs sits down with a real tween for an unscripted, honest conversation about life online. A pedagogist is more than an educator — it is a professional trained in child development, behaviour, and the social and emotional forces that shape how young people grow. Combined with her background as a social worker, Allison brings a rare and powerful lens to one of the most urgent challenges of our time: keeping children safe, confident, and grounded in a digital world that was never designed with them in mind. Allison is the founder of Edit Change Management and a published author whose work has shaped conversations around online safety across the globe. For over a decade, she has travelled the world visiting schools, sitting with students, listening to what they are actually experiencing online — and what they are too afraid to say out loud. She has seen what parents miss. She has heard what children whisper to each other but never to the adults in their lives. And now, she is saying it all out loud. Dear Tween is not a lecture. It is not a warning. It is a dialogue — raw, warm, and deeply necessary — between a child asking the questions that matter and an expert who has spent her career finding the answers. In each episode, a real tween poses one of today’s most pressing questions around online safety. What happens when someone shares your photo without asking? How do you know if someone online is really who they say they are? What do you do when things go too far? Allison answers with the clarity of an expert, the warmth of someone who has sat with thousands of children just like yours, and the honesty that tweens — and their parents — deserve. Because here is the truth: most children are navigating the internet largely alone, piecing together their understanding of safety, identity, and trust from platforms that profit from their attention. And most parents are doing their best with information that is outdated, overwhelming, or simply too vague to act on. Dear Tween changes that. One question. One expert. One conversation that could change everything. For parents who want to understand what their child is really facing online. For tweens who deserve real answers, not warnings dressed up as advice. For every family trying to find their footing in a world that moves faster than any of us expected. Real questions. My real answers. Dear Tween — every week, for the kids who deserve to know.