Dear ,

This Friday, 15 May, is the International Day of Families. The United Nations has set the 2026 theme as Families, Inequalities and Child Well-being — and I have been sitting with it for days.

When the UN speaks of inequality, they mean income, housing, healthcare, digital access, education. All true. All urgent. But as someone who has worked at hospital bedsides, in care homes, in midwifery suites, and now in the quiet, hard work of coaching parents and teenagers, I want to widen the lens with you.

Because there is another inequality nobody puts on a policy poster.

The inequality of attention inside the home.

I have met children from comfortable houses who are starving — for one adult who listens without their phone in their hand. I have met teenagers with the latest devices who feel poorer than I ever did walking barefoot in Yola because nobody asks them how they actually are. I have met widows in West Africa and in the diaspora who lost their husbands and then quietly lost the right to be heard by their own extended families.

Inequality is not only material. It is relational.

And here is the gift of the International Day of Families: we do not have to wait for governments to act before we act ourselves.

This is the heart of my Communication Cascade Model™ — Connect, Understand, Thrive. In that order. Always in that order. Connection first, before correction. Understanding before instruction. Thriving as the harvest of both.

So this week, I would love to invite you to try three small things in your own home:

The first is the five-minute floor. Choose one child, one teenager, or one elder in your family. Sit with them for five undistracted minutes. No phone. No agenda. Just attention. You will be amazed at what surfaces.

The second is the inequality audit. Quietly ask yourself, in this family, whose voice gets heard least? Whose feelings get explained away most often? That person is your invitation to this week.

The third is the one outward act. Reach beyond your four walls. A call to a widowed aunt. A meal for a single parent. A message to a young cousin in the diaspora who is drifting. Family extends further than the front door, especially in our culture.

If you have read The Phone-Free Teenager, you know I believe small, repeated acts of presence are stronger than any rule we ever write on a wall. And if you have read Beyond the Goat Pen, you know I believe the wounds inflicted on women and children inside families can also be healed inside families—when someone is brave enough to start.

Be that someone this Friday.

With love,

Latifah

Latifah Ajetunmobi Parent & Teen Coach | RN, RM, RMN Founder, The Latifah Ajetunmobi LLC latifahajet.com

P.S. If this letter spoke to you, forward it to one parent, one auntie, one teacher. That is how cascades begin.