Parenting in the Public Eye with First Lady Dawn Moore

Some conversations stay with you long after the recording stops. My conversation with First Lady Dawn Moore is one of them.

I’ll be honest with you, I was pretty excited going into this one. I have followed Governor Wes Moore’s career with deep admiration — he made history as Maryland’s 63rd governor, the first African American governor in the state’s history and the only sitting Black governor in the country, and now he is running for reelection. But I was really eager to talk to the woman who has been by his side supporting him every step of the way. I’ve admired her work as the First Lady of Maryland and heard wonderful things about her as a person.

What I did not anticipate was just how much she would exceed my high expectations, in great part because of the ease, warmth and thoughtfulness she brought to a subject that does not often come up in her public conversations: how she and Governor Moore are parenting their children in the public arena.

First Lady Dawn Moore grew up in Queens, the daughter of a public school teacher and an entrepreneur. Kindness was a value her family emphasized when she was young, and it is a value she and Governor Moore are fostering in their children, Mia (14) and James (12). What I found so useful was how she thinks about teaching kindness as a practice, not just a principle. This is evident in what she often tells her kids: if everyone is not laughing, it is not a funny joke. That one sentence contains a whole curriculum on empathy and accountability. It asks children to look around and notice who has been left out (or is the target) of the laughter — and to understand that this is what matters.

We talked about what it actually looks like to raise children inside a family of public figures: the social media questions, the newspaper headlines, the moment her son Jamie ran onto the field at a Navy football game to offer his father some unsolicited diplomatic advice on a certain political standoff. His solution was pure twelve-year-old brilliance, and I will let Dawn tell it herself. But I will share here what that story revealed: these are children who are aware of the world their family inhabits, who have opinions and feelings about it, and who feel safe and confident enough to bring those feelings directly to their parents. That does not happen by accident.

The First Lady is honest about how much work goes into creating that safety. She and the governor made a deliberate decision when he was elected to keep their children in the schools they had always attended, even though it meant a daily commute from Annapolis to Baltimore. She goes into full mother mode every summer and over the holidays, and her team knows those blocks on her calendar are not negotiable. She talks to her children’s pediatrician about social media. She waits to see what questions her kids ask before she volunteers answers they are not yet ready for. She regularly watches for whether they seem happy and settled.

This is calm, intentional parenting. And it is all the more impressive because it is happening within pressured scheduling and under public scrutiny.

The First Lady shares a story about four-year-old Mia on a playground, cheering a classmate across the monkey bars with a level of encouragement that made that child’s mother cry — and then write to The First Lady to tell her about it. Her response to receiving that message tells you everything about how she approaches this whole endeavor: not with self-congratulation, but with relief and gratitude that this aspect of her parenting approach seems to be working.

Her humility runs through this conversation. She is a woman who moves through a very public life with grace and a calm, confident wisdom. But she also tells us that she will apologize to her children when she gets it wrong, that she is still figuring it all out, and that she looks to friends with older children for guidance.

Conversations like this one are what Ground Control Parenting is all about.

Parenting in the Public Eye with First Lady Dawn Moore is out now. Watch it on our YouTube channel, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And please pass it along to every parent in your village who could use a dose of grounded and generous parenting wisdom.

Thanks to Paramount for their sponsorship, to the Seneca Women Podcast Network for their continued support, and to our new philanthropic partner, DonorsChose. And thanks, as always, to YOU for reading, listening, and being a part of the GCP community.

Enjoy,