Sumedha Khoche, CEO and Founder, KinderPass, Reimagining Child Health and Development
Sumedha is an award-winning marketer and business leader with 16+ years of leading million-dollar businesses at P&G and Pepsico.
Podcast
Overview
Parenting is known to be one of the most difficult yet rewarding jobs in one’s life. A child’s early parenting is often the most cherished time. However, it comes with its own set of uncertainties & challenges making one constantly question his/her style.
There are judgments from society, a vast amount of contrasting information on parenting, and one’s instincts for the child’s best care.
We discuss the same on our today’s episode of The Brand Called You with our guest Sumedha Khoche, who is the founder of a digital child health platform. She brings to you her vast research findings, knowledge, and experiences on parenting and child development, answering your questions to get more confident with this lifelong job.
Tune in to listen to this enriching conversation.
About Sumedha Khoche:
Sumedha, the founder of KinderPass, a platform reimagining child health, and development, gave up her lucrative career with P&G to focus on parenting. After a lot of research on child development, Sumedha founded KinderPass to support the questions, needs, and anxieties of parents of children “from the time they leave the hospital with their baby till the time they enter school”.
In this discussion, she shares some amazing insights into how parenting is changing and how technology is enabling parents. She also draws upon wisdom from the older generations while retaining the importance of research and knowledge-based parenting.
DISCUSSION
Why did she leave a lucrative corporate career?
Sumedha recalls her journey as a personal motivation after becoming a parent. Coming from a corporate conglomerate involved in baby care products and surrounded by health care professionals around her in family and at work, Sumedha eventually decided to step in the entrepreneur’s shoes to mark her shift from products to services.
Sumedha outlines the key needs of young parents like a spectrum or a journey from infancy to toddler to
pre-schooler. It is like the best job in the world that nobody has prepared you for. There is a lot of doubt and uncertainty – “am I doing the right thing for my child”? A lot of the challenges in the early stages are related to health. Later the challenge moves to learn. How is the brain functioning? The parents want to know why something is good for a child.
Evolution of parenting
Sumedha stresses the importance of realization among parents about the importance of emotional involvement & a stress-free environment for their child’s nurturing. With the vast amount of knowledge available for young parents, they strive to do better.
She says: “You do better when you know better.”
However, she doesn’t invalidate the possible negative consequences of the increased screen time, scarcity of time, and lack of community nets of joint families.
What is the difference between raising the firstborn and the second-born?
We often come across fun anecdotes about the difference in raising the firstborn vs the second-born.
Sumedha explains how it is natural for parents to be more scared with the firstborn. As with any other job, you are more settled and in more control at the time of a second-born child. A younger child also has his/her role model in their elder sibling, from whom they learn and replicate a great deal.
Community building in KinderPass
KinderPass works extensively with experts and also works based on sharing experiences with other parents.
Impact of culture on parenting
The challenges become larger because everyone is comparing with one another across a much larger spectrum. A lot of the things we take for granted as an adult can be traced back to our experiences as
a child before 5 years. The learning starts from birth and the journey continues.
Culture has a major impact on parenting. Fathers and mothers think very differently as well. Hierarchies and structures are important. How do people view goals by different sets of individuals is important. South Asia parents are focused on how well a child is doing in comparison to others.
Profile
Sumedha is an award-winning marketer and business leader with 16+ years of leading million dollar businesses at P&G and Pepsico. She is an alumnus of Shri Ram College Of Commerce and IIM Indore (where she is also a visiting faculty in marketing & consumer insights).
When she became a mother, she applied the same philosophy of analysis and hands-on learning, and poured herself into the world of early childhood research and neuroscience and was amazed that all this knowledge was locked into research papers and books but not available on demand to parents, exactly when they need it and personalized to their needs.
It was then that she decided to use technology to help time-starved parents (like herself) who are continuously on the hunt of finding what’s right for their child but don’t know where to begin. Keeping the struggles of working parents in mind and her own motherhood experience, she’s created KinderPass to empower parents to contribute to the most crucial first 5 years, that will shape the life of their child forever.
Sumedha is a long distance runner, a voracious reader and an avid traveler (been to 40+ countries and all continents). She is married and her two children (aged 9, 5) have been the first “beta-testers” for all activities on KinderPass!
