Our Mission

Childhood Matters is a live one-hour weekly call-in radio show on 98.1 KISS-FM in the San Francisco Bay Area, 105.1 KOCN-FM in Monterey and Santa Cruz, and La Nuestra KBBF 89.1 FM in the North Bay, and 1480 KGOE-AM in Eureka. The show is presented by Interactive Parenting Media.

The mission of Interactive Parenting Media is to inform and inspire parents and all who care about children so that every child may be happy, healthy, and thrive. We provide a respectful, inclusive public forum through our interactive radio shows — Childhood Matters and Nuestros Niños — and other media in English and Spanish.

To read our "birth story" click here.



Board of Directors

Ronald Barkin, JD, Attorney
Rocio de Mateo Smith, Executive Director, Area 5 Developmental Disabilities Board
Kisha Grove, Human Resources, Kaiser Permanente
Susan Lindheim, MD, Pediatrician, Kaiser Permanente Richmond Medical Center
Eric McDonnell, Executive Vice President, United Way of the Bay Area
Rona Renner, Executive Director, Childhood Matters, Inc.
James Ricks, Support Group Leader, Family Resource Network
Mark Pertschuk, JD, Attorney

	Ronald S. Barkin, JD, is a graduate of Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley and was admitted to the California Bar in 1971. He has represented and been on the Board of Directors of numerous profit and nonprofit corporations. He has been married for 41 years and has two grown children, one grandchild and another due in August of 2009. He has been a board member since the start of Childhood Matters and has been involved with childhood matters all his life.
	Kisha Grove, MPA, a Human Resouces Professional who is employed with Kaiser Permanente, has been in this field for over 12 years working mostly with public agencies before her employment with Kaiser Permanente. Kisha holds an MA Degree in Public Administration and a BA Degree in Sociology and Social Services from California State University, Hayward. Kisha has a very active life and takes pride in getting involved with community groups and projects. She has been married for over 10 years to Severan and is a mother of two boys Winston and Quincy.
	Board President Susan Lindheim, MD, Kaiser Permanente Richmond facility for almost 25 years. She is also Assistant Physician-in-Chief for Kaiser Permanente East Bay and the past regional Co-Chair of the KP Northern California Diversity Council. Susan has been honored with many awards for her clinical, community and diversity work. Susan has been a board member since the start of Childhood Matters.
	Board Secretary Born and raised in Mexico City, Rocio de Mateo Smith has worked over 25 years in the field of developmental disabilities with a special emphasis in early intervention and services to immigrant communities. She has been the Executive Director of Area 5 Developmental Disabilities Board for the past 14 years. In this role, Rocio advocates for the service rights of people with developmental disabilities of all ages both at the individual and systemic levels. Prior to this position, she was the Executive Director of Agency for Infant Development, a Fremont-based program for infants with disabilities and their families. Married to Carl Smith, Rocio has three adult children and a granddaughter.
	Board Treasurer Eric McDonnell, Executive Vice President, United Way of the Bay Area. Eric McDonnell is a committed and passionate advocate for children, families, and communities. As executive vice president, Eric provides strategic, transformational and operational leadership to achieve UWBA's goals, set priorities and deliver on the organization’s mission – to be the catalyst that enables people to strengthen their communities by investing in one another. Eric drives UWBA's efforts to ensure that every child has the opportunity to reach his or her academic potential, and families achieve economic self-sufficiency, while making Bay Area neighborhoods safer, stronger places to live. Eric holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in public administration from the University of San Francisco. A husband and father of three school-age children, he loves to bowl and play basketball.
	Mark Pertschuk is a leader and expert in public health policy, advocacy, and social movement building. He has run successful grassroots campaigns at the state and national levels. He is the former President and Executive Director of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights in Berkeley, California. In the late 1980’s, he led a grassroots campaign to ban smoking on commercial airline flights in the United States. In 1995, Mark co-founded Californians for Responsible Gun Laws, and ran a successful grassroots campaign for four major statewide gun control laws. He served as Legislative Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington, DC from 1999 – 2002, and was an adviser to the Million Mom March.
	Rona Renner, RN, Executive Director, Interactive Parenting Media, and host of Childhood Matters radio show, is an accomplished parent educator and talk show facilitator. In addition to her role as host of Childhood Matters, she has been a guest expert on radio and has appeared on national television segments on CNN and 20/20 and is a monthly guest on ABC 7's The View From The Bay. Rona is the parent of four children, ages 20 to 38, grandparent of two, and has been a registered nurse for over 40 years with a wide range of experience in health care, administration, and patient education in New York, California, Zaire, and India. Click here to download Rona's bio.
	James Ricks, Support Group Leader, Family Resource Network

The Birth of Childhood Matters and Nuestros Niños
by Rona Renner, RN

In the early 1990s I was teaching classes at the Kaiser Richmond Medical Center, in the Department of Pediatrics. The classes focused on temperament, discipline, cultural differences in parenting, setting limits, and respectful communication. Each week parents from different backgrounds would attend. Some were sent by Child Protective Services because of child abuse or neglect issues, and others come out of a desire to learn more about raising children. These classes provided me with a rich education that I had not had previously. I heard the voices of parents who were doing the best they could to raise their children, even though they often needed more resources and support.

One night three weeks into the series, I was talking about discipline and how important it is to think about what we want to teach our children. The previous week we had discussed the cultural differences in parenting and how many things were passed on to us from previous generations.

On this night a father who had not yet spoken during the class raised his hand and stood up in the back of the room. As he spoke, everyone was quiet. I don't remember the exact words, but the essence of it was that now he understood why he shouldn't hurt his child any more. As he spoke I got the chills and felt a tap on my shoulder. The experience was as if an angel was tapping me and saying, "You've got to find a way for other parents to hear this father." I had never had that kind of experience before, and when I went home I told my husband that something really strange happened in class. The father's understanding of why he shouldn't hurt his child was deep and sincere, and I knew that it was rare to hear the words he was saying.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do until many months later when I was in my PJs folding the laundry, and I turned on the radio to find the OJ Simpson trial on the air. I listened for a few minutes and then realized that they had gone to a break from the trial and were talking about disciplining children. The guest on the show said something that I didn't agree with, and for the first time I called into a talk radio show, and said my opinion. The host of the show had me hold on the line afterwards and asked if I would take calls since they were losing their guest and the trial wasn't ready to come back on the air. I said "Sure."

For the next hour in my PJs, I took calls from folks on KPIX (San Francisco), answering questions about discipline, temperament, and ADHD. When the hour was up I looked at my husband and said, "That's it, that's what I'm supposed to do, talk to parents on the radio and let other parents speak their mind."

It took about ten years for me to figure out how to get on radio. It is not an easy task, and it was much more complicated then I imagined.

For a year my husband Mick and I did a Saturday night radio show called The Art of Parenting, on Free Radio Berkeley, the only station we could find that was interested in a show on parenting. After that, for over 3 years, I was the parenting editor on KPFA's Morning Show once a week and then once a month. I learned a great deal about radio, but that wasn't the station I wanted to be on. The folks in Richmond had never heard of KPFA, and I wanted to reach a diverse audience. So I found a radio consultant, Peter B. Collins, by calling him and telling him that I wanted to become the Anti-Dr.Laura.

With the help of Peter and many friends and relatives, we came up with a plan, became a 501(c)(3), and applied to First 5 Alameda County for funding. We did not get funding until the third request, and the funding was just enough to cover the cost of 14 shows. KISS-FM had never had a parenting show on their "Old School and Today's R&B station," but for the right amount of money to cover the air time, they were willing to take a chance. So, using my dining room table as our meeting space, and my extra bedroom as the office for our Americorps*VISTA volunteer, we launched Childhood Matters in November of 2002.

Once we were on the air we went to other funders for support, knowing that once they could hear what we were doing they would understand the value of using the media to reach families and providers with reliable information. We approached First 5 Santa Clara, and they were very clear that we would have to serve the Spanish-speaking community if they were to fund us. We were already talking about how to do that, so with their support we launched Nuestros Niños. We didn't have enough money to do that, so a few key people deferred their payments in order to make it happen. In the photo, our staff in 2005.

From there we went to First 5 Marin and First 5 Contra Costa, and people like UWBA found us, as did other funders. Now it has been almost six years that we are on the air, and we continue to find new partners and reach more parents.

There is more to this story, but the birth of Childhood Matters came from the words of a father who was struggling to do well by his child.