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Sharon Weingarten, MSW, LSW, ACSW Founder of the What I Wish You Knew Web Site Sharon Weingarten is a licensed social worker, a teacher, a mother and an expert on intergenerational communication. She has 30 years of educational and therapeutic experience working with children, adolescents and families. She is a member of Rotary International and serves as an advisor to numerous community and mental health organizations. Her passion and expertise is working with parents and teens, and her goal is to get them talking to each other. Her idea for "What I Wish You Knew..." was born several years ago, when one of her own three children was seriously injured in an accident during her junior year of college, the "junior year abroad." Upon hearing that her American daughter was in an emergency room in a hospital in Australia, Weingarten immediately flew there to be with her. Fortunately, the injury was not life-threatening, but did require a prolonged period of bed rest and recuperation. The doctors advised against a 20-hour flight back to the United States right away, so together, the mother, daughter and doctors came up with a plan. When the daughter was released from the hospital, she was brought back to her dorm room at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Her mother was allowed to take one of the empty rooms in the dormitory also. The daughter was able to rest, continue her medical treatment and stay at the University for the remainder of the semester. The mother was able to do what mothers do; she took care of her daughter. But she also did something that most mothers don't have the opportunity to do. For over a month, knowing that her husband was at home, taking care of their other two children, she was undistracted by normal demands of family, home, work and all her other responsibilities in the States. This mother had the luxury of not multi-tasking, of really being able to live in the moment, to be there for her daughter, to be grateful and to think. She was living in a girl's dorm on the other side of the world. She filled the time she was not with her daughter with reading and writing, and with getting to know her daughter's friends, as well as staff and many other students at the University of Queensland. The people she met were kind and helpful, and curious and forthright too. She shared meals with the kids in the communal dining room. She shared the halls of the dorm with students and carried her shampoo in a little basket, like they did, to the shower rooms they all used. She did laundry for her daughter and herself in the laundry room all the students shared. She used the University library. After a while, she stopped being a strange phenomenon to the students. They accepted her. They told her about their "mums" and about other things too. They asked her questions and they told her stories about their lives and gave her some advice to pass on to other parents also. Probably, precisely because she was not their own mother, and because there was a degree of anonymity in talking with her, they did so. Being respectful of their privacy, and that of all teens who want to share some of their thoughts and stories, this mother created the website, "What I Wish You Knew..."
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