Source: Ci6 Keynote Speaker Chelsea Clinton on Teaching Kids the Value of Persistence
The daughter of former President Bill Clinton and 2016 presidential contender Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton is the author of the number-one New York Times bestselling picture book She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History (both Philomel). Clinton is also the author of the New York Times bestselling It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! (Puffin Books) and, with Devi Sridhar, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? (Oxford University Press).
On October 2, Clinton, who serves as the vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, where her initiatives include helping to empower the next generation of leaders, will publish Start Now! You Can Make a Difference (Philomel), a middle-grade title for young activists.
Muscatine is the owner of Politics and Prose with her husband, ABA Board member Bradley Graham. A former Washington Post reporter and White House speech writer during the Clinton administration, Muscatine is currently writing Hillaryland, her story about working with Hillary Clinton, to be published by Penguin Press.
At the Thursday, June 21, breakfast, following Muscatine’s introduction, Clinton thanked booksellers in the audience, some of whom she recognized from her previous book tours. “I’m so grateful to all of you because without your support and partnership, I wouldn’t be able to have the reach that I hope to have with the work that I feel called to do and the obligation that I feel to children in our country,” she said.
The first time the two met was when Muscatine worked for Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton was just 13 years old and living in the White House. At the time, Muscatine received some impassioned advice from Hillary on raising her kids to be readers: “Your mother was fierce, relentless, incessantly reminding me to read to my children — constantly. She badgered us and others who had children along with me in the White House; she would constantly be sending us books and CDs…Not that I wouldn’t have [read to my kids], but it was so important for me to hear it from her. So I was wondering, when you had Charlotte, did she do the same thing to you?”
Chelsea Clinton’s daughter, Charlotte, is now three years old, and her son, Aidan, is two. She said her mother inculcated her with the same message about the importance of reading to kids and making sure they grow up in a language-rich environment.
“I do think that the stories we tell our children are profoundly important for how we help them either expand or limit their world and how they think about their own possibilities within our world and our shared future,” Clinton said.