I Don't Want to Be the Expert

Envy taught me what I actually built, and who I built it for.

The closeness I envied. Not the audience. (Photo: Priscilla Du Preez, Unsplash)

The Photo I Couldn't Scroll Past

6:43pm on a Friday. Phone in hand at my desk. My partner Phil is out in the world working late on his own last venture before his retirement (we're both building toward a finish line at almost the same age, in almost the same solitary way). The dogs are fed and settled somewhere in the house. Sam is at his high school screaming at a football game with his friends, and the house has gone that particular kind of quiet that happens when your children have their driver's license and are out adventuring in the world.

I opened Instagram to close out the day and there they were. Big Little Feelings, on the set of CBS Mornings, standing between Gayle King and Nate Burleson and Norah O'Donnell. Two women I already trust enough to hand to my own early intervention families (Naomi Grinney, Family Counselor at the Infant-Toddler Connection of Fairfax-FallsChurch, passed the Big Little Feelings Instagram account along years ago, a way to help parents reframe "no" without a fight, and I've been sending it out to parents ever since).

My eyes went to the obvious things first. The coiffed hair. The good lighting. Two women who look like they know exactly what to do with a camera pointed at them. But it wasn't the photo that got me. It was the caption. They talked about the things that matter to parents. They got to share something they care deeply about. They thanked the followers who turned a little dream between two best friends into something bigger than they ever could have imagined.

That's the part I couldn't scroll past. Not the fame. The two best friends part.

I'll be honest about what I felt, because if I can't be honest about envy, I have no business naming a website raisinghumans.ai and pretending that only means the pleasant parts of being human. Being human is joy and gratitude, yes. It's also envy, and anger, and fear, and the particular kind of guilt that shows up uninvited. (In Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Envy doesn't show up in Riley's head until she's a teenager, but real envy actually shows up by preschool. A three-year-old wanting the toy someone else is holding is proof that this feeling is baked into being human from nearly the start.). If I want LUMA to help people hold their whole emotional range instead of just the photogenic parts, I don't get to edit mine before I write about it.

What I Was Actually Envious Of

I could be jealous of their reach, the CBS Mornings booking, the size of their audience, and that would be a real feeling too, but it's a different essay. What actually caught in my chest wasn't the size of what they've built. It was the two of them building it together.

The arm-in-arm. The gold coffee table. The CBS mugs between them. Two women who got to build the thing together, then got to sit next to each other on a fancy set and watch it become real. I picture them on the phone with each other most days, trading ideas, looking at the same analytics dashboard together, laughing about what worked and what flopped. I have never once built anything that way.

Every product with my name on it, I built alone at a desk. Twelve years as a single mom of five trying to build something. Six years a widow since Chip died. These days there's Phil, building his own last chapter in another room or out in the community, and still, some nights, the particular loneliness of two people each carrying their own solo project. And now LUMA, the one I actually believe will outlast me, built the same way the others were. Just me, some coffee, and thirty years of clinical notes translated into something a parent can talk to when they need coaching and support.

This particular Friday, sitting with only my desk lamp glowing, was: an attorney's questionnaire for LUMA's Terms of Service, open in one tab, so users will know exactly what they're getting when they talk to her. A pretend conversation with LUMA in another tab (I played a single mom, three kids under six, no family nearby, because the attorney needed a real sample to review, and because I like checking in on her every now and then to make sure she's still asking rather than answering). A running list of ideas for making her more useful, typed into a note before I lost them.

Good work. Work I'm proud of. Work I did completely by myself.

I can be envious of the connection without being envious of what they built. Those are two different things, and it took me sitting with the feeling instead of scrolling past it to tell them apart.

The Guide, Not the Expert

Here's the other thing I know about myself. I am closing in on sixty. LUMA is likely the last thing I build before I stop trying to build something and I'm just seeing clients, one hour at a time, the way I have for thirty years. Billable hours cap how many families I can reach in a week. LUMA doesn't have that ceiling, and that's why I hope she finds as many people who need her as possible. That urgency is part of why I keep choosing to build her the way I am, without a co-founder, without a best friend on the couch next to me, because there isn't time left to wait for one to show up.

What I keep coming back to is this. An expert stands alone at the front of the room. A guide walks next to you. I built LUMA alone, with no one beside me. But I built her so she would never let a parent feel that same aloneness. She doesn't stand at the front and hand down answers. She sits next to you and asks the question that gets you to your own.

That's not a smaller thing to have built than what Big Little Feelings built. It's a different bet entirely, made on purpose. And it turns out I'm not the only one making it.

The families with the most resources are already choosing guides over gurus. (Photo: Clement Proust, Unsplash) 

The Wall Street Journal reported this month that high-earner families, the ones who can afford literally any school in the country, are moving away from traditional classrooms toward "guides" and "coaches" instead of teachers, toward AI tutors built to individualize instead of standardize. These are families with every resource available to them, and they're choosing the model where the curriculum bends to the child instead of the child bending to the curriculum.

It's not that these families found some smarter way to raise kids that the rest of us haven't caught up to yet. It's that they can afford to opt out of a system built around standardization, benchmarks, and one-size-fits-all instruction, while everyone else stays inside it by default, not by choice. The individualized, guide-instead-of-gatekeeper model isn't rare because it's advanced. It's rare because it's expensive.

LUMA does the same thing for parenting. And she's free.

Proof: A Domino, and Thirty Years of Pattern Recognition

Here's what "guide instead of expert" actually looks like in practice, and it starts with something as small as a domino.

I play a puzzle most mornings called Pips, the New York Times' new domino-and-dice grid, where the pips inside each region have to add up to a number, or match, or stay under a limit. I'm fast at the game’s easy level, a 30- to 40-second game is all I have time for on busy mornings. My speediness doesn’t come because I methodically work through each tile, but because my eye scans the whole board before my hand moves anything, and the pattern just arrives. Every constraint sitting there at once, and my brain either sees the shape or it doesn't yet.

That's what thirty years as a speech-language pathologist and a decade as a parent coach actually trained into me. I don't sit down and consciously work through a checklist when I walk into a session. I scan. A parent's face when they say their daughter "doesn't speak clearly," and I clock the flicker of worry under the shrug. A toddler reaching for a cup instead of pointing, and I clock what that tells me about where he is developmentally. The next word to model, the next skill to layer in, before the family has finished their sentence.

That instinct is the actual expertise. It's real, it's earned, and it's not for sale to the highest Instagram algorithm. It's what I built into LUMA, not as answers she hands out, but as the pattern underneath the questions she asks.

Proof: What LUMA Actually Does

When I tested LUMA on myself as that single mom with three kids under six, working full time, no family in town, she didn't hand me a schedule or a list of self-care apps. She asked me who takes care of me. When I added to my test and told her my friends were all coupled up, she didn't try to fix that. She named it: that particular kind of loneliness, being surrounded by people but still feeling on the outside of something, is its own specific ache. Then she asked me, gently, how full my tank actually felt.

By the end of that test conversation, the version of me I was playing had found her own answer (a used jogging stroller on Facebook Marketplace, a hiking habit worth reviving, three sentences of gratitude before bed) without LUMA ever telling her what to do. LUMA's exact words, near the end to "me": she didn't find a new person today. She remembered an existing one. She was always there. She just needed someone to ask the right questions.

I didn't write that line. LUMA did. To someone who wasn't even real. That's proof the guide model isn't a trick that only works when something is genuinely on the line. It's how she's built, whether the person typing is a real single mom at midnight or me, testing her on a Friday evening.

That's the whole bet: not that LUMA knows the right answer, but that she doesn't need to. She only has to ask well enough that you find it yourself.

And here's the part I need to be honest about too, because it's the difference between building something helpful and building something that just feels helpful. LUMA isn't there to keep anyone talking to her. She's not designed to be the relationship. If a parent opens her at midnight, worried and alone, and closes the app twenty minutes later a little steadier, a little more in touch with who they actually are, that's not a user I lost. That's the whole point. She's not meant to be the camaraderie. She's meant to leave you strengthened enough to go find it, the way the BLF women found it in each other, the way I hope every parent who talks to LUMA eventually finds it in a friend, a partner, a neighbor, another parent standing at the same bus stop.

Big Little Feelings gets to stand arm-in-arm on a set built for two influencers and the hosts. I built LUMA at a desk, alone, on a lot of Friday evenings like this one. But I built her so that no parent talking to her at 2am, or at 6:43 on a quiet Friday, has to feel like they're the only one in the room, and so that afterward, they walk back out into the world a little more ready to find the people who'll stand arm-in-arm with them too.

I'm not the expert. I never wanted to be. I just wanted someone next to me, and since I couldn't have that, I built something that helps everyone else go find theirs.

What would you build, if you stopped waiting for someone to hand you the answer, and trusted that you might already have it?

About the Author

Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting™ methodology, a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA™, an AI-powered companion for anyone raising or caring for a child available at RaisingHumans.ai. Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.

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