Kim Cameron-Smith lives in Northern California with her husband Philip and their 4 children. She is the founder and editor of ICP and the host of the Gentle Catholic Parenting Podcast. Her book, Discipleship Parenting, provides important insights for parents hoping to raise kids who know and love God, especially in a world that increasingly rejects God or shoves him to the outermost margins of culture. Her latest book Rooting Your Teen in the Faith addresses the problem of faith drift in Catholic youth and demonstrates why parents are the most powerful factor in the successful transmission of faith to their teens. Her writing has been featured in The Imaginative Conservative and Our Sunday Visitor News.

Kim enjoys a family-centered lifestyle balanced by service to her parish and community. She is a long-time catechist and scouting leader. In her free time, she enjoys sewing, reading, and organizing stuff.

Influences and Perspective

Kim’s thinking about parenting is shaped by many disciplines, including developmental psychology, neuroscience, Gordon Neufeld’s attachment paradigm, and Catholic social doctrine and virtue ethics. Her understanding of what it means to live a joyful, intentional life with her children continually grows and evolves as she learns more about them, herself, and how God has created us to find him in all things, especially relationships.

Kim describes herself as “an artist of family life.” This doesn’t mean she lives in an Instagram-worthy house! Her project focuses on the art of family relationships. Science tells us about how children thrive, but raising children is not itself a science. It’s much more an art. Sometimes we are walking blind, trying a little of this here and a little of that there, like an artist playing with color on a canvas. Sometimes we see that what we’re doing isn’t working, so we have to reconsider our assumptions about what our children need and our vision of how we get there. With experience and maturity, we begin to see our children the way a seasoned artist sees a landscape, gaining perspective, recognizing veiled beauty, accepting the limitations we bring to our craft. In this uncertainty, we as parents are changed. In our parenting journey, we learn as much about ourselves as we do about our children.

Work and Education

Kim is a trusts and estates attorney in a boutique law firm.  She holds a B.A. in English from Wellesley College, an M.Phil. in Medieval Literature from Oxford University, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, and a J.D. from U.C. Berkeley.  Despite all this fancy education, she finds herself saying and doing dumb things on a regular basis!