Emily Kucharski

Mum and founder of Wish I’d Known, an insights community for parents

Mum and founder of Wish I’d Known, an insights community for parents

I’m Emily, founder of Wish I’d Known, one of the world's largest crowdsourced databases of parenting experiences, with nearly 1,000 insights on raising young children and parental well-being freely available via our intelligent library. I had the idea for Wish I’d Known after having my son in late 2021, and my husband – an experienced researcher and data scientist – helped me bring it to life.

We felt first-hand the massive learning curve parents go on, and we couldn’t help but notice how many times we heard the phrase “I wish I’d known…” amongst fellow parents. We realised that while many of the challenges of parenting are universal, we too often navigate them alone or in small bubbles of friends and family (if we’re lucky), so we lack broader perspectives that could reassure us and ease our journeys.

Driven by a desire to bridge this gap, Wish I’d Known was born. Over a million words and data points were captured via a safe-space community where users anonymously contributed their experiences, and then saw what the rest of the community said, in a representative and digestible way. Our insights have been used in a parliamentary roundtable, NHS e-learning and corporate training.

In the process of capturing thousands of words each week, we also developed an analysis tool - wholeSum - which is helping many other types of experiences and voices to be 'heard', too, from research around parental mental health, to academic research, customer research and more.