Dr. Punam V. Saxena is a TEDx and SXSW speaker, two-time author, and advocate with over 35 years of work in equity and education. A second-generation Indian American who grew up as the only Indian family in rural Georgia, she speaks on cultural bias, the Model Minority Stereotype, parent engagement, and empowering South Asian women’s voices in leadership. Her signature TEDx talk, The Key to Enhancing Student Success, explores the minority experience of growing up as “other.”

We are opening a new series on The Raw Onion, and it begins where so much of what we carry as adults actually begins.

With the young brain.

Not because this episode is only for parents. But because every single one of us was once a child in a system, a home, a culture, that was either building us up or quietly chipping away at something essential.

And most of us never had the conversation we needed about what was actually happening.

This episode is that conversation.

Dr. Saxena spent her early years being tested for a gifted program twice and not passing, not because she was not brilliant, but because the assessments were built around a language and culture that was not hers. She describes losing 25 years of her life to what that moment took from her. That experience became the foundation of 35 years of advocacy, and it is the thread running through everything she shares here.

What she brings to this episode is not a framework or a method. It is honesty. The kind that makes you pause and think about the child you were, the adults who surrounded you, and what was quietly being encoded in that developing brain before you ever had words for it.

We explore what the education system was built for, and who it was not built for. We sit with the concept of a secure base, the one relationship, the one presence, where a child can simply exist without performing. We talk about selective cultural identity and what children silently choose to carry forward. We talk about legacy, presence, and what it actually means to show up for a young mind in a world moving faster than any prior generation.

Stephanie‘s work at Triage Coaching and Consulting focuses on inherited generational stress and the neuroscience of how family patterns shape our nervous systems across generations.

If you are in your 40s or beyond and something in your life no longer fits the way it once did, Yoshie works with women navigating exactly that. Visit Lotus Flower Journeys to learn more.

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