About Me

I come from a lineage shaped by survival, displacement, and rebuilding. I grew up Lebanese-Armenian in Beirut, carrying two cultural identities before I ever left the country. I now live in Los Angeles, raising my son in a third culture entirely, still holding both of the ones that shaped me.

The question of what to keep, what to let go of, and what to build from scratch is not theoretical for me. It's lived. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday, in an ordinary moment with my son, when two cultures are pulling in opposite directions and I have to decide in real time who I want to be as a parent.

I'm Aline Topjian, a parenting coach, social emotional learning specialist, and Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach. I hold a Master's in Educational Psychology and School Counseling and have spent over a decade supporting parents, children, and educators at the intersection of developmental science and real-life family systems.

What I've learned is this: most parents don't need more information. They need the right information, help cutting through the noise, and support applying new skills in the moments that actually matter.

Because many of the skills children need most (regulation, self-awareness, emotional connection) were never consistently modeled for many of us growing up. Many of us were raised in homes where survival came first, where fear and control were the tools available, and where compliance was mistaken for respect. So we're learning, in real time, how to give our children what we never received ourselves.

And yet our grandmothers and mothers knew things too, things that didn't have a psychological term but are now backed by research. The way food and gathering created safety. The way storytelling passed down identity. The way collective care buffered stress. This work doesn't ask you to leave that wisdom behind. It asks you to see it clearly, name it, and carry it forward intentionally.

For SWANA and diasporic families, this is layered with the experience of navigating multiple cultural frameworks at once, balancing inherited ways of raising children with modern Western parenting expectations, often without a village and often without a guide.

That's why I built the To-Gather Method. Not from theory alone, but from living this, studying it, and supporting families through it for over a decade.

Parenting change doesn't happen through insight alone. It happens in real moments, when awareness becomes response and small shifts begin to repeat over time.

Not through perfection. Through practice.