Introducing Smart Parenting Gamechangers 2025 Awardees

Five years ago, Smart Parenting launched the Smart Parenting Awards, our annual credentialing campaign that recognizes products and services strongly recommended by parents in our community. In 2024, recognizing that food and nutrition remain top of your daily concerns, we launched the Smart Parenting Food Awards with a similar vision: to identify and spotlight all the food solutions for parents. It is now in its second year and this year, we wanted to bring you, our audience, more.

Parenting means much to us at Smart Parenting because it’s quite literally close to home. The topics, content, and posts we cover daily focus on what happens inside our own homes. But being a parent also opens us up to a reality we cannot miss: that every child and their future are, in some sense, now something we have a collective duty to protect and grow. It is the root of the knowing smiles between two parents who’ve never met, or why we’re so ready to give recommendations online to new friends we've made via digital communities, but have never once been invited into their homes.

This is the heart of our newest category, the Smart Parenting Gamechangers. This year, the team pushed ourselves to expand the Smart Parenting Awards to recognize exemplary individuals in different fields who are advancing the Filipino child and family.

For our inaugural class, we celebrate seven honorees—from entrepreneurs to advocates, medical experts, and educators—each carrying infectious hope for the betterment of all our children.

Some of our honorees had been doing the work for years before anyone at Smart Parenting was a parent. They paved a new way and took on the challenges of infertility, early education in remote areas, autism awareness and inclusion, and the waning use of Filipino. They changed the game decades before today’s audience even began playing.

One of our honorees deserves a special mention as we honor her five months after her passing. Dr. Rebecca Singson is a medical expert whom the team has always wanted to lock arms with.

As we launch this campaign, it is my intention to bring due honor to Filipinos who tirelessly try to effect change for us all, even without the promise of recognition. May they bring you the inspiration and hope we all so desperately crave today. May they inspire you to hope again for a better future for our children and our families. And in this political climate, may they inspire you to demand a better future for our children—all of them, not just the ones inside our home.

"Laging may pagpapahalaga hindi lang sa wika, kundi pati sa kultura at kasaysayan natin. That's how we try to foster love of country. And we bring kids outside to the community, because 'yun ang dapat mong mahalin talaga, ang kapwa mo Filipino. We teach them to help and meet marginalized members of the community. If they do that on their own without our help, then we’ve done our job."

READ: Ani Almario: Raising a New Generation of Readers

"One of the things we get wrong [about online sexual assault and abuse] is thinking, 'Hindi yun mangyayari sa akin,' or 'Hindi yun mangyayari sa mga pamilya tulad natin.' But especially in this day and age of social media, it’s a clear and present danger to families everywhere. And at the very least, kung hindi man tayo nabibilang sa pamilyang pinaka-vulnerable doon, kung hindi man yung mga anak natin ang pinaka at-risk, it’s an area na pwede at siguro dapat tayong makipagtulungan sa iba’t ibang mga magulang at pamilya to address this threat against all children."

READ: Senator Risa Hontiveros: Champion for Women and Children

"I recently got to do a project with the World Health Organization (WHO). This year, the theme is maternal and newborn health, and something that is not so talked about that’s very important is teenage pregnancies in the Philippines—the rising cases and how there are really measures, ways, to lessen that number."

READ: Bianca Gonzalez: A Reasonant Voice Who Inspires Youth and Women

"In the early years of bringing the Knowledge Channel to the schools, at that time, it was, like, huge TVs. You know, the CRTs (cathode ray tube). Huge satellite dishes. We would need to bring that to the islands. So it would come by plane, and then by boat. And then sometimes, like ‘bangkas.’ And sometimes, in areas where there is really no transportation, we would have to deliver them by dump trucks...they [also] thought it would replace the teachers. But we said, "No. We will never replace you", no, even today with AI. We will never replace the teacher. There will always be a human in the loop, human touch, for the children to learn better."

READ: Rina Lopez: The Heart Behind Accessible Early Education

"Infertility became a huge part of her work toward the end of her social media career. She naturally became an infertility specialist and helped many couples who had tried for years. Some had gone through more than 10 or 14 years trying, with failed IVFs and miscarriages. Because of her advocacy for health, she helped many achieve successful outcomes.

I see a lot of comments saying, 'Ay naku, wala na talaga ang chance. You know, I'm 37,' just like that, 'I'm 40 plus.' There is so much hopelessness around infertility talaga. But my mom gave hope to all these patients, and because of her, many babies were born and conceived," says Dr. Gio Zahar, Dr. Becky Singson's son.

READ: Dr. Becky Singson: A Legacy of Hope, Healing, and Women's Health

"One project we're truly proud of is the Drops of Hope Project. Our bottle washes are made with purified drinking water. And we thought, if we put purified drinking water in our products, how unfair is it that many Filipino families still don't have access to clean drinking water? From that simple idea, Drops of Hope was born. A portion of proceeds goes into building sustainable water filters for barangays and communities in need. We just finished our fifth water filter and we can't wait to keep going. "

READ: Lorina Tan: Turning Little Worries Into Big Remedies

"The Philippine society, specifically the government, has done a lot for people with disabilities. We now have the Magna Carta of persons with disabilities. We have an anti-bullying law. We have a law that makes PhilHealth free for persons with disabilities. We also have many programs within PhilHealth that help with assessments and therapies. All of that happened because of the legal actions taken by our legislators.

Right now, we are helping legislators finalize the Autism Care Plan Bill... It means we want each and every government agency to have a plan to address the needs of families and Filipinos on the autism spectrum.

What does that mean? We should have not just services for persons on the autism spectrum, we should also care for the mental health of the parents. Because in this journey, talagang magkasama. We are hand-in-hand with our children. This is a path that we are trekking together and we hope the government can help both the caregivers and the person we are caring for."

READ: Mona Magno-Veluz: From Isolation to Inclusion

Produced by the Smart Parenting Team
Editor-in-Chief: Ronna Capili Bonifacio
Asst. Managing Editor/Co-Producer: Em Cruz
Interviews by Hanna Panoringan and Em Cruz
Art Director: Mariella Lao
Videographer and video editor: Rolando Pingco Jr.
Associate Publisher: Bettina Santos

Photographs by Paola Aseron, Jorem Catilo (Bianca) and Cyrus Panganiban (Sen. Risa for Esquire) Hair and makeup by Team Muriel Vega Perez and Gery Penaso and Russell Gonzaga (for Bianca) Writers: Em Cruz, Hanna Panoringan, April Kristell Llana, and Riyalyn Grace Pasimio