Fruitful discussions

When Nathan Anderson was a teenager, he kept repeating the same brief routine with his mom, Shelley, when she’d pick him up from school.

She’d ask, “How was your day?” He’d reply, “Fine.”

Like many 13-year-olds, he wasn’t particularly keen to talk about his feelings.

While they were eating dinner together one night, Mom passed him a piece of paper from a ceramic jar. It was filled with slips with simple prompts like, “One thing that made me smile today was” and “Three things I learned today include.”

As the mother and son used the prompts more often, they started losing track of time and having deeper discussions. And, as Anderson grew into a young man, he found that his confidence grew, too.

“At first, I just thought it was kind of lame,” Anderson said with a laugh, “but then I started getting more into it. … It did start changing my view even of myself, speaking positively a lot. My brain would start doing it naturally: I’d start giving myself positive feedback, rather than negative feedback.”

What became known as the “positivity pot” started being used at get-togethers with friends and family. After a fun, intimate group experience at a graduation party, Anderson thought there was room for the concept to grow. He joined childhood friends Matthew Roberts and Benjamin White to launch a kickstarter in 2017, raising over $19,000 to create decks of PEAR Cards—the “PEAR” stands for Positive Engagement And Response.

Each deck contains 100 cards with printed prompts and positive affirmations. The cards are more than just icebreakers—they’re designed for positive reflection, building trust and making connections. The deck includes simple questions, such as those that ask people to talk about their favorite song or favorite season, along with others that encourage deeper reflection, such as to share their favorite childhood memory, their greatest strength or something they’re looking forward to.

Roberts said the mindset behind PEAR has been to use the cards to create an environment in which people feel more comfortable to “be open and positive … and willing to be vulnerable and put themselves out there.”

During the development process, the trio formed connections they never expected, including having sold and shipped PEAR Cards to educators and therapists across the United States. Chico High, their alma mater, has 20 sets for its students.

Therapist Victoria Sanders, CEO of VMS Family Counseling Services in Fresno, has purchased 50 decks for her practice and plans to order more. They primarily have gone to families that are struggling with communication or have taken in a new foster child. She asks them to use PEAR Cards at dinner or in a similar setting “to give them a jumping-off point to have a healthy and positive conversation.” Many of the families have told her this has helped create a more open and communicative environment.

“The PEAR Cards give families/people a safe and nonthreatening opportunity to express themselves, sometimes about easy things, but sometimes also about really personal and private things,” Sanders wrote via email. “Any time that we are able to find something that helps us express ourselves, our mental health is benefiting.”

For Anderson, Roberts and White, the drive for PEAR to make a positive difference in the realm of mental health is personal: They lost a close friend to suicide their last year of high school.

An estimated 50 percent of all Americans are diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder in their lifetime, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And, suicide statistics in America are staggering, especially among young people. It is the 10th leading cause of death among adults, according to the CDC, and the second leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 34.

One of the CDC’s suicide prevention strategies, “promotion of connectedness,” has a direct connection to what the PEAR team hopes to do.

White said one objective is to be part of a positive cultural shift toward eliminating stigma about mental illness, making it more of the norm for people to talk about their feelings and beliefs.

Since their product is still new—it launched in February 2018—sales have been slow, but they’ve had great feedback from teachers, therapists, families and groups of friends. They were able to write their first check for charity last year. Ten percent of all proceeds from PEAR go to organizations focused on promoting mental health: Mental Health America (MHA), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

For MHA, a nonprofit headquartered in Virginia, donations from its fundraising partners, like PEAR Cards, support its public education campaigns and free online screening tools. MHA spokeswoman America Paredes said the organization has found PEAR Cards to be a useful tool when initiating conversation, and because the prompts are open-ended, they can encourage the forging of deeper connections and combat feelings of isolation.

Right now, the PEAR team is exploring partnerships with local school districts to get decks on each campus, as well as a program dedicated to mental health and wellness. The ultimate goal is that the cards could be used to help educators identify kids who may be experiencing mental health issues, or, at the very least, foster self-love and break down barriers to connecting with others, like the fear of rejection.

“If one of the impressions that’s being made on them inside the classroom is that it’s OK to express yourself and it’s OK to speak positively about the person next to you and also about yourself—you don’t have to be an egoist to say you love yourself or to give yourself a compliment—y’know, that’s huge,” Anderson said.

White added: “If this sparks somebody to say something that got them the help they needed, that’s mission accomplished. If it only changed one life, we would be happy.”