Correspondent photo / John Bagnola Joan Reardon Stebleton, an attorney with the law firm Brouse McDowell, has released her first children’s book.

CANFIELD — Here’s a novel idea.

At the Reardon household in Canfield, Tim and his wife Suzie decided early on as parents that it would be beneficial to make their children’s homework fun.

“As long as I can remember, beginning at St. Charles Elementary School, Mom and Dad could feel our pain from piles of homework, sort of like a parent’s intuition,” Joan Reardon Stebleton, 25, said.

She was the oldest, followed by Shannon and Tim, and all were two years apart. Their innovative parents wholeheartedly believed that if they could find a way to motivate their children’s young minds to read and understand their homework, they would really benefit. So “Mom and Dad” began creating fun learning games related to the context of their chapters, believing their children would then be one step ahead of the game in the classroom the next day.

And it seemed to work. Whether it was a crossword puzzle or a math or spelling quiz, or knowing word definitions, it simply became a fun evening and not just another school project after being in a classroom all day.

Joan, newly married to Ben Stebelton, said both parents found time to care and hope for their children’s bright futures even though they both worked.

“Dad was a very busy young attorney and Mom’s job could not be any harder. She had the toughest job in the world. Like most moms, she worked from home without a computer. That’s right. She was a housewife, a stay-at-home mom, the CEO of the Reardon Enterprise, or as we called her, not our monitor, but our Momitor,” Stebelton said.

At a young age, the children even set goals for themselves. And even though aspirations usually change throughout the years, Stebelton’s never did. She aspired to become an attorney one day just like her father and oddly enough, she wanted to write a book.

“Mom and Dad always enjoyed reading to us. On family trips to Barnes & Noble, they always encouraged us, even at 3 and 4 years old, to choose a good book to read to us. Then, when old enough to read on our own, we were encouraged to join a book club. And to this day, we even have our own family book club. Our family learned to love the arts together too, including Broadway musical performances and the symphony orchestra. And because of our exposure to music and the arts, all three of us decided to take piano lessons. And thanks to many lessons and patience from instructor Rick Blackson, we had the pleasure of performing many piano recitals,” she said.

Her parents believed that music education is linked to improved cognitive function, increased language development and positive social interaction. It helped to stimulate both sides of the brain early on.

The family agreed that the interaction spent at the dinner table and homework festivities contributed to the success that would follow for all three children. Shannon, now 23, and Tim, 21, are both in medical school, and Joan just passed the Ohio Bar Exam last November to follow in her father’s footsteps as an attorney.

Stebelton’s favorite subjects at St. Charles Elementary were history and English, and she engaged in a competitive and creative writing competition called Power of the Pen. She also gave praise to two speech and debate coaches at Cardinal Mooney High School.

The school always placed well at speech and debate competitions, including the fast paced public forum debates. She said she would never have reached her goals in life without the help of coaches Diane Mastro Nard and Jen Gonda.

“Our speech team always placed well in the state and at the National Championship in Dallas, with topics like “Do we need Standardized Testing?” And “Should we be genetically modifying animals, plants, and microorganisms?” Both required a lot of research, which came in handy when she was writing her first children’s novel.

Stebelton also was competitive in sports. She was a four-year letter winner in golf, averaging 43, and enjoyed a Northeastern Ohio Honorable Mention in the sport her senior year. She then went on to The Ohio State University and majored in history, graduating in three years with honors. During her time at OSU, she took elective courses that inspired her to continue her quest to write a children’s book. The electives included the History of Witches and Tolkien Monsters.

Even at the age of 12, Stebelton said she was always intrigued by her father’s law office stories and had a back seat view of everything that went on there. So she decided to pursue her law degree at Case Western Reserve University in 2020 following her graduation at OSU.

During her time at Case, Stebelton implemented a publication called “The Need for Legal Protection for Kid’s Influencers on the Web.” Also during this difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was one of the founding members of a national co-ed fraternity named Delta Theta Phi. This fraternity gave men and women an opportunity to be together by Zoom or other means to converse and study without the worry of a super spreader. She then graduated and passed the bar exam in three years.

Stebelton recently joined her father at the Brouse McDowell Law Firm in Boardman, where she is an associate specializing in real estate and business law. Her first interesting case came this past June with the closing of the sale of Summer Garden Food Manufacturing, a Thomas Zidian Company in Boardman, for $235 million to Lassonde — a Canadian company that employs 2,700 full-time employees.

Since Stebelton has had a lifetime involvement in speech and debate competition, being an attorney is right where she wants to be at this time in her life. But, her other lifetime dream was to author and publish a book. Now she’ll check both off her bucket list.

In August, Stebelton’s first book came to fruition. “The Grimsbane Family Witch Hunters” is, of course, fiction and a great read for children ages 8 to 12 . It was rated in the Top 50 books after the first day.

The book, written under her maiden name Joan Reardon, is published by Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. She has another book coming out next summer titled “Summer Road Trip,” and she is also in the process of writing two more fiction novels — at the same time — for future publication.

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