Building Tools Parents Want to Use

Parents often quip that children do not “come with instructions.” Underlying this joke is a real interest in supporting their children’s learning and development, but not always knowing how. And parents do need to know how to do their job well—their actions may determine children’s lifelong happiness and success.  

In 2018, my team and I started Devie, an AI parenting coach startup, to help parents feel empowered about the decisions they were making and to help provide their children with the home learning environment they need to thrive. Along the way, we learned a ton about how to design an early childhood development product that parents need and want to use, and the importance of taking a personalized approach. Here are my top five takeaways for developers, policymakers, program designers, and others seeking to create effective tools that support parents: 

Needs > wants. Parents care about child development most when they’re facing a developmental challenge

When my co-founders and I started working on Devie, we assumed that because parents care about their children more than anything, they would care about their development too, and would engage with the tools we developed accordingly. Research interviews seemed to validate this assumption: parents are fascinated by their children’s development, and eager to support it. So we designed our first version of Devie accordingly. Parents would send us pictures of their child playing, and then my co-founder would analyze them for developmental milestones and offer an activity they could do together to boost their child’s development accordingly. We found that at first, this was delightful and fun, but after a couple of days, parents would start messaging us about other, more urgent questions they had. Questions about their child’s sleep, behavior, and food stressed parents out, and they were proactive about seeking expert support around those issues. 

It seems obvious in hindsight, but we found that while parents absolutely do care about their children’s development, it’s a nice-to-have, until it becomes urgent when they’re facing a challenge.

 

Advice needs to be personalized and immediately actionable

Once we realized that parents care most about child development when they’re dealing with a challenge, we changed Devie. The second version of the product provided expert advice and content divided by age and challenge area. Parents could use the app to find guidance on topics like sleep training, weaning, potty training, and behavior. 

This time, we found that parents would run through the content on the app. But that was it. Once they had interacted with most of the content, they stopped engaging with the app, although they still messaged our founding team to ask questions about their challenges. 

Interestingly, we noted that most of the time, the answers to the questions parents were asking were in the app already, but we realized they were still reaching out for two reasons. 1) They valued the personal touch and context that our team had about them, their child, and their family. And 2), they wanted advice to be more actionable and incremental. Our team was able to give them advice a little at a time, so that once they tried something, they could come back and get the next step or get advice on how to adjust, rather than consuming the information all at once. 

Parents were engaging with our team, and not the app, because with us, they felt cared for. They felt empowered rather than overwhelmed by “just enough” actionable information, and because they could see progress on their challenges. 

Unlocking scale through modular content + community + non-judgmental guidance

The handful of parents in our beta group were engaging with our team, asking questions, and getting personalized advice and plans. But we were left with a challenge: how do we scale this up? 

We took inspiration from apps like Noom and Headspace, and decided to try a tiered approach. First, we divided the content on the different challenges into plans with modules. Each had some homework or actions that a parent had to do and report back on in order to move on to the next step. Next, we added in a community component, where we curated small groups of parents on the same plans whom we thought might be able to support each other, and facilitated them with care. Finally, to add a personal touch and respond to those extra questions, we assigned each group a qualified, non-judgmental parenting coach with early childhood expertise who would be available to support them. 

With this model, (nearly three years after we started!) we finally saw the engagement levels we wanted! 

Never stop listening, learning, and changing

Last year, Devie was acquired by Think of Us, a systems change non-profit that aims to transform child welfare with lived experience at the center. Through Think of Us, Devie will be a tool for young parents in and recently out of foster care – a new segment of the parent population for the Devie team – and we are back to the drawing board! 

The process of adapting Devie to this new population is ongoing, but we can already see how these young parents’ priorities are different than our other users.’ For example, young parents in care struggle more with lacking basic resources and supplies, and with isolation and stress. So Devie’s focus is shifting to emphasize the community, and we’re plugging into local and national resources to get parents the supplies and practical aid they need. 

It’s on us

All of this is to say, designing a child development product for parents is hard, but it’s a labor of love. In the child development community, it’s easy to assume that parents should and do care about their children’s development – and they do! But putting the research and research-based products out there isn’t enough! The onus is on us as designers and developers to make the science of early learning and development accessible by building things parents need and want to use.

 

Puja Balachander is a social impact designer turned entrepreneur dedicated to supporting every parent to give their children the best start in life. She is the founder and CEO of Devie, an AI coach providing every parent with the personalized advice, learning activities, and emotional support they need to be the parent they want to be. Puja was a 2020-2022 Learning Sciences Exchange Fellow.