Building Tools Parents Want to Use
Blog Post
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Dec. 6, 2022
The Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) is a cross-sector fellowship program designed to bring together journalists, entertainment producers, education leaders, social entrepreneurs, and researchers around the science of learning. As part of the program, our fellows contribute to various publications, including New America’s EdCentral blog; BOLD, the blog on learning and development published by the Jacobs Foundation; and outside publications. The article below, authored by 2020-2022 LSX Fellow Puja Balachander, is excerpted from a post published in the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Blog on November 8, 2022: 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.
To continue reading, see the full article published November 8, 2022 in The Joan Ganz Cooney Center's blog.
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