As a parent, the idea of delegating my child’s attention to a third party, VC funded company seeking profit is extremely distasteful.
I don’t want my child to become accustomed to living with their activities being monitored (and presumably used to build a profile which outlines their preferences) in exchange for succeeding in their chores.
The dystopian in me sees this is a child’s gateway to joining the depersonalised workforce, trained that validation comes from completing their tasks and seeking the hollow reassurance of a gamified system.
I’m sure you have worked hard on your product but this is a horrifying end state.
Totally understand where you're coming from - it's certainly not meant to be a fit for every parent.
What we are building is taking an existing parent-behavior pattern (chore charts, nagging to complete tasks, activities to get your child to become more responsible, etc) and turning it into a language that kids understand as well. The goal is to help align incentives of parents and kids.
Ultimately, we want it to be a game where time on the screen is just as important as time off the screen, and where kids are excited to do life-skill building activities.
In a world where a lot of parents feel their kids are stuck to their screens, we're hoping this provides some respite by leveraging screen-time as a way to get them engaging in the real world.
We definitely want to avoid that dystopian future, and want to make the best product for parents and kids. Given that, we'd love to hear more of your concerns to help broaden our perspective. In addition to commenting here, you can reach out directly at founders@joonapp.io
> The goal is to help align incentives of parents and kids.
Instead of taking the time to teach your child empathy and personal responsibility, you want parents to give them a virtual candy bar for doing things so they keep doing them. Reinforcing something I would term as bad motivation (I'll do anything to get virtual coins to spend in a mobile game)
Honestly I'd rather just give them a real candy bar and be done with it.
How about a phone app that encourages parents to put down their phones and do the hard work of motivating their children to participate in household activities?
Your dystopian future is already here. Kids spend countless hours grinding meaningless resources in games, or doing stupid actions to gain enough resources to unlock a new item in a fremium battle-pass-schemed game.
It's telling that SV types try to delay access to technology to their kids.
If you work with technology long enough, you start to appreciate it's absence. I really feel for kids these days, they don't know what it was like to not know things, and to have a small world.
I make sure my kids see me reading from a physical book almost every night. I use digital books too, but when they see me using that, it’s not obvious what I’m doing.
I don’t want my child to become accustomed to living with their activities being monitored (and presumably used to build a profile which outlines their preferences) in exchange for succeeding in their chores.
The dystopian in me sees this is a child’s gateway to joining the depersonalised workforce, trained that validation comes from completing their tasks and seeking the hollow reassurance of a gamified system.
I’m sure you have worked hard on your product but this is a horrifying end state.