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The comment section here is pretty negative, and while I tend even to agree with a lot of it, as a school administrator working in the early childhood space, I can shed light on one important element that a lot of folks here are missing:

The demand for stuff like this is ABSOLUTELY real, and growing. Lots of folks here have made very thoughtful posts about why this is not an ideal way to motivate a child/teach them habits/etc., and lots of the responses counter with some wonderful practice that commenters do at home and works for them.

I, too, have delivered that spiel about a gazillion time for parents. More specifically, when talking about internet safety, or healthy device use, my mantra is always about how ineffective the notion that "some tool" can solve this for them is, and that honest, deep, meaningful communication with their children is the only real way to address these things. You know... parenting.

But 100% of the time, as soon as I am done, I get asked for all sorts of recommendations for things that I JUST told them are actually suboptimal and, ultimately, ineffective. I tend to work with mostly very high-earning families, who either by choice or circumstance, spend usually not that much time with their children and look at this stuff as another one of their many problems that they can outsource a solution to.

It seems that OP here has developed a tool that can sell well to the parents (you are developing good habits!) while also appealing to the kids (its just a game!), and has high production value. The thing I'd argue most of you are missing is that the educational value of this, IF THEY ARE TO SUCCEED AS A BUSINESS, actually takes a backseat to the perceived value that this has for the parents and the kids. Those are not one and the same... at all.

One commenter here said that they were surprised, as a parent, that YC would fund something like this. I chuckled, because I think something like this is exactly what following "make something people want" leads you towards, especially in contrast to "make something people need." I fully agree that no family needs this, and that frankly they are missing out on a lot thinking that this is a healthy thing to bring into their home. But I promise you that loads, and loads of family with lots of money WANT this.

That is insightful but also depressing. Paraphrasing... 1) the incentives are set up to create more companies like Joon, but 2) the nature of the solution space ensures those companies tend to be parasitic on society rather than helpful. i.e. all solutions in this space will be net negative on society, but the space is too fertile so solutions will grow and find traction. Externality perfect storm.

Do you think there's a way Joon can take their mindshare and pivot their audience towards healthier behaviors without tanking their business?

> all solutions in this space will be net negative on society, but the space is too fertile so solutions will grow and find traction.

To me, its a bit more about being stuck in a sub-optimal steady state. If we take this as an example, "the right", or optimal way to parent someone through these challenges, has become just too difficult. It is too steep a gradient to climb, so sub-optimal alternatives like this get a lot of traction. But then these sub-optimal alternatives actually change the landscape of the domain itself, making climbing the gradient to the optimal solution even tougher. It becomes self-fulfilling, and the optimal solution becomes unreachable. (I once revealed to a parent that during a lesson a child tearfully revealed that she felt that her parents didn't care about what she had to say because they would always be on their phones at dinner instead of talking to her. When I suggested revisiting that culture at home, the parent scoffed at me and ridiculed what I was suggesting, for surely no family could operate like that).

If you ever see a family at a restaurant with a younger child glued to a screen, you instinctively recognize the effect I'm talking about. Surely not getting your toddler glued to a screen as you are out in the world is the right way to raise them. But it is hard. And, the fact is, you know there exists something there that can instantly get them to behave. So you gravitate towards it -- perhaps initially, JUST THIS ONE TIME. But of course now, it gets much harder not to do this again. And we're off to the races.

If I can allow myself to get on a soapbox for a moment, I think the fake news phenomenon illustrates this so well. Never, in the history of humanity, has it been so easy to learn/know things. Yet it seems that at the same time, never have so many humans been certain of their completely false beliefs. At some point, you need to recognize that really the issue we have is one of demand, and sadly for us I don't think we really demand the things that we really need a whole lot of the time. This goes with these parenting apps, gyms, news, etc. Tech is just devilishly efficient at a lot of things, so I think we notice it more readily there. steps off soapbox

Maybe there are just some things that can't be fixed in this world with the tool of venture capital. And if so, childcare and education are definitely good candidates.

In response to the general sentiment of comments here:

In an ideal world, there would be no need for Joon.

Parents would be having meaningful and deep conversations with their children. They'd be spending a lot of time building up their kids’ intrinsic sense of responsibility. They'd be consistently spending quality time with their children, forming a deeper relationship with them, built on trust, mutual respect and love.

However, after talking to so many parents, many of them are trying to "survive" first, before they can "thrive." They're working full-time jobs. They experience constant guilt that they aren't doing good enough. They read articles everyday about parenting, but struggle to implement what they're learning. They watch their kids addicted to their screens, playing games and watching TikToks, but they feel powerless to manage it.

And we are conscious of the harms technology can have on kids. From the get-go we’ve been working with pediatricians + child psychologists to hopefully eliminate these externalities.

We're not trying to replace effective parenting. We're trying to be a better choice than the current options -- TikTok, Youtube, Roblox/Minecraft/any pure game -- that their kids are spending hours on every day. We're trying to make parents' lives easier so that they can go from "surviving" to "thriving."

We appreciate everybody taking the time to read our post and comment here.

> However, after talking to so many parents, many of them are trying to "survive" first, before they can "thrive." They're working full-time jobs. They experience constant guilt that they aren't doing good enough. They read articles everyday about parenting, but struggle to implement what they're learning. They watch their kids addicted to their screens, playing games and watching TikToks, but they feel powerless to manage it.

But these are all issues with parents, not with kids. Why not make a gamification app for parents to help them parent better? I think someone else suggested an app that shut off the parents phones for a period of time. Or an app where parents and kids do chores together?

And realistically kids are only doing 15min of chores a day. They make their bed, throw their dirty clothes in the hamper, put away their toys and they’re usually done. Maybe a chore in the yard too. And the rest of the time this virtual pet is just eating up screen/brain time just like any of the other screen time apps you mentioned. So it’s not reducing screen time, is it?

Every device already has a screen time limit and parental controls to limit time and content as needed.

Like you said: “In an ideal world, there would be no need for Joon.”

So why shoot so low? Why not aim high and create a better world where apps like Joon don’t need to exist? That might mean addressing the cause of the problem, rather than masking the symptoms.

Put another way, you're trying to build a "lesser evil" to draw children away from greater harms.

What if you took another tack? Instead of building a habit RPG for children, build it for the parents, and make the quests small things they can do each day to build connection with their children. I guarantee you: if the children are glued to their screens, then so are their parents.

It can even be chore-oriented, in that chores should be done together with children. I'd recommend maybe starting communication-oriented or affection-oriented though.

Since time is the primary thing parents lack, let your value prop be ways to save them time, whether that be by clever hacks or by helping them organize fitting these activities into their lives.

Agreed - even earning pretty OK £, both parents working 5 days a week it's hard. If a 3 day working week was normal then this would be a lot easier.

I am torn, my kid loves playing on the computer (any screen) more than he does his doing chores, and combining these would be great, but the gamification of my parental responsibility does not sit well. I really appreciate your work and effort but chore > reward is not my goal or method.

What if the game itself has more depth (learning for example) while remaining as engaging? Simple dopamine triggers they have enough.

Totally hear your point! Chore > reward is not our long term goal either. I think you actually nailed it that our longer-term goal is to add more depth (i.e. integrating books, math problems, other learning resources, etc.) into the platform to wean off of just chores. This is just our MVP state right now where we had launched a small solution that parents have been expressing a need for.

Weaning off chores but adding more and more to the platorm feels ominous, dystopian even.

The end goal should be to wean off of Joon, not suck more and more of external meaningful actions in.

I understand though that the business incentive and the parenting incentive are hard to align in this case.

Try Khan Academy Kids app.

Yet another product that aims to insert itself into the family relationship between the people, where no third party has even been needed.

Like most mobile games, it conditions the users to behave according to its reward loop. The description above talks about retention. The screenshots show a few UX patterns to increase engagement, both with children and parents.

As an engineer, I see a market for this app. As a father, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. A board and the stickies can do a job.

My wife works as a language teacher and I noticed a big difference when she started doing an adventure game like this with one of her young boy students. The kid went from accidentally turning off his web cam a lot, pretending audio isn't working, not looking at the video call at all, etc. to actually being engaged and wanting to answer the next question to earn more points he could then spend on equipment to defeat the next "monster" in the game. Be they robots or man eating plants or whatever and then win the treasure at the end. She would just draw the monsters and the treasure and the equipment in colored marker in a notebook she showed the student each step, but it was still very motivating to him. Seems like this app takes a lot of the work out of the parent/teacher side.

> We’ve been hearing about kids who are asking their parents for more tasks at home (whether it’s chores or family activities) every day so they can play Joon, so it feels like we are on the right track.

As a parent ... this might be the right track for you the game creator, but it is not the right track for the kids.

Totally hear your perspective. Having kids beg for chores is not what we are hoping to achieve in the long-term. Our broader goal is to help encourage kids to learn positive habits like making their bed, reading every day, etc. Hopefully we can use this tool to help the parent-child relationship work together towards this goal rather than have it just be a dopamine hit for kids and a task tracker for the parents.

is it a dopaminne hit for kids as it stands?

I really have mixed feelings about this, tending to "not so good". Gaming chores tends to be a real problem. Ideally, kids need to do chores, homework and self-care not for a reward but because they just need to be done. I can quickly see this being a problem in the future where unless the "reward" exists, there is no motivation to do the "work".

I'm unsure of the parent feedback on this as well. As a parent, I do chores with my kids. As an example - I help them clean-up their rooms and they help with clean-up of the house in general. I still read to them and expect them to read on their own.

My view is probably jaded since I work remotely full-time. So there may definitely be a space where this is regarded as something parents would pay for.

> Joon has 3 pricing tiers: Monthly, Quarterly, and Annually and each come with a 7 to 14 day free trial.

How much? Why can’t companies just explicitly say the price?

Shoot I didnt see this and replied to other comment about this, so apologies! We just launched subscriptions last week but we are still price testing different price points. Right now one of the most common price point that we are offering is $7.99 per month, $16.99 quarterly and $49.99 annually. Once we solidify the price, we'll absolutely update the FAQ and make pricing more transparent on the site since totally agree with you that it needs to be very transparent.

In your FAQ you have an entry “How much does June cost?” which uses a lot of words to avoid answering what it costs.

We just launched subscriptions last week but we are still price testing different price points. Right now one of the most common price point that we are offering is $7.99 per month, $16.99 quarterly and $49.99 annually. Once we solidify the price, we'll absolutely update the FAQ and make pricing more transparent on the site since totally agree with you that it needs to be very transparent.

Lots of negative feedback here. While I don't have kids, I'd imagine if I introduced this app to my nephews they would just try it once or twice and forget about it because many other apps are more fun.

On another note, I would also suggest OP to take the feedback received with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, your job is to find people who love your app. You're not going to convince every parent/child and that's okay while you're building out your niche.

For kids always playing on their phones, this might be good. For others maybe they don't need this. // May I suggest as a buyer of many games for kids, that your pricing model means an instant and permanant NO from my household. Signing up for stuff takes effort and memory, not getting to own what I paid for sucks. $50 a year (more than that price in AU) is crazy. I can buy 10 good kids games for that. Another reason: pricing model requires continual engagement, which means lots of 'rewards'and flashy lights and emotional triggers - no thanks.

> the earliest incarnation of the software was a prototype Kevin wrote while in college, to motivate himself to do things like get enough sleep.

Did this work? Is Kevin still getting enough sleep nowadays?

You must be aware of all of the products that have attempted this solution to this problem. why is your attempt going to be more successful?

Honestly I don't mind the idea, the product seems good and interesting enough to catch the attention of kids. I mean, if there was an 18-34 version I'd download it immediately.

Oh very interesting - novel twist that I'm excited about for my kids.

How is this compare to ChoreMonster? They were hot for a while and don't hear about them anymore.

Good question - ChoreMonster actually got acquihired in 2018 by Verizon and then immediately shut down. We are quite bit different though, with choremonster parents would assign tasks and then kids would complete them for either small game rewards (like monster farts) or extrinsic rewards like more screen time. We try to build a full game experience (like pokemon) as the motivator but are also trying to lean away from just the parent assigning kids chores and help children feel empowered to create / select their own habits or hobbies that they would like to do!

Awful idea, which I'd downvote if I had enough karma on YC. Kids have fantastic imagination, doing the "rendering" for them is always going to set them back. The best tech oriented ways to learn kids to clean after themselves is give them toys which need to be replenished.

Yes, that's what I love with my son. He doesn't need any device to, realistically, be a dragon, or a dinosaur. Granted, a t-shirt with a dinosaur illustration can help.

FYI you can’t downvote submissions or direct replies only comments

That's a totally fair point! We've seen technology help expand kids imagination, and we're hoping to do the same.

I don't want to hate on this game but I think there's a bad trend amongst all YC game investments.

How do they not realise that production values are important for games? Pretty much all YC funded games don't have good art direction. In 99.9% of cases if the game is ugly it's dead on arrival. So many of these games are just YC throwing away $500k. For less than the investment in one game they could hire a few games industry people to give advice on the games. There's so many game art students that graduate every year without being able to get jobs that could make these games look decent.

Off the top of my head MZ was YCs best game investment. Game of War lost players to alternative games with higher production values. Along with other issues the company lost most of its value when it was sold.

Looking at this game these are some issues IMO:

-Dragon animation speed does not match movement speed. This makes it seem like the dragon is not actually walking along. It also doesn't face the direction you're moving. I get this is probably to reduce the amount of sprites needed but with the dragon also not having an animation that matches its movement speed it makes it even more jarring.

-Perspective and art style are all over the place. The "quests" sign and chest next to it are clearly created at a different camera angle to the houses, they are also a completely different art style. Inside you can see the walls from all directions, this is used in action games because something could be on that wall, if there's no action elements inside then using regular style walls would help.

-Lighting is all over the place, even on the same object. In the town section the building in the bottom left (visible at 0.33 in the video) has a dark back suggesting that it is lit from towards the camera, it casts a shadow on the ground as though the light is from the opposite side. On that building there's also no shadow from the chimney. Either everything should cast shadows or nothing should. None of the small props and trees cast shadows.

-The dragon sprite is cell shaded but the backgrounds are not. This can work if done well but because there's a bunch of different styles it can't make the dragon stand out anyway.

-Lots of things(but not all) have a white glow/outline. Is this to show what is interactive? Can these be clicked on? The door to a building seems like enough. Also the buildings have shadows that ground them in the scene but then a white glow is put over them to make them stand out.

Reading the reviews it seems like lots of parents are enthusiastic about the product but I think you need to be careful when they say their kids "love" the product. I've seen this with literally every educational game or gamification system I've ever interacted with. Kids love the game instead of school but would never stop playing their regular favourite game for it.

I think it's disturbing that the website has better production values than the game. Feels very targeted to parents not kids. It seems like they think kids wont notice a low quality game when the founders literally give examples of games they played as kids that have high production values.

This is super helpful feedback and totally agree. We just started working with a great studio for art / animations (before, it was a mix of freelancers and asset packs we could find, as we were mainly bootstrapping). The production value should become much higher really soon.

> Use gamification to keep your child on track. Your child chooses a virtual pet (called a Doter) to feed, wash, and grow. When they complete the real-life activities assigned to them, their Doter grows and levels-up in the game helping your child visualize their own progress.

Shouldn't that be dotee? One who is doted upon. By a doter.

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.

Would you rather delegate your child’s attention to YouTube/Reddit/Instagram, which will inevitably happen the moment they get their own devices?

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.

> One of the hardest parts of parenting (and of growing up!) is getting kids to do things that they don’t enjoy.

This sounds like "eat your wheaties", and I think this is a faulty premise / self fulfilling prophesy / you're asking the wrong question. To echo some of the other comments on this thread, chores should not be viewed as "eat your wheaties", but rather are an opportunity for meaningful connection and a way for child to bond with family and community.

I'd go even further and say children given the right environment and at the right age want to do chores. Chores can and should be enjoyable and meaningful. For evidence, take a look into the Montessori method and in particular Montessori Practical life. I think you'll find the following:

- A wealth of anecdotal examples of children doing chores on their own for fulfillment and to demonstrate their independence. (No daddy, let me do it myself!)

- Children want to do chores because that's what they see their parents doing, and also because they have a drive towards their own independence. (corollary: the same goes for smartphones and other addictions)

- Where this goes wrong is when parents either help too much (not giving the child opportunities), or when parents overcriticize (not giving the child space to learn). The root problem is not one of incentives, but of either miscommunication, lack of communication, or too-high or too-low expectations.

A caveat here: Montessori Practical Life is oriented towards 3-6 year olds. Based on your origin story if you're thinking about the age where you were playing video games, you were probably older than 6, and maybe that's the age group you're targetting.

Given what I see as the root causes of chore distaste though, I don't feel that incentivizing things via a video game will solve the problem even for older children--I predict dependency on Joon and habits going away as soon as that crutch is removed.

But maybe I and others are being too negative. Maybe there's a path to bootstrapping from Joon to more meaningful connection and weaning off of the game? Given that you have the will and energy to throw at the problem, maybe you can discover a solution to this weaning problem. Maybe you can discover a path to bootstrap from Joon to meaningful child-family and child-community connection.

Since you have energy and interest, here's some exposure to my viewpoint sources, in the interests of converting you to what I see as a healthier worldview, so that as you spread your worldview it's tempered with mine. I'd recommend you look at a few of the following resources:

- Talk to your local Montessori community. Find an AMI-certified school and talk to the staff about Montessori Practical Life, and how it compares to or might relate to Joon.

- Ask them to refer you to the article "Stop Saying Good Job To Your Kids (and what to say instead)". I'm finding a few articles with that title but can't find the particular one that I'm thinking of. Your Montessori guides will know.

- Read "Taking Charge": https://smile.amazon.com/Taking-Charge-Caring-Discipline-Sch... . Not Montessori, but a similar vein, and I feel like it tries to tackle the same problem you're tackling--building up "good" behaviors. Goes at it more from a Maslow's hierarchy of needs perspective, but I think all these life philosophies are in the same family, and a healthier counterpoint than the "Eat your wheaties" philosophy I see reflected in your post.

---

Tangentially, I find the "eat your wheaties" mentality distasteful even for adults, but maybe this is just a quirk of my own psychology. Any time I perceive something as "I should do this because it's good for me" rather than "I do this because I enjoy it", I just fall into a procrastination loop. I literally lack the ability to take the "force myself through" path, and in the long term this has been a blessing. To "correct" my habits (I did, like you, grow up also playing many thousands of hours of video games, and I didn't exercise enough and tended to stay up late to boot), I've always had to find intrinsic enjoyment in my new habits, whether that be cleaning, eating more vegetables, getting more exercise, etc. In the end I've made the happy discovery that my tastes are very malleable, and this is the best tool in my belt for self-shaping.

An informal support for my way of doing things being more widely applicable: there seems to be a lot of research floating around supporting that procrastination is due to negative emotional associations.

In that light, it seems what Joon does is try to paper over that negative emotional association by providing a counterbalancing positive emotional association. I'd imagine where you'll see success here is incidentally--Joon might overcome initial resistance and sometimes if a person does the chore enough the original negative association might fade towards neutral, at which point the bootstrapping problem is half-solved. I'd imagine this doesn't happen in all or even a majority of cases though.

---

To draw another analogy-- because of how you frame chores, I have a hard time imagining Joon being able to frame chores as anything greater than grinding mobs for XP. Grinding mobs is a boring chore, but XP is rewarding, so that makes grinding mobs fun, right?? Hecka no! XP is just a number on a screen, and grinding mobs is boring as all heck.

No, I play RPGs for challeging dungeons and boss fights and hard mode. Bosses do drop more XP, but XP and loot are not what make boss fights fun. Boss fights are enjoyable for the intrinsic challenge and the satisfaction of growing to meet that challenge. In Joon, what would constitute a boss fight? And how would you motivate it?

More generally, where in Joon is the feeling of personal skill progression? In the best games (and in life), this goes deeper than just my on-screen character gaining skills-- I personally get better at the game, and can feel it. What is the analogous feeling in Joon? Given your focus, I'd imagine this would have to be some form of getting better and faster at the chores themselves and eager to further test my skills in real life.

This feels like the kind of app created by people who don't have kids.

At first glance it reminded me of Jira Junior For Kids :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shZslfbaS0

It's not quite that after further investigation and perhaps might seem actually workable with the right kids and mindset.

As a parent, I can’t believe this got funded by YC.

> We started working on this idea when, shortly after college, the three of us had a conversation about our childhoods

I think actually being a parent is a pretty important qualifier before trying to make an app that involves the parent/child relationship.

So many things unsettling about this idea that I think would have been shot down by founders with kids.

Sorry, but either get a founder/CEO that’s a parent or pivot to a market that you understand at a deep level.

I definitely see where you're coming from!

We think to build this we need passion and perspective. We're extremely passionate about this space. As you mentioned, being parents would have definitely helped us deepen our perspective. While it's no replacement to being an actual parent, we try to gain this perspective in the best ways we can (we've spoken with 100+ parents, continuously seek advising from pediatricians, occupational therapists, and experts).

The best products are built to address your own needs.

Kids don’t want to have fun doing chores, chores aren’t fun. Kids want to feel included, important and respected.

The fact that you (the giant, highly-intelligent human that keeps them alive) wants their help is the most important thing and makes them feel like they have a valuable place in the family. The chore isn’t the thing that matters, it’s the parent looking their child in the eye and respectfully treating them as an equal that matters. And once you have established that mutual respect, getting chores done is easy and mutually beneficial.

So yeah you can gamify chores, but then that comes at the expense of one of the great ways to build a parent/child relationship: coming to a common, respectful understanding of what it means to be part of the same household.

I could go on and on about this idea. But that’s why I think it’s so important to have an exec in your business that is living and breathing this parent/child relationship because you can’t interview 100 parents before each important decision.

I appreciate the ambition, but 3 non-parents trying to make an app for parents is a lot like trying to write a travel guide about a country you’ve never been to. It’s possible, but certainly way harder.

A parent isn't necessarily a good parent, and non-parents won't necessarily bad parents. The creators can also work with parents and parenting specialists, and read parenting books, something which "real" parents often never do.

I would like to see your arguments about the unsettling things, instead of attacking the founders themselves. I too believe there might be some bad ideas about this app, though it seems useful for someone like me who'd like to improve his habits.

> I would like to see your arguments about the unsettling things, instead of attacking the founders themselves.

I’m not attacking the founders. Just providing feedback that the app itself as well as their backstory doesn’t sit well with me (for reasons mentioned above). You shouldn’t be in the startup business if you think direct feedback is an attack. FYI, I’m a parent with 3 kids in their target demographic.

Here’s a quick hit list of issues:

* Replacing cooperation with gamification

* Moving an important piece of parent/child communication to a generic digital interface

* Trying to build a long-term habit (chores) with a short-term goal (making a pet not go to sleep). What happens when the kids friends say that digital pets are lame and FPS or RTS games are cool? How do you motivate the kid to do chores now? My kids are into games for a few months at most on average, best case scenario is off and on for a couple years at most. They grow up and they’re interests change.

* Kids learning / activities are highly personal and a lot of successful ones start with a similar backstory: “I built X for my own kids and they loved it so much I built a business out of it.” There’s no way as a parent of 13 years I’m listening to 3 college kids about what they think is best for my kid. Any interview with a Parenting blog/magazine is almost DOA, unless they really want to play up the Silicon Valley trope of being able to out-think any problem, even one you’ve never experienced directly. Not sure how far that’ll fly though. But if I have two apps and one is built by young, parentless techies and another by some untechie parents, I’m naturally going to give the parents the edge when it comes to introducing something to my young kids.

Anyway, all the critiques are starting to get massively downvoted, so I’ll leave it there, but I could continue on although I’m not sure it would do much good.

As others said, maybe the goal is to make an app enough parents want and I’m just a parent that would never want this app.

I appreciate you taking the time to write those issues. Indeed they were what I was looking for.

I upvoted because I think those are good critiques, and some gave me a new perspective on the matter.

TL-DR: Habitica + Tamagochi for kids

With great parenting apps like these, who needs parents? /s

Ever seen parents who just sit their toddlers in front of youtube kids and tiktok all day? atleast this has a positive influence on them

Soda… At least it’s not lead paint!

Saying something else is worse doesn’t make your thing good, or even OK. It has to stand on it’s own merits.

And the debate is about what kind of influence this app would have on children, parents and their relationship. Way too early to tell if it’s a “positive influence”.

Of the several dozen families I’ve seen raise children in various communities, children not doing chores has always been the symptom of other parenting / respect / behavioral issues. It’s not like everything is all roses except the kid complains about chores. There’s always something deeper going on in my experience.

This concept is a band-aid at best as it doesn’t attempt to address any of the deeper issues that might be causing kids to not do their chores, or the issues of parents not wanting to (or not being able to) parent effectively.

Still, I agree you can make a ton of money selling band-aids.

This looks like satire from the "Silicon Valley" show, tbh.

Launch HN: Joon (YC W22) – A mobile game that teaches kids to build good habits