OurChild - Connecting for Parent-led Child Care

There are many stay at home moms and dads around the world. Often they are alone taking care of their children most of the day and doing house chores at the same time, not giving the necessary amount of time and energy to support their child development. Many are lacking enough ideas on what to do with their children to reach their full potential.

OurChild is a social network that helps stay-at-home parents joining to create parent-led child care groups. Instead of being alone raising their children, parents can join a few days or all days in the week to do common activities to promote their child development.

OurChild not only join parents, but also offer tutorials for meaningful activities based on brain research, to help parents creating a rich environment for their children.

There are about 30% of stay-at-home parents in western societies and even more in other cultures, most of them moms. Being a stay-at-home parent its not an easy decision. Mothers experience social isolation and have higher levels of sadness and anger. Guilty and anxious moms are less available to create meaningful moments with their children.

Also, alone it is not easy for parents to have the resources and ideas to create meaningful and various activities for children, not to mention that not all parents have the same knowledge background. Some parents know what kind of activities are important for their kids' cognitive, motor and language development but many others without knowing put their babies and preschoolers in passive situations that are thought to be stimulating, like computers and TV. Even when knowing what to do, many times the resources, time and energy are limited, which hinders the capacity to implement diversified activities with children.

The population we are targeting are stay-at-home parents, particularly mothers, and their babies and children up to 5 years old. Many of these parents do not know others in the same situation and many would like to have a group they could join once a week, every other day on even everyday to share moments together to support their child development, while reducing the feeling of being alone and frustration.

Also, we will work to tackle the immense inequality in the access to good opportunities for child development. Kids living with well informed parents with a good social support and financial resources are in advantage, while kids staying with overloaded mothers lacking money and social support will have less opportunities during the most important period of their lives for brain development. 

Ourchild is a social network that will help stay-at-home parents, particularly mothers, joining to create parent-led child care groups. Our solution works in two domains:

1. Joining parents. Parents sign in to the platform and define their location and set their preferences and values considering child care and education. There will be 2 options: (1) based on location and on the values and preferences, the platform will suggest other parents with whom they may establish an initial contact to start a new group; starting a new group demands creating rules for the group functioning (2) parents may join existing groups, if they are open to new parents and if the newly arrived parents consent to adjust themselves to the rules of that existing group.

2. Activities tutorials. The platform will suggest age-appropriate activities based on brain research, to promote healthy child development. When parents join together, they should always make activities for their children with developmental and educational value.

There are many social networks aiming to sharing thoughts and contents, for dating, for professional connections, etc. However, currently there is no social network designed to join stay-at-home parents with the objective of joining together to help supporting their child development, at the same time they are supporting each-other and receiving suggestions of age-appropriate activities based on brain research. Having this technology available for millions can have a huge impact on the development of children for the next generations.

At the moment our technology is just this innovative idea. We are trying to develop the first prototype. Our core technology will be social network - we aim to develop an algorithm to join people first based on location or distance. We believe it's better to join people in their communities. Second, we will try to refine our algorithm to join people based on their values and preferences, as well as the age of their children. 

We know that stay-at-home parents are suffering. If we search for the subject in google we find several reports of depression,anxiety, alienation, and isolation. We also know that from our experience with relatives and friends - they all report the same feeling of missing being with others in the same situation. When we launch the app, we expect to reach at least 1M of users in the first 2 years. We also expect to improve the application with the feedback from users. We believe that we can also promote indirect outcomes, such as promote natality, if we are able to successfully decrease the feeling of being isolated.

At the moment we did not launch the application yet, as we are developing the prototype. We expect to reach 1M children in the first 2 years and to escalate for many more after 5 years.

This is a solution that will only work if it reaches millions of people. It is the only way to assure that in each community there are enough people to form a parent-led child care group. Our goal is to have as many people as possible using the OurChild model for child care.

At the moment we need technical human resources to help us build a secure application. We also need advice on legal issues, marketing and definition of which countries we should focus on. If we receive a positive feedback on the idea, we will start a pilot in Portugal to analyze the impact. The positive thing about this idea is that there is no similar social network.

First we are looking to get feedback and that is why we are making this application for MIT solve. We believe it is a good idea, but we only start it if we get positive feedback. The cost for start something like this is high and we need to be sure that will get enough support. One major barrier is lack of technological partner to develop the platform. We are planning to partnering with existing companies working on social networks or to receive suggestions from the MIT Solve. For the brain-based activities we will use our connection with research centers.

At the moment its just Nuno and Susana. Nuno is a psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist and Susana is a clinical and educational psychologist with lot of experience working with children and their parents. At the moment Susana is working part-time and taking care of a 2 years old girl. We are looking to include a computer specialist or engineer to help us build the application as soon as possible and we have already started some contacts.

Nuno is a professor and researcher at a research center for rehabilitation. Background is in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Susana is a psychologist with experience working with children and their families.

Initial piloting will have the collaboration of the Center for Rehabilitation Research at the School of Health of the Polytechnic of Porto, that will help with the science behind the activities for children. We are still looking for a technology partner for the project.

We are looking for financing the development of the product and early testing. OurChild will have a free version based on advertising just for connecting parents and a paid version for the brain-based activities suggestion for child development module. However, we are open to consider a non-profit model for low income countries, without any payments involved.

Financial sustainability will be based on advertising and if necessary on a paid version for the brain-based activities suggestion for child development module.

I'm applying to Solve because it is the only way I see to implement our idea in a near future. We expect MIT Solve to validate our idea and market potential. We need mentorship and strategic advice from Solve and MIT networks and of course some funding for the platform development.

Tech companies with experience in social networks, both on development and legal issues. We have the necessary connections for the science-based component of the project.

NA

NA

NA