ParentingIn - Family Development Platform and app

Parents are their child’s first teacher, yet many children are entering kindergarten without being emotionally, socially, cognitively, or physically ready. Many parents do not understand early childhood education is birth to five. This crucial time is being discounted at the expense of the child.

Our solution is an app & platform. A platform for checklists and expert resources. An app where parents and children visualize each milestone and practice.  For example, the app will show a child putting on a jacket and then parent and child can practice and complete.  And as parent and child practice and complete, the milestone is tracked and points are given.

Children learn from hands-on teaching and experiences. It’s amazing when you see the joy on a child’s face when they put on their jacket. Building a child’s self-esteem and emotional and social skills will give them a chance to excel throughout their educational years. 

Parents are their child’s first teacher, yet many parents are failing regarding their child’s early childhood education. Many parents do not understand early childhood education is birth to five.

We have been pouring money into public education for years, and nothing has changed. “Kids don’t show up to our schools “at risk” as soon as they turn 4 or 5 years of age. At-risk kids begins at birth.” (Albuquerque Journal - Steven Carrillo).

Parents need to know what developmental milestones their child should be attaining birth to five, which includes self-help skills, manners, values, character, and caring. The list goes on and on, and it is not all about academics. Social and emotional development are keys to the overall maturity and confidence a child gains at a very young age.

Society has grown accustomed to putting the burden of early childhood education on others instead of the parents. Our solution is to help the parents so they can be their child’s first teacher and empower them to not only help their child, but grow themselves.

We feel that our family game and website will give the parent and child a place to visualize, practice, and achieve each developmental milestone.

We are serving all families with children up to five years of age. Moreover, we are serving those that support families such as pediatricians, teachers, social workers by giving them the platform to share their valuable information to the parents.

Our team is very active with the local ChildCare Association, National Childcare Association, CYFD, Head start, Early Childhood Alliance and other groups to ensure that parents receive as many resources as possible to help them and their child during this crucial time.

There are many resources available online, but searching for these can be overwhelming and unproductive.  Our solution will give parents direct access to links that provide developmental milestones and self-help skills, separated by age group.

Lack of knowledge and time are significant reasons that parents are not able to help their children reach the developmental milestones needed for them to be ready when they enter the K-12 school system.

Our solution will make it quick and easy for a parent to get the resources and help they need to ensure that their child develops cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically.

Our hope is to reach all families regarding the importance of early childhood education.

Our solution is two-fold.  One is a website for parents where they can go to for help, advice and resources in raising and developing their child.

The website is a two-sided platform where early childhood education experts share their knowledge and expertise.  This can include videos, podcasts, checklists, lessons learned and more. 

Developmental checklists, separated by age group, will be displayed.  If a parent and child have trouble achieving a milestone, our platform with give them the help and guidance they need.

The second part of our solution is an app where milestones can be learned.  Parents and their child will see each milestone demonstrated, for example, putting on a jacket. They practice together and the child will learn vocabulary words and command words to help them with putting the jacket on. When a child can put on his own jacket or snap his own pants, the child will glow with pride doing it on his own. Building self esteem is crucial.

Our app will include a button for taking a video or photo of the child when they have achieved a milestone. Like a scrap book or photo album, the app will store each milestone success. Parents can select to use the visuals of their own children for other siblings versus the visuals that are in the app.

To gain adoption, the app will be set up as more of a game that a parent and child can play.  They will be able to pick milestones by age.  The parent and child will watch the milestone and hear verbal instructions.  They watch, they practice, they achieve milestone.  Points will be given for practice and completion.  Kind of similar to the games children play where they move up as they reach certain points.  But, the game will be shared between parent and child, not something that the child does alone.

“Hands on learning” has been a catch phrase for years in early childhood education and even today with all of this technology it must not be lost. It is the only way that the majority of young children/people learn.  Our app provides this hands-on learning.

Our solution is focused on assuring that children learn self-help skills, verbal skills, physical, social and emotional skills as well as problem solving skills. It has to be a joint effort between parent and child. Our solution provides this environment.

We have been pouring money into public education for years, and nothing has changed. 

There has not been one site focused on helping parents with their child during years birth to five.  Sure, they can do Google searches or read social media feeds. Or they can let the child struggle and hope that once they reach kindergarten others will start teaching them what they need to know.

It is imperative that there are 1) milestones that are clearly defined and trackable 2) data that follows a child so lessons can be learned about what is working or not 3) resources for parents to help them if they are having trouble with a certain milestone or any troubles with their children during this timeframe.

The burden cannot just be on the teachers and school system.  The parents have to be engaged in tracking their children's milestones and understanding the importance of the years before they hit kindergarten.

Our solution will provide a website for parents to go to for training, advice and resources. And an app for them to use with their child to visualize and experience crucial milestones.

We feel that making a family game and having a platform where parents have resources to learn and teach their children about developmental milestones is what is needed to see major change. And we believe that achieving these developmental milestones, when supported by parents and families will build confidence and self esteem in the young child.

Teckedin.com is a fully developed 2-sided platform for users and providers. It is hosted on an AWS server.  We would create a new version that has two sides of parents and resources. The categories would change from tech to early childhood categories.  This would be the base to our website.

We have purchased the domain parentingIN.com and created a sample website with our concept.

We envision a coding app that will be used by the parent and the child. For example, Root Robotics offers an educational robot capable of teaching children as young as four years old to code. The Root Coding Robot has two wheels and can operate on tables, floors and countertops as well as other surfaces.

Students can instruct Root to draw, play music, respond to inputs and carry at tasks based on coding languages that go from graphical blocks to full text coding.

Our app would be a little different than Root Robotics in that the coding would be done with parent and child.  So they code to show how a jacket gets put on, or how you wash your face.  They code together, they see the visual and then they practice for real, between parent and child.

Another plus to our solution is that parents may find coding exciting and by doing it with their children, they themselves may enroll in technology or coding classes, thus improving their own skills and job opportunities. This way the entire family benefits from using a technology platform/app.

Technology is very important.  And so is money.  But, giving more money to Public Education Departments or other agencies has not shown results. Our solution is focused on the parents.  Something that has been sorely needed and has been avoided by many parties, for various reasons.

And we will be solely focused on birth through five years of age.

The most important thing that a parent must do is follow through by physically showing and teaching a child so that they really learn. “Hands on learning” has been a catch-phrase for years in early childhood education and even today with all of this technology it must not be lost, as it is the only way that the majority of young children/people learn because it is life experiences, problem solving, figuring things out that really make a  person.

Our website and platform will use technology to bring that visual/physical interaction between parent and child.

With our website, parents will have a one-stop shop to go to for advice, help and resources during their child's birth to 5 years of age. Most parents have smart phones and are already engaging in social media and other websites. Our first step will be to get parents signed up to be our early adopters. And we will get the early childhood education resources onboard so there is value and interest in going to the website.

We will connect with companies like Root Robotics for collaboration and partnering.

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Locally - 30,000 families

Nationwide/Globally - millions of familes

We are serving all parents/families with young children. We need to get all parents/families involved in their child’s early childhood education so that they know what they need to do with their young child everyday to ensure that their young child develops cognitively, socially , emotionally and physically so that they have confidence and good self esteem when they enter the K-12 school system.

The app/platform will give them checklists of development steps their children should be striving for.  And will give them lessons, resources to help and get them involved which (as mentioned earlier) may in turn help them with their own education, growth and success.

Next year - Getting website built.  Get focus groups set up for both sides - parents and early childhood experts. Use feedback to modify website and start getting it shared through social media, childcare associations, pediatricians.

Get app concept developed so will know how much time and cost is needed to make it live.  Look for partners to help us.

Five Years - Our website and app is used by millions of parents and families.  And data shows that children are going into K-12 much better prepared and ready than they are now. 

Barriers for next year:

Cultural/Market: Who will pay - parents or resources?  Will parents use?  Getting traction and seeing data results that it is helping.

Fighting the current status quo which includes parents, public education systems, etc.

Getting past parents or others being offended because they are asked to ensure milestones are being met and participate in their children's early childhood education.

Financial: Getting our website up and in a pilot can be done quickly. We may find additional development we need and additional financial resources we need. The cost of building our coding/visual app is unknown at this time and we may find the cost prohibitive without funding and/or venture capital.

Technical: The resources and partners to help us build this app are are unknown.  And the time to market is unknown.

Barriers for next five years:

Parents are not using the solution and therefore we are not getting any data and children are entering kindergarten without the skills to succeed.

Money is still being given to public education systems and other entities and there are minimal funding opportunities for companies like ourselves to tap into some of these monetary sources.

1) Once platform is built we will need to get user groups set up - one for the parent side and one for the resource provider

2) Start people using and getting feedback and data on what is working and what is not.  Start signing up experts and resources.

3) Get approval from parents to track their children to see how they do in kindergarten, middle school, high school, etc.  

4) Document results showing that this type of platform is seeing results

5) Getting technical help to build the app

6) Using social media to drive usage

Part time - 2

Contractor - 1

Donna and Debby are identical twin sisters. Our parents divorced when we were nine and we have three older sisters.

Donna has an AA in Early Childhood education and has owned a preschool for 25 years. Prior to owning the preschool she worked in early childhood centers. She has been on the board of the NM Childhood Association and continues to work tirelessly on the behalf of children and their families. Her childhood center is a Focus5 certified. 

Debby has been the owner of a technology company for 26 years. 17 years ago, after Donna showed Debby the process she went through each month to complete the USDA food reimbursement claim forms (which were all paper/handwritten),  Debby worked with Donna to develop "FoodbuyingPro".  The database software solution was copyrighted and made into a commercial MS Access database solution.    Although our attempt to get the State of New Mexico to purchase it and make it available to all childcare centers in New Mexico failed, because of political reasons, Donna has used it for 17 years and continues to use it today.  The time she saves doing her menus and reporting is well documented.

Our team has the early childcare knowledge and passion, and the technology side to listen to ideas and problems and make them reality...just like we did 17 years ago.  We hope this time, with the help of the MIT network, we can get our solution out in the mainstream so that it can start helping parents and children.

None at this time.

Our platform will be 2 sides - one side parents and the other the providers/resources. We can charge parents 5.00 per month or give it to them free. We can charge the companies/people that upload content 100.00 a month, for example, for them to showcase their expertise and have a link for parents to reach out to them. Or the platform could be funded by a grant or something similar.

And we can have advertisements running geared towards parents and children.

We haven't decided on the pricing for the app as this will depend on the development costs.  

Debby self-funded technology platform teckedin.com.  To change this platform to be parents/resources would not be a major development task so would self fund this development.

We have also started a godaddy website to get some ideas moving along.

With the help of MIT experts we can determine best way to have income/profitability to help pay for future development, growth of platform.

We can also have advertisement/banner ads for revenue.

Once the business model is decided upon - we can also have advertisement to help with revenue.

Visibility and like-minded individuals that truly want to see change in early childhood development.

Credibility and help getting the solution out in the public for people to start using and giving feedback.

Help with technology needs and business models.

Help families and children nationwide and worldwide

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

"The Moment of Lift" by Melinda Gates gave us a lot of thoughts.

"When kids learn something new, they see they can grow. They lift their sense of self and change their future". We see this also as when parents learn something new, they see they can grow. That is why we want to have an app where parents and children work together to do simple coding or work on development milestones.  And if a single mother or a mother in an abusive situation, we hope this will help her move on for the benefit of herself and children.  We also feel family planning is very important as Melinda Gates talks about in her book.  Our platform could help parents look at why that is so important and how they can stagger their children so they can have the resources and be the best parents they can be.