"Learn With Me" parenting app

The ways in which parents interact and engage with their young children during the first few years of life will have lifelong impacts on a child’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. The “Learn With Me” parenting app aims to connect parents with high-quality practical tools to support their child's brain development delivered through learning modules on an app. After enrollment, each learning module will be tailored to the specific developmental stage and needs of the child. Parents will be incentivized to the complete modules through consumer rewards and coupons. The Learn With Me app would be a sustainable model of information exchange where both parents and commercial supporters benefit.

Parental responsiveness and engagement with young child during the first few years of life will have lifelong impacts on a child’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. With so much responsibility, parents have a lot of questions. The National Parent Survey tells us most parents believe good parenting can be learned, and they wish they had more information about how to be a better parent and how to use more positive parenting strategies (Zero to Three, 2016). More specifically, we know that this deficit in knowledge disproportionately affects parents of low-socioeconomic backgrounds. Babies born into low-income households score lower on cognitive development tests than their more affluent peers. This disparity exists as early as nine months of age, and triples by the age of two. When entering kindergarten, less than half of children growing up in families that are low income are prepared for the learning they will do in school compared to 75% of children raised in high income families. A gap in parental knowledge can lead to a gap in skills, and thus early investment is key. With access and incentive to good information, parents can be empowered to make an impact now on their child’s later outcomes.

The "Learn With Me" app would be free and accessible for all parents; however, it would be designed specifically for the needs of parents from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. Parents of all backgrounds report that they most often turn to family members, religious leaders, and healthcare providers for information about their baby's development. However, a growing number of Millennial and GenX parents report they would like more reliable information accessible online. 

There are a considerable amount of parenting websites and applications which already exist. Many focus on the physical development during pregnancy, and early milestones of infancy and early childhood (e.g. BabyCenter; The Bump; Text4Baby; Zero to Three). Most encompass a wide array of topics, including everything from feeding recommendations, to safe sleeping tips, to car safety, to weight and growth checks. Some go on to directly address a parent's role in their child's cognitive and socioemotional development, however, none address the needs of parents of underserved communities specifically. Importantly as well, none provide incentivize to consume the information beyond a parent's own interest in such topics.

Parenting apps already exists in varying forms, however, we want to encourage those parents most in need of reliable and practical information to tune-in early and often. Tailoring information in the learning modules to a child’s specific age as she grows will make implementing key strategies easier. Tying the completion of the modules to ready-to-use tangible rewards can help make a child's distant developmental milestones something parents will think about at the present time when they have the most impact. To increase access and inclusiveness, the app would be available in Spanish as well. Extra learning components to address the needs of bilingual families would be included in this version. Lastly, marketers can gain access to consumers directly. The "Learn With Me" app would be a sustainable model of information exchange where both parents and supporters benefit

In economics there exists a body of literature that studies time-inconsistencies in decision-making. This body of work compares differences in something coined "present-biased" choices and "future-biased" choices. We find that individuals tend to make present-biased choices in a variety of contexts, for example, people do not save enough for retirement, or they eat and drink too much despite knowing it is not advantageous for long-term health. This also translates to the amount of time and effort parents feel they need to invest in their infants to impact later outcomes. It can be understood that people are generally distracted away from long-term goals by short-term impulses. For parents, it may be difficult to focus on the reading skills your 5-year-old will need before she enters school when your biggest problem know is having trouble finding a breastfeeding schedule that works. But we know building strong and secure attachments between parents and infants through intimate shared interactions is what builds the foundation for future development.