[iveaves]

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.

[awb]

> 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.

[NAR8789]

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.

[stuaxo]

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.