r/ParentingTech

Hi r/ParentingTech!

I’m an indie developer and recently launched StarKid, a family chore/allowance app I built specifically to make managing chores a little more engaging for kids.

The basic idea is to turn everyday chores into tasks. Kids complete tasks, earn stars, and can work toward wishes/rewards. Parents can create and assign quests and keep track of progress.

I’m trying to build something that actually works for families rather than just adding gamification for the sake of it. I also noticed that the design and feel of many apps were missing.

A few things I’d love opinions on:

• Does this approach actually solve a problem for parents?
• Is the gamification useful or just unnecessary?
• What features would you expect from a good chore/allowance app?
• What would make you trust an app like this with your family?

I built the app myself and am still very early, so I’m genuinely looking for criticism and ideas rather than just promotion.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starkid.mobile&pcampaignid=web_share

Thanks! I'd love to hear what you think.

I’m an engineer turned product manager, and I’ve always loved two things a little more than necessary: education and games.

For a long time, I wanted to put those interests and the skills I’d picked up building technology, towards something useful for children. That became much more tangible once my niece reached the age where the iPad became a regular part of her world.

I’m not anti-iPad. Quite the opposite. It is an incredible piece of technology to put in the hands of a six-year-old. I just kept thinking it could ask more of her.

That thought took me back to Dora the Explorer.

Growing up, we’d watch Dora ask us a question and then stare silently at the screen for a painfully long time while we yelled the answer at the TV. Obviously, Dora couldn’t hear us. But the idea was clever. The screen was trying to turn us from viewers into participants.

Learning games like Lingokids and ABC Mouse took that much further and made screens genuinely interactive. But most of that interaction still happens within rails someone else designed. Tap here. Drag this. Choose A, B, or C. Collect the reward. Repeat.

That works brilliantly for games. But it doesn’t accommodate the wonderfully messy way a six-year-old wonders about things.

Ask my niece an interesting question and she might draw the answer. She might make up a ridiculous story. She might photograph something she noticed around the house, make a sound, explain an idea, or give you an answer you never anticipated.

I started wondering if I could build for that.

Could the iPad provide the spark and just enough structure to get a child started, while leaving the interesting part to them?

That question became Taroo.

The first versions were experiments around this idea. Then came the uncomfortable question every builder eventually has to answer: does this actually work for anyone other than me?

So I spent months talking to parents and educators. I sat through hours of enrichment classes at a school for gifted kids, which was basically the X-Mansion for 8-year-olds. I watched how teachers prompted children, when kids became absorbed in something, when they needed more structure, and when something I thought was clever bored them almost immediately. And very importantly, I saw how their eyes lit up when they screamed “look what I made” in class.

These insights shaped the Taroo we have today, and I’m genuinely proud of where we’ve reached.

Taroo is a world of short creative quests for kids 6 to 10. In Pass the Pen, a child might get the beginning of a strange story and decide where it goes next. Doodle Master might give them the start of a picture and ask them to turn it into anything they imagine. Rhythm Pad lets them experiment with sounds and put together their own little beat. Snap Trail might ask them to put the iPad down, hunt for something triangular in the real world, photograph it, and tell Taroo what they found.

Their creations stick around too, so over time Taroo becomes a little record of the things they have imagined and made. Parents get a window into that world without needing to hover over every activity.

Taroo is now live on iOS and Android.

There is still plenty I want to improve. But this no longer feels like the little experiment I started with. I’m proud to put it in front of parents, and particularly proud when I see a kid become attached to something they made themselves.

If you have a 6 to 10-year-old in your life, I’d love for you to try Taroo with them. More than anything, I’d love the unfiltered feedback: what they immediately understand, what they ignore, what they keep coming back to, where they get stuck, and what they wish they could do that I haven’t thought of yet.

I’ve spent enough time with Taroo that I’m no longer capable of seeing it like a new user.

So please, tear it apart.

I originally built Bedtime Buddy for my boys, 3 and 6. They loved it enough that "one more story" became a nightly negotiation, so I kept building until it was something I could share with other families.

The idea is simple: your child is the star of their own story, in the worlds they're already obsessed with. Their name, their age, the things they love, plus co-stars: siblings, friends, grandparents, the family dog. My 6-year-old is deep in a mermaid phase right now, so a certain little mermaid has guest-starred in about a dozen of our bedtime stories.

What I obsessed over: it had to feel premium and be dead simple for a tired parent at 8pm. Voice input for story ideas ("a dragon who is afraid of the dark"), profiles for each kid in the house, storyteller voices that read aloud (or you read it yourself, which is honestly the best way), and a bookshelf of saved favorites so "read it again" actually works the next night.

The free tier is 2 stories a month, forever, no card required. Premium unlocks unlimited stories and the extra voices.

Would love honest feedback from the builders here, and if any parents give it a try tonight, I genuinely want to hear how it lands: magicalbedtimebuddy.com

Hey all — hope it's okay to share this here, happy to take it down if not.

I've been building a baby diary app called Cassi (solo dev, dad here, built it because I couldn't find one that did what I wanted). It's in open testing on Android right now and I'd genuinely love feedback from people who actually breastfeed, because that's the part I most want to get right.

I built the app specifically for breastfeeding parents — to help spot anything they're eating that might be upsetting their baby via breastmilk — and it's since grown to track everything a baby or child eats, so you can spot what's upsetting them there too.

What it does:

• Feed logging with left/right breastfeeding timers (or log manually if you're pumping/combo/formula feeding)
• Sleep, nappy, and mood tracking, all in one diary
• Growth tracking (weight/height over time)
• Optional AI-generated insights that look for possible patterns between your own diet and your baby's feeds/sleep/nappies — this is very much a "might be worth mentioning to your GP or LC" kind of feature, not medical advice, and it says so clearly in the app
• You can invite a partner or another caregiver to log alongside you, so you're not the only one keeping track
• A PDF export you can bring to your healthcare provider

It's free to use as a manual diary, no strings attached. There's a premium tier for the AI insights and photo logging if you want it, but the core diary works fully free.

It's still beta — there will be bugs, some screens are rougher than others, and I'm actively fixing things as people find them. If you try it and something's broken, annoying, or just missing, please tell me. That's exactly the kind of feedback I need right now, good or bad.

Link to try it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willisshillis.cassi&hl=en_NZ

Thanks for reading — happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Every family dinner, someone's always got their head down scrolling and watchinf reels or gossiping about a friend. I tried the whole "phones away" thing. Didn't work.

So I built Party Line, a free app with party games designed for people who are physically in the same room. Open the app, share a code, and everyone's in within seconds. No accounts, no ads, no setup.

It's got three games right now:

• Word War — Race to guess a secret word. Use jinxes to mess with other players.
• Smarty Pants — Kids vs. adults trivia, with rounds that get harder and worth more points.
• Doodle Do! — Draw and guess. Bad artists welcome (actually preferred).

The whole point was to make something that uses the phone addiction against itself — instead of everyone staring at their own screen, you're all yelling at each other's screens.

Free on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/my/app/party-line-table-games/id6796210448

Would love to know if this hits for anyone else's family

I built an app for all the things I want to experience with my kid someday

The idea came from a problem I kept having myself.
I’d see a movie, game, book or activity and think:
“This would be great to do with my son.”

But often he’s simply too young for it right now.
And realistically, by the time he’s old enough, I’ll probably have forgotten half of those ideas.

So I built Kids Bucket List.

It’s a small app for collecting things you want to experience with your child — whether that’s next weekend or years from now.

You can organize ideas into categories, create your own activities, assign them to your kids and keep everything synced across your Apple devices.

I originally started it as a pretty simple side project, but it slowly turned into a full SwiftUI app for iPhone and iPad with CloudKit sync, and a Mac version on the way.

It’s now live on the App Store:
AppStore

Would genuinely love some feedback — especially on the core idea. Is this something you could see yourself using?

I know how that sounds.
But I work from my phone. Sometimes I need to answer an email, check an order or deal with something while my baby is right beside me.

What started bothering me wasn’t really screen time. My baby wasn’t watching videos or using my phone.
It was the fact that he was constantly seeing ME holding one.

So I started hiding my phone inside a book when I needed to use it around him.
Some people think it’s clever. Others think it’s ridiculous, deceptive, or that I should simply put my phone away.
I’m obviously biased because this problem eventually led us to create Peek A Book, but I’m genuinely curious about the parenting side of the argument.

Is hiding the phone actually better than letting your baby see you use it?
Or are we overthinking this completely?

It’s 40°C where we are right now, but the heat isn't what worries me most: it’s the invisible UV exposure.

With three young kids, guessing whether the UV index is at a safe 2 or a dangerous 9 isn't an option, and bad sunburns early in life double the risk of skin damage later on.

I tried using standard weather apps, but they hide the UV index under layers of forecasts, menus, and ads. I needed to see peak UV risk instantly without digging around.

So I built a simple, no-frills tool. You open it and immediately get two things:

1. The exact, real-time UV risk level.
2. A straightforward reapplication countdown based on that UV strength.

No clutter, no bloat, no sign-ups. Just the UV facts you need when you're outside with your family.

Sharing it here in case it helps keep your kids safe this summer too. Protect their skin, check the UV index, and don't forget the hats! ☀️🧴👶

https://uvindex.pixari.dev