r/ParentingTech

We’re hitting an awkward transition point with YouTube and I’m curious what other parents are realistically doing.

My son is heavily into gaming and wants to watch specific streamers/creators that are completely unavailable on YouTube Kids. The “older kids” YT Kids setting honestly still seems very filtered/random and doesn’t really reflect the actual gaming ecosystem kids his age are interested in.

At the same time, unrestricted YouTube obviously comes with concerns around algorithm drift, shorts rabbit holes, inappropriate content etc.

To complicate things further, in Australia we’re now stuck in a weird position where under-16s are prevented from signing into normal YouTube accounts in a way that allows us to actually apply supervision/content controls properly.

There also seems to be some kind of Google/Family Link DOB glitch where the account is recognised as under 16 for YouTube access restrictions, but not in a way that lets us apply supervised under-16 settings consistently.

So at the moment our practical options seem to be:
- ban YouTube entirely,
or
- allow unrestricted/open YouTube and monitor manually.

We do actively monitor/check history and talk about internet navigation with him, but it would honestly be nice to have some middle-ground content restrictions available rather than either “YouTube Kids only” or “completely unrestricted.”

I’m not really interested in “ban YouTube completely forever” because:
- it’s a huge part of gaming/social culture now,
- he mainly wants specific creators,
- and I suspect long-term navigation/media literacy matters more than pretending the platform doesn’t exist.

What are other parents actually doing for:
- gamer kids,
- creator/streamer watching,
- supervised YouTube,
- history review,
- algorithm management,
- and teaching kids how to navigate the platform safely?

Especially interested in approaches that are more nuanced than either:
- “full unrestricted access”
or
- “absolutely no YouTube ever.”

Some days I feel like I’m doing two full-time jobs at the exact same time.

Working remotely with a baby under 1 while breastfeeding and trying to avoid screens has honestly been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

My baby is SUPER active.
He won’t independently play for more than 10–15 minutes before needing me again 😅

I spend my day rotating activities, answering emails one-handed, cleaning bottles, and praying naps last longer than 30 minutes.

And somehow I still feel guilty:

• guilty when I work
• guilty when I’m not working
• guilty when I’m tired
• guilty when I need a break

Please tell me I’m not the only one struggling with this 🥲

Hey r/ParentingTech,

I'm a solo founder and parent who got frustrated enough to build my own solution. Here's the honest version of why.

Every chore app we tried followed the same pattern: novelty for a week, then dead. The kids lost interest, we stopped enforcing it, and we were back to nagging. I started digging into why — and the behavioral science is actually pretty clear.

Kids don't respond to obligation. They respond to visible progress, earned rewards, and a sense of leveling up.

So I built ThriveTrack around that. Kids earn XP points for completing chores and daily habits. They level up from Seedling to Champion. Streak shields protect their progress if they miss a day so they don't feel like quitting. It's gamified — but not in a cartoon distraction way. The mechanics are borrowed from habit science, not game design.
It's live on iOS right now. I'm actively learning from every family using it and building in public.

A few things I'm genuinely curious about from this community:
— What made you give up on the last chore app you tried?
— Do your kids respond better to rewards or consequences?
— What would make a habit app actually stick in your house?
Not here to just drop a link — I want to understand what's actually broken for real families. Happy to answer anything about how I built it or why I made certain design decisions.
You can find it at thethrivetrack.com if you want to try it.

I am worried it's one of those things that works great at first then becomes useless once kids figure out the loopholes. For parents who have been using it for 6+ months, does it actually keep working?

Hi all,

Looking for a ChatGPT like AI but safe. Meaning parental controls, safety guardrails etc. Preferably with iOS app.

Been trying several "Safe" AIs - all suck. Either it resembles a game too much or its not really safe.

Thanks!

Disclosure first: I built this app, Lunia. Real founder story, not a fake testimonial.

It started after watching my kid ask the same questions for weeks. "Is there a monster?" "What if there's a monster?" "Can you check again?" Generic bedtime stories about brave dragons and friendly wizards did nothing. Same fear, same questions, every single night.

A few things were driving me crazy that I'd seen other parents complain about here too:

• The mental load of inventing a bedtime story on the spot after a 14-hour day. Some nights I'd just open YouTube and feel terrible about it.
• Generic story apps that swap the kid's name and call that personalization. A kid named Emma reading "Emma's Adventure" about something unrelated to her actual fear is just a rename with extra steps.
• Specific fears had no specific stories. Dark, dentist, new sibling arriving, starting daycare, the loud dog next door. None of these exist unless you write them yourself at 9pm.
• Most apps assume staring at a screen at bedtime is fine. We try to keep it audio-only and the options were thin.

So I built Lunia around four developmental goals (sleep, overcoming fears, building confidence, empathy). The fear stories use Wolpe's gradual exposure approach: the scary thing (darkness, monster, dentist) is introduced softly and reframed as a friend by the story's end. The confidence stories use Bandura's mastery learning: the kid in the story earns small wins through their own effort, never rescued by an adult. You add your kid's name, age, what they're working through tonight, and the story is generated and narrated. Audio-first.

Not a magic fix. My kid still drags out bedtime, still wants water, still wants one more song. But the monster-under-the-bed loop hasn't come back in 6 weeks of using it.

If anyone else is in the same loop, what's actually worked for you?

My son is starting to walk to school alone and goes to after school clubs so I need something that wont die by 2pm. Most of the time he is gone from 7am to 5pm most days and I dont trust her to remember to charge it every single night

We were looking at phones for our tweens and this popped in when we were researching gabb. Sounds awful now…who to trust?

Hi people,

I was FaceTiming my 3-year-old from another goddamn hotel room last year. Again. Third trip that month. And there he was, in his dinosaur pajamas, trying to listen to me read him a story through my phone screen while I squinted at his little face from 800 miles away. The connection was garbage. He couldn't really see me. I couldn't really see him. I just... kept thinking, this isn't how it's supposed to be.

He hung up sad. I sat on that hotel bed and felt like the worst parent in the world.

That night I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking — what if he could still hear MY voice? Even when I'm not there. Not some random narrator with a radio voice. ME. Reading to him. Every night.

So I started building.

I called it HuggleTales because I missed hugging him at bedtime. (Yeah, I know, cheesy as hell, but it's true.)

The messy truth:

• Been coding this nights and weekends for 6 months while working my actual job
• About 300 families have downloaded it and thats nice for 1 month in the App Store I guess
• Kids are creating roughly 300 stories a week now
• The stories are INSANE — had a grandma octopus racing sports cars last week, and a sad piece of toast finding friendship. I screenshot the weird ones.
• MRR is around $450 — so no, I'm not buying a yacht, but it's real money from something I built.

What I didn’t expect:

• Voice cloning took me 1 month to sound good… longer than I thought. Accents break it. Background noise breaks it. And kids keep trying to record their OWN voices which is adorable but technically makes me want to scream.
• Apple rejected me 7 or 8 times… I wanted to throw my laptop.
• Firebase and AI costs spiked and still haven’t received the first App Store payment on my bank account yet.

But here's why I'm still doing it:

I tested it first with my son and he loves it.. He almost always chooses the app instead of books for bedtime thats nice and makes me proud :D

A friend messaged me a few days ago. He's a pilot, gone 4 days a week. He said his daughter listens to "him" reading her a new story every night he's away. She picks the characters, she makes the choices, and she falls asleep to his voice. I almost started crying reading it.

That's why I'm still fixing bugs at 1am. That's why I'm learning marketing even though I hate it. That's why I keep going even when mommy bloggers want $500 for one Instagram post and I feel like it’s too much?!

Because I know what that hotel room felt like.

Anyway. If you're a parent who travels, or works nights, or just sometimes needs to be two places at once — I built this for us.

Happy about every feedback and I am here to talk about Flutter, AI nightmares, or just vent about app store review hell.