How Apps Play a Role in the Parenting Puzzle

Our feature this week is written by Kidoc LLC, the parent and pediatrician developers behind iEarnedThat. Focused on motivational tools for families based on positive reinforcement, they provide an example of how a simple app in the palm of your hands can provide a goal-oriented activity for the entire family.

How do we motivate children to do the things they don’t want to do? It’s a simple question with no “right” answer, and it poses a huge challenge to parents of children of all ages. We asked ourselves this basic question when creating iEarnedThat. How can we help parents motivate their children to do what we as parents know is good for them?

Convincing a five-year-old to eat their vegetables or brush their teeth is a seemingly insurmountable challenge that often leads to bribery, parental frustration and negative attention. These obstacles can result in an adversarial parenting style with few results. Children are smarter than we give them credit for and learn to manipulate their parents and caregivers at a very young age. All too often, children are rewarded and bribed for negative behavior to stop an undesired action. Unfortunately, negative reinforcement tends to be a vicious cycle that perpetuates more of the same.

A theory embraced by many developmental psychologists, pediatricians and parents is positive reinforcement. Numerous resources point to this very simple, yet effective style of feedback and behavior modification for our children. Experts would agree: reinforcing good ideas and actions will yield more cooperative, happier and ultimately healthier children.

Our first iPhone app, iEarnedThat, was the product of an alliance of experts with diverse backgrounds. New parents Michael Docktor, a Pediatrician, along with his wife who is a Pediatric Occupational Therapist, teamed up with long-time friend and marketing guru Joshua Greenfield. Together they pooled their collective experience to come up with a simple, visually dazzling, and highly customizable tool to arm parents, teachers and therapists in this daily struggle.

iEarnedThat aims to tackle many aspects of the challenge of motivating children with a simple tool in the palm of one’s hand. Children (much like adults these days) are distracted easily and lose sight of their goals before they reach them. iEarnedThat is about keeping children engaged and excited, while reinforcing positive behavior to EARN a reward. A reward should be something that highlights positive actions to signify accomplishment of a desired goal. Our hope in designing this app was to allow the child and parent to work cooperatively toward a reward of their choice upon meeting a goal, such as doing homework or chores. Much like the star chart on the fridge, our primary maxim is to keep it simple, customizable and user friendly. Our talented developers built a visually stunning 3D puzzle to turn desired rewards into an interactive jigsaw puzzle that visually reminds children exactly what they are working towards.

We are not alone in believing that technology like the iPhone and iPad are going to be a way we educate our children in the not-too-distant future. These tools compliment traditional paper-based tools with rich, interactive, family experiences. Our hope is to empower parents, teachers and therapists facing so many other challenges with a simple, customizable tool to motivate the children in their lives.