Howdy friends!
This one is personal. It is the short version of why I started building this thing, and one of the many reasons I keep going. No studies, no citations, no meta analysis this time.
The conversation he was not part of
Midnight, Christmas holidays, 2024. I was talking to my mother in law in the kitchen, telling her how thankful I am for Diana and what an incredible blessing my children are. Just the quiet kind of thing you say late, when the house has finally shut up and you get a minute to mean it.
All the kids were asleep.
Or so I thought.
What he wrote
So he quietly went and got himself a piece of paper, and somewhere up there at midnight he sat down and wrote this.
Dear Dad. This is Dexter. I want to thank you for being the best dad ever. I heard you talk downstairs and now I know how lucky I am to be your son. I want you to know that no matter what I will love you. Thank you.
He drew a crab on it. Crabs are my favorite animal. My personal website is ninjacrab.com, so the kids know. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Then I turned it over.
Dear Mom. This is also Dexter. You are the best mom ever. You are really calm with everything.
Two cute observations.
The first is "This is Dexter." He signed in at the top, the way you would if you weren't totally sure the reader would know who was writing. Then he flipped the paper over and did it again. "This is also Dexter." Just in case I had forgotten in the three seconds it took.
The second is what he said about his mom. "You are really calm with everything." He skipped kind, he skipped loving, he skipped every one of the things a grown up would reach for. That is a kid reporting something he has watched happen, over and over, probably on his worst days. You cannot coach that out of a child. He just noticed.
He was not supposed to hear any of it
None of it was aimed at him. I wasn't teaching. I wasn't making a point. I wasn't doing the thing where you say something a little too loudly so the kid in the next room picks it up. I thought he was asleep.
I have told that kid I love him roughly nine thousand times. Bedtime, drop off, into the phone. Zero letters. One overheard conversation at midnight, one letter.
He built his whole picture of how lucky he was out of a conversation he was never invited to. I'm not crying, you are.
Kids aren't listening to what we tell them. They are listening to everything else. Which is mildly terrifying when you think about it for more than a second.
Why that is the whole north star
People ask what we are measuring. The shortest version is gamified habit building, sure. The real answer is the thing I actually watch for.
YouTube counts minutes watched. Google counts search queries. The best thing I have seen come out of this product is all these I love yous going from kids to their parents, and that is our north star. A ten year old going and getting a piece of paper at midnight. That is the metric.
I come from parents who had a hard time saying I love you out loud. What they did instead was make kimchi, which takes about 12 hours, starting at the crack of dawn, because they wanted the best for us. That was the I love you. It just arrived in a jar.
So a kid writing it down and drawing a crab on it is not a small thing in my house.
What I am watching out for
The test I keep coming back to is whether a parent using this ends the day with more attention left over for their kid. That is the whole bar. Not the dishes, not the streak, not the points.
So what I am building toward is room. Clear out enough of the daily negotiating and the chasing and the who did what, and there is space left over for the midnight kitchen conversation your kid is secretly listening to. An app cannot make a moment like that, and mine certainly can't. It can get out of the way of one.
The risk is that it goes the other direction and a family app becomes one more thing to manage. One more screen between a parent and their kid. One more set of notifications telling you that you are behind on your own family. That would be worse than no app at all, and it would do the damage efficiently, at scale, with a really nice interface. If that is where this lands, I built the wrong thing and I need to hear about it.
A letter from a ten year old is the metric I actually care about. I know that is not a real one. It is still the thing I hold the next decision up against.
That is one of many reasons I am on this journey. There are others, and plenty of them are far less sentimental. This is the one I keep on my desk.
Thanks, Dexter. I hope you are all doing well and feeling fulfilled!