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Notes from making apps for parents and kids: morning routines, what to say to kids, habit-building, and the parent's own feelings — written by an engineer dad.

📌 Start here

Will rewards make my kid lazy? What dopamine research says about reward systems for kids

"Are we raising a kid who won't do anything without a reward?" — a reward system for kids, answered through ADHD dopamine research.

📱 Which app fits when?

Kid won't get ready in the morning? We stopped nagging and put the routine in a gacha

"I've got it, stop telling me" — a to-do bingo board for the kid who refuses to be told

"How many more?" — a visual schedule board for the kid who can't see the day ahead

"I'll start fresh Monday" — a habit tracker for kids who quit after missing one day

"You said ten times for game time" — a reward-tracking passbook app for kids

The school keeps calling about my kid — so I built a behavior incident log for parents

Survivorship bias in parenting — I was only looking at the planes that made it back

PlanetLoopTimer

Set a timer, start a fight — a visual timer for kids who melt down when time's up

“They grow up so fast” — so I did the math on how much time I have left with my kid

Porting a PC-9801 N88-BASIC game to iPhone — a 100-line Bēmaga tennis game, 30 years later

My kid wanted a game and my phone had none, so I built a puzzle with no timer

— Latest —

"No way I can do all that!" — summer homework that won't get done, a wall of Post-its, and TodoBingoNew

The paradox of choice in parenting — why "pick whatever you want" froze my kid

TDD parenting — the workbook was running a test suite on us the whole time

Engineer dad parenting: applying TDD, BDD and DDD to raising kids (series intro)

Not giving in to tantrums (but always taking the deal) — our one dinner-table rule

Orwell's doublethink, but it's parenting — he won't listen, and I want him happy

"Fools learn from experience" — Bismarck, Piaget, and a kid who won't take my shortcuts

Losing patience with my kid over a test score — until I split process from outcome

Why my kid won't even try — nobody shoots at a hoop bolted to the roof

Letting kids fail: I was grabbing his failures before he could feel them

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