For a couple years, I worked with some great friends of mine to try to build a startup that would encourage, promote, and teach language development strategies to mothers. A child’s ability before kindergarten is predictive of long term outcomes (high school graduation, earnings, incarceration); there is a oft-cited 30 million word exposure gap between 3 year olds in high- and low- income families that is one of the causal links in this performance disparity.
Our goal was to figure out a sustainable way to build products and scale technology that could make an impact in the space. To start, we decided to focus on tech-savvy, well-educated (high earning) parents that might pay for this kind of coaching, measurement, and feedback. We built several prototypes and tested them. (A recording service that analyzed story-time and gave suggestions for dialogic reading techniques. An app with little games that tracks your child’s development through their success with the activities. A consultation service with child development experts.)
As individuals, we were not initially very well-equipped to address the problem; hence the many pivots. We had some expertise for automating language tracking and feedback, but at the start we were all young, childless men. We brought a mother of two young kids onto our team to help rectify the situation, but it was quite late in the game.
For me, ‘predictable consequences’ of the work, at least at the time, are tough to assess. So much of it seems predictable in hindsight.
Had we successfully cracked the market with any of these ideas, there were possible negative consequences– are we increasing and enabling neurotic parenting? Are we taking advantage of parents’ anxiety about their child’s development? Is a quantified approach to parenting healthy? Since this is likely to be something only people who are aware of the problem seek out, will it simply exacerbate the poverty gap in early school performance? There would’ve been obvious positive consequences as well, though. What techniques can we learn from the best parents? What decisions matter in a child’s development? How can we cultivate good parenting skills in a scalable way?
We didn’t make it that far, though. I have vivid memories of going into the homes of many parents, handing them a prototype, and watching them struggle to even glance at it while interacting with their children. Things we thought were obvious about the UI were totally lost on parents that don’t live in a tech bubble world. It was painful to see just how out of touch we were with the basic facts about a new parent’s lifestyle.
How predictable was it that we were out-of-touch with our vision? My biggest regret is the amount of time it took me to step into the home of our first parents; it became clear quite quickly after that. Parents of young kids are putting out fires on a minute-by-minute basis; aspirational thoughts of language learning and social development are a luxury. While I still believe it’s an important goal, I don’t think it we were solving the right problem in the right way.
There were potential consequences of the technology we set out to develop that we never had to grapple with. There were *also* plenty of real-world negative consequences in our design approach that impacted our lives directly. Early on we were marked by indecision. When we found focus, our prototypes revealed that we didn’t understand who we were designing for, how they lived, or what they needed. This was *not* a pleasant lesson to learn. Fortunately, a healthy dose of humility has a way of preventing us from repeating our past mistakes.