What we’re for
Open a feed — any feed — and something starts choosing for you. It was tuned by people whose job is to keep you there, and it does that by reaching for the next big feeling. That’s their algorithm, running on your kid. Our reason for existing is to help your family become its own: to decide, on purpose, what the next hour of attention is for. For your kids. And, while we’re at it, for you.
The idea
A recommendation engine has one job: keep you watching. It learns what makes you feel something — delighted, outraged, envious, surprised — and serves more of it, because feeling is what keeps a thumb moving. None of that is tuned to who your kid is becoming. It’s tuned to the next minute on the app.
Being your own algorithm is the opposite stance. You decide what your attention, and your kid’s, is for. Not no screens — chosen screens. The point was never to count minutes. It was to make the hour mean something.
Most adults can’t do this yet either. We’ll open an app and resurface twenty minutes later wondering where they went. So this isn’t a willpower lecture aimed at children. It’s a skill the whole family builds together — which is the only way it ever sticks.
Intentionality
Parents want the number — how many minutes, what age for a phone. There isn’t one, and selling you one would be the least useful thing we could do. What separates families who do well isn’t more rules or fewer. It’s whether the parent is choosing.
“My kid’s on Discord building games and on YouTube learning to animate. I know exactly what that is, and I have my reasons.” That’s a parent doing this right, even when we’d pick differently for our own kid. More power to you. The version that worries us is the quiet one: “yeah, he’s on YouTube all afternoon. I don’t really know what he does on there. But, you know — it’s YouTube.”
That’s the line. Not strict versus relaxed. Chosen versus checked-out. We’ll be generous about almost any choice you make on purpose, and clear-eyed that checking out is the one that costs your kid.
Do it with them
When something your kid loves worries you, the instinct is to ban it. Banning usually just relocates it to a friend’s phone, where you can’t see it. The thing that works is harder and better: do it with them.
Put the brain-rot video on the big screen and watch a whole episode of nonsense together, then pull apart why it’s so hard to look away. Scroll the app beside them for a while. Sit down and use the AI for the homework together instead of forbidding it. You’re not surveilling. You’re turning something solo and passive into something shared and examined — which is where judgment gets built.
It also keeps the door open. The parent who’s watched the weird video is the one the kid comes to when something goes truly wrong. The parent who banned it is the last to hear.
The algorithm
It’s tempting to make the feed the bad guy. It’s more useful, and more true, to treat it as a system — built mostly by people who mean well and know they’re getting some of it wrong — that your kid can learn to see.
A few years back, a group set out to teach kids about the algorithm. They knew it had landed when teenagers started rolling their eyes: “yeah, yeah, the algorithm, I get it.” That eye-roll is the goal. A kid who can name the machine can put it down. Fear doesn’t transfer that skill. Understanding does.
How we help
Tell us what your family cares about — that they’re building things, not just consuming them; that they stay off the stuff engineered to hook them; their age, where they are. We turn it into a watch list, a play list, a read list scored for that. Your list looks nothing like your neighbor’s, because your family isn’t your neighbor’s. We won’t hand you a ruling on how to parent — we hand you what kids in your kid’s grade are really doing and what a given show, game, or app is like, and leave the call with you.
Together
Watch the show, scroll the app, use the AI side by side. Shared and examined beats solo and passive — and the door stays open when something goes wrong.
On purpose
More tech or less can both be right for your family. The only choice that costs your kid is the one where nobody’s choosing.
Your list
Tell us what your family cares about; get watch, play, and read lists scored for your kid — not for everyone’s.
FAQ
Straight answers — no fear-mongering, no pretending it’s simpler than it is.
Become your own algorithm.
Take the five-minute family survey and every guide, recommendation, and list on the site gets tuned to your kid’s age, what they use, and what your family cares about. That tuned list is yours — built by you, for your family.
Take the Family Survey