School was out the first week of June for all three of my kids. If there is one thing I have learned over the past summers, it is that week-long camps take your money, they still need you to drop and pick up kids during the work day and at the end of the summer, my children have no idea what they did that week (or weeks).
If you have children who are neurodivergent, the last thing you need is more demands on their nervous system that truly deserves a break.
So, I built them a game.
A page on each of their iPads/iPhones, their name at the top, their color choices behind it. The twins are a year from leaving this house. My youngest starts middle school in the fall. Three children, three different summers ahead of them, and one common worry underneath it: will the math slide, will the laundry stay mine forever, will anyone emerge from a bedroom before noon?
Here is how it works. Every useful act earns a tap: read twenty minutes, cook dinner for the family, fold and put away your own laundry, study a section of the test to get the learner’s permit, finish a round of grade-level math. At the end of the day, bring the phone to me and I approve the earned stars. There is a PIN. I hold the PIN.
Stars climb a ladder of rewards the children chose themselves the night we set it up, and the summer has a ceiling on the cash portion, because I refuse to let anyone grind their childhood into wages.
The ladder is where this stopped being a productivity trick and taught me something. There is money on it, a little, capped. But look at what my children placed above the money: a sleepover yes. A late movie on a night with nothing the next morning. An afternoon that belongs to one child and me and nobody else.
The first set of rewards the kids redeemed? Boba at the local Kung Fu Tea, a board game in lieu of a trip to Sephora, the promise of a sleepover with a couple of friends, a stack of books a little over what they had earned.
They priced my attention higher than my wallet. They were right to!
About the learning, I made myself one promise: this is not enrichment. Nobody in this house is prepping for a gifted program in September. I wanted ten weeks that do not eat what the school year planted, negatives and proportions kept warm for the child who fought hard for them in March. So the practice arena inside is small on purpose: ten questions at a time, math or science, tuned to the grade each child just finished, fresh every time. A round earns a star like everything else. And, an option to print the questions out if screen free is what works best for the child.
Then my children found the holes. Of course they found the holes!
End of week one, I realized Ammu hadn’t been redeeming her stars. Turns out, I never set the pin on her device. She set one herself and awarded herself the stars. She was keen to point out she only gave herself stars that she truly earned. Pattu on the other hand, opted out. No stars, no rewards and that was okay too.
Every hole they found became a rule. A reward can be redeemed once. A chore counts once a day. Practice pays two stars a day, and after that you are playing for glory. My QA department works for boba.
I keep asking myself what actually worked here. The stars? The cash? The progress bars filling in their colors? I don’t believe it is any of those. Every tap a child sends me says: look, I did this. Every approval answers: I saw you do it. That exchange, dozens of times a week, is a lesson I will process later.
I showed it to a few friends. Every one of them asked for a copy. So, it is now something your family can have too. It is called the Summer Independence App. You can walk through a demo family first, a seventh grader named Maya mid-summer, stars and rewards and all: try the demo. If it fits your house, it costs $29, once, for every kid under your roof, and you set it up in five minutes: get the app.
And here is what it will never do, because I built it as an amma before I ever thought of it as a product. No ads. No accounts. No upsell screens aimed at your child. Nothing about your family leaves your own device; I could not read your child’s data if I wanted to.
This is my first time selling software, straight from my home to yours. Send me your good juju. And send me your loophole reports, because my three testers are excellent but they cannot catch everything.
As for us today? The kids just got back home: books (again!), body mist and a pack of cookie dough bites.
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