You can only make the good visible, and let it accumulate. Every rule below comes out of that one sentence, and each of them is enforced somewhere in the code rather than promised here.
A chart that can take a sticker back turns the chart into a thing to protect instead of a thing to try at. It also hands a child a rational escape: “it’s stupid, I don’t care” is an accurate assessment of a game you can lose.
What makes it trueThere is no operation anywhere in the product that reduces a number. The test suite fails if one appears.
Waiting is the thing that escalates. A child told to wait for the reward they just earned learns that the adult is the obstacle, which is the opposite of what any of this is for.
What makes it trueNo screen a child can reach has a locked state, a countdown, or a shortfall on it.
A bad morning at school must not be able to close the door on a good afternoon at home. School can only ever add to the day.
What makes it trueA teacher's rating pays 3, 2 or 1 — gold, silver, bronze. There is no rating that pays nothing and none that takes anything.
A teacher was busy. A parent forgot. A family was on holiday. Missing information is not evidence of a bad day, and a product that treats it as one is punishing a child for an adult's week.
What makes it trueA day with nothing recorded is not drawn at all — not as a gap, not as a zero, not as a gray square.
“Kept my hands to myself”, never “No hitting”. A child cannot practice a negative — “don’t” describes an absence, and an absence is not a thing anybody can be proud of having achieved.
What makes it trueEvery button in the starting library is written in the first person, as something done.
Without a lowest rating that still pays, an honest adult on a hard day has to choose between lying and recording nothing. Bronze means the truth can always be told and nothing discouraging ever appears on a child's board.
What makes it trueBronze pays 1. There is no fourth rating, and there never will be a rating that pays zero.
“I had a hard moment and I came back.” Without it, a bad day is a total loss — and a day that is a total loss is the day a child decides the whole thing is pointless. It is worth what any other hard thing is worth, deliberately never more: worth more and a child is being singled out and catalogued for the thing they find hardest.
What makes it trueEvery child gets it whatever else they chose, it is always first, it cannot be deleted, and it is the one button that can never graduate — it is not a habit.
A prize a family cannot deliver is worse than no prize. The child picks what they are working toward; the grown-up decides what is on the list to pick from. Half the suggestions cost nothing, because for a lot of children twenty minutes of a parent to themselves beats a toy.
What makes it trueA parent never types a number. They answer how often a prize should happen and how hard a thing is, and the pricing is derived from that.
The number is scaffolding. What a child is actually collecting is the experience of an adult seeing something and saying so. A product that pays out only in numbers has mistaken the scaffolding for the building.
What makes it trueTapping a button answers with a sentence about who they are — “that takes real courage”, “that is who you are when it counts” — not with a score.
Adults mis-tap. But a point that can be reconsidered an hour later is a point a child has to keep earning, and that is just subtraction with a longer fuse.
What makes it trueFive minutes, then the window closes and nothing in the product can reopen it.
The trouble that was hardest in September is solved by December, and a button for it has quietly become free points. So the app offers to retire it — and the child is told, by their own companion, “you just do this now, all by yourself.” Nothing is deleted and every point it ever earned stays earned.
What makes it trueOffered only after a button has been tapped on 10 of the last 14 days and is at least 21 days old — and the app only ever proposes. A grown-up says yes, and can always say not yet.
It is not therapy and no app can promise a child will change. What this one does is make the good things visible, and let them add up somewhere a child can see them.
Answers · The thinking · What we hold about your child · The deal