I vividly recall walking out of Toronto’s Mt. Sinai hospital 7 years ago. I was carrying two car seats, each with a sub 5 pound human in it. I experienced a strange feeling of vertigo exiting the automatic sliding glass doors of the hospital and being met by the hubbub of University Avenue. I wondered to myself if this might be similar to what it feels like to successfully shoplift for the first time: Am I really going to get away with this? I mean, how was it possible that I, someone who had never changed a single diaper, was being allowed to walk into the world with two helpless infants?
When I briefly became a taxi cab driver in New York City (for an art project) I had been required to take weeks of classes and pass an exam. Yet, somehow, there had been absolutely no prerequisites for becoming a parent. No test, no degree, no parent license arriving in the mail to get framed and put in the bathroom. This was confusing, as caring for helpless infants seemed orders of magnitude more challenging - or at least consequential - than navigating (somewhat poorly) a yellow cab. As a taxi driver the objective is straightforward: get your passenger safely to their destination as efficiently as possible. As a parent, the goals, and means to those goals, were much less clear.
What I kept wishing existed
While I may have had no experience, I did have some preparation. I had done a lot of reading about parenting during my partner’s pregnancy; and some of the books truly resonated with my personal values and ideas about the parent I wanted to become. They spoke of a patient, curious, steady caregiver who navigated stressful moments with a steady but firm hand. However, as is sadly the general case for me with the books I read, the details tend to quickly fade from memory. And even when I did manage to remember the larger themes, they were rarely top of mind when I needed them most (e.g. a bedtime meltdown situation).
As a former athlete I found myself thinking back to my days as a swimmer, when my coach would stand on the side of the pool watching me go about my workout. When she saw a problem with my form she would, in the moment, step in with pertinent advice or a strategy meant to address the issue. As a parent, that’s exactly what I wanted. An expert who was somehow able to observe my daily performance and provide the actionable feedback that would allow me to improve.
Parenting experts, of course, do exist. I have consulted a few myself, and found the interactions generally quite useful (if expensive). However, there was always a large gap - the problem of observability. These therapists were not “on the pool deck” (so to speak) watching me parent. Even though I tried my best to remember and accurately recount my interactions with the children over the past weeks, it felt like a far cry from actually seeing my parenting in action. The therapist never heard the actual words that were spoken, or the tone of my voice. And what if the moments I presented were not even the most critical moments to work on? Perhaps I didn’t even remember those moments.
What I wanted was for my therapist to be more like my swim coach; able to observe my real life interactions with my children, and therefore able to accurately and promptly identify the teachable moments that needed work. When I first became a parent this desire for a dedicated personalized parenting coach existed only in the realm of imagination. An appealing but impractical pipe dream. However, in the past year things have changed. What was previously inconceivable now has suddenly been made possible. That realization led me to start building Pairent.
What Pairent is
Pairent is an app that listens during the ordinary hours of family life. Overnight, it does the slow, reflective thinking that simply isn’t possible in the middle of a meltdown. It examines what actually happened in your family that day, finding moments where your interactions were in, or out, of alignment with the parenting guidance you have selected. In the morning it provides gentle, actionable guidance, connected to the actual moments being referenced, so you can hear and remember exactly what happened.
And just as my swim coach came to better know me and my strengths and weaknesses over time, Pairent too, can notice patterns. It can learn, for example, what tends to set a hard morning in motion, which approaches actually land with which kid, where your patience reliably runs out. This helps personalize the advice it provides.
I know how the idea of introducing a device that listens inside a family home can sound. Some people I am very close to would never use Pairent, and I think their wariness is earned; there will be a whole post about that. For now, I want to be clear about a few things. First, we don’t sell your family’s data (and never will). Second, we have turned off model training at every AI provider we use. Third, there are no ads. And finally, you choose what data is kept, with all original recordings automatically deleted within 48 hours of upload.
This all means that Pairent costs money, and it is not cheap. The upside is that this means that you are the customer and not the product.
Why a blog
A product that asks for this much trust should not be a black box, and the thinking behind it should not live only in my head.
I wrote down some of the guiding principles behind the Pairent project on the philosophy page: it consists of a few short statements about parenting, technology, and how we’re building this project. The goal is to try and capture the ethos behind Pairent, and underline how we differ from many “standard” apps and technologies. It’s a good starting point, but I also want to build out the thinking that is behind each of these principles, one at a time, over the coming weeks with more thorough explanations.
Where things stand
It’s early. We’re building the first prototype now, and my family is the first test family; every feature gets tried on our own mornings before it goes anywhere near yours. If the idea speaks to you, you can join the waitlist, and if something feels off, I’d genuinely like to hear about it: daniel@pairent.app.