Parents rarely ask us for a feature.
What arrives instead is a description of an afternoon. The bag on the floor, the child who has either gone quiet or gone loud, the twenty minutes before dinner has to start. Almost nobody writes in to say what the product should do. They describe the day instead, and most of the work is in hearing the difference between those two things.
I do the community side of TopParent, which mostly means reading those descriptions. This is an honest account of what happens to them.
What people ask for is usually not what would help
The most common request we get is for more ideas.
It is a reasonable thing to ask, and we have decided not to do it. You are not short of options standing in the kitchen at the worn-out end of the day, and handing over another twenty would move the work back onto you at the exact moment you have least to give. We have written up the full case for one idea rather than a library, including what the decision costs us, because it does cost us something.
That is the awkward bit of building with parents. Taking you seriously is not the same as doing what you say. If we treated every request as an instruction we would have built the thing you were trying to get away from.
So we sort by the moment, not the request
What we actually do with feedback is strip out the suggested solution and keep the situation.
Somebody writes to say the app should have a timer. Underneath that is usually an afternoon where an activity ran long, or ended badly, or the child would not stop and the parent had no graceful way to finish. The timer is one answer to that. It is not obviously the best one, and it is not what we would have looked at if we had only read the first sentence.
So the sorting is by moment. After school. Before dinner. Weekend morning with nothing on. A second child in the room. When we see the same afternoon described twenty different ways, that is worth more than twenty different feature requests, and it is how the sentence we kept hearing about the after-school hour ended up shaping the product rather than sitting in a document.
The requests we turn down
Some of what you ask for, we say no to on purpose, and it is only fair to say which.
We do not do progress tracking, scores, or anything that turns an afternoon into a record of how you are doing. We do not send reminders designed to make you feel behind. We do not tell you what an activity is meant to be good for, because that turns play into a task with a mark scheme, and it is not a claim we are willing to make. A fuller list is in what we have decided not to build.
Every one of those has been requested by somebody. Saying no when you took the trouble to write is not comfortable, and I would rather be straight about it than pretend the roadmap is a democracy.
What we have not solved
Plenty.
We hear a lot from parents of more than one child, and one idea in a room with two children is a harder problem than one idea in a room with one. We hear from parents whose child needs the same thing every day and who feel like they are doing it wrong. We hear from parents who tried something, it went nowhere in four minutes, and they concluded the fault was theirs.
Some of that we have partly answered in writing. Some of it we have not answered at all yet. I would rather say that plainly than describe a version of TopParent that does not exist.
If you want a hand in it
The useful thing you can send us is not a feature request. It is a description.
What the afternoon was like, what you tried, what happened next. You do not have to propose a fix, and the messy ones are more use to us than the tidy ones. We are a small group of parents building the thing we wanted at the end of our own school runs, and the product gets better mainly because people tell us where it let them down.
The other way to help is simply to use it and let it be wrong sometimes. Tell PLAI™ what your afternoon actually looks like, take the idea it gives you, and tell us when it misses. That is the whole loop.