3 Parenting Insights that surprised us at SmartParent

We are a curious bunch! We keep talking to parents to understand their needs. During the research phase, we are always cautioned against doing surveys as it is better to “see what the customer does, rather than listen to what the customer says”. So we observe and validate some of our insights with data and expert opinions from people from the field. I am sharing some interesting trends that we observed so far.

1. Parent’s Get Lazy as years progress!

Do children really wear us down ? No.

As children grow up and start taking decisions on their own, parent’s involvement with child’s life gradually reduces. 

Real world impact ? Interactions with teachers and schools reduce gradually for higher classes. The PTM (Parents Teachers Meetings) attendance reduces drastically for higher classes especially 5th Grades onward. We found this to be the case from schools and some login patterns of Parents into Learning Management Systems.

Reasons sighted by Teachers, Parents and experts is that children mature to become the conduit of communication between school and home. Feedback from Teachers and schools get standardized and have less impact over years.

2. Parenting Style is hard to change!

We have observed that parenting styles stick over the years. It’s a hard habit to change.

Why is this important?

As the children grow, their expectations from parent’s grow. Their worldview changes especially once they hit teenage years. Our parenting styles have to evolve as per their needs and hence Parenting Styles have to change! But it doesn’t !

3. Managing the Tech Lakshman-Rekha

Parents have a tough time dealing with virtual boundaries in digital worlds. The fact is kids nowadays know more about tech and it’s environment than parents! During our interactions, we have found that parents resort to a start of denial with a dialog in lines of …

“I trust him/her to do the right thing when it comes to internet”

We Parents have been exposed to internet during our adulthood and hence have no context of handling a powerful medium like this with our children. The monster we called TV looks benign in front of the almighty Internet !

Forget S*x Talk, the new age parents have to give a P*rnTalk to their kids !

These were some of the insights that stood out as we build a Parenting Dashboard. We see an immense opportunity to any company / startups that could address these pain points.

We hope more players jump into this foray and address the most important part of a human experience. the