In today’s digital age, parents often find themselves in a constant battle to strike a balance between their children’s screen time and other essential activities. The Carrots&Cake app, founded by Hamel Shah and Meredith DePaolo, aims to address this challenge with a novel and balanced approach to managing kids’ screen time. By prioritising learning over leisure, the app is set to transform how families engage with technology and ensure that screen time is both beneficial and regulated.
The Primary Purpose of Carrots&Cake
In its simplest form, Carrots&Cake seeks to redirect children’s attention from mindless scrolling on platforms like TikTok towards educational apps that foster growth and development. The app emerges in response to growing concerns about the negative impacts of excessive screen time on children’s physical and mental health. In May, the US Surgeon General called for urgent action to address this issue, and Carrots&Cake is here to provide a solution.
Carrots&Cake is not just another parental control app; it’s a parental control learning platform that helps parents design the order in which their kids interact with apps. The goal is to ensure that children engage with learning apps before indulging in recreational ones. This shift in the sequence of app usage is based on a simple yet profound principle: what kids do first matters. Just as a parent wouldn’t serve a plate of broccoli alongside a giant piece of cake, the app acknowledges that handing a child an iPad with both educational and entertaining apps won’t lead to disciplined learning.
How Carrots&Cake Works
Carrots&Cake empowers parents to choose learning apps with a high cognitive load from the App Store, what they call “Carrots.” These can include educational apps like DuoLingo, music lessons, and even meditation apps. When a child accesses their device, these are the only apps available. After the learning time is completed, the remaining apps are unblocked for a set period, known as “Cake Time.” This approach maintains children’s agency while fostering self-regulation and delayed gratification.
The app addresses the problematic aspects of screen time by breaking the cycle of dopamine feedback loops and countering the persuasive design of addictive apps. It encourages children to focus on learning tasks before indulging in recreational activities, leading to more balanced dopamine levels and helping kids build resilience and grit. Carrots&Cake also sends kids reminders as screen time ends, reducing tantrums and making the transition off screens smoother.
The Founders’ Inspiration
The genesis of Carrots&Cake can be traced back to the founders’ experience volunteering with Burmese refugees in Malaysia. The children they worked with had limited access to formal education, relying on expats for their learning. The founders saw an opportunity to bridge this gap by introducing educational apps. However, they soon realised that even the best educational apps struggled to compete with more enticing games and streaming services. This experience prompted them to find a solution to motivate children to use educational apps effectively.
This realisation coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as their own daughters transitioned to distance learning. Witnessing a decline in their behavior as screen time increased, the founders decided to develop Carrots&Cake from a behavioral science perspective. The app expanded to prioritise not only learning but also the development of children’s self-regulation skills around technology. They sought advice from top experts and specialists in children’s technology addiction, making Carrots&Cake a comprehensive solution.
What Sets Carrots&Cake Apart
Carrots&Cake differentiates itself from other parental control apps by going beyond simple timers. Most parental control apps do not consider the crucial aspect of how children use their devices and how this affects their behavior. Traditional solutions are often one-sided and can lead to a breakdown of trust in the parent-child relationship. In contrast, Carrots&Cake aims to foster family connections and cultivate trust through parental guidance rather than control.
The app involves the entire family in the process, allowing children to maintain their agency during free time and providing parents with conversation starters to engage their kids and understand their online interests. Carrots&Cake is not just a band-aid; it aspires to be the cure for the screen time dilemma, elevating screen time, empowering families, and putting children’s well-being at the forefront.
In a world where technology plays an increasingly central role in our lives, Carrots&Cake provides a much-needed solution for parents who want to ensure that their children’s screen time is both enriching and well-regulated. With this innovative app, children can thrive in the digital age while parents regain peace of mind and trust in their family’s relationship with technology.
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