It’s a well-known fact that quality parental interaction is critical for a child at any stage of development to learn, grow, and excel. But in today’s world of remote workers, business travel, frequent moves and family separations, parents often find themselves away from their children for long periods of time — in fact, more than a quarter of children live apart from one of their parents.
Technology is often blamed for causing a rift between parent and child, but two education and policy veterans have set out to use technology to bridge the gap between parents and children separated by physical distance. Georgia State Representative and General Assembly House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, along with long-time friend Eliza Leighton, are tackling the issue of parent-child separation with a new immersive, interactive app, The Family Room.
Leighton, an accomplished social entrepreneur who co-founded the national education reform organization Stand for Children, and Abrams, realized a simple phone call — or even a FaceTime call — wasn’t enough to provide children with the necessary interaction they need. Hype spoke to Leighton about how The Family Room works, what you can do with your child when you’re on a business trip (yes, you can color with them!), and the partners they are currently seeking out.
Elevator pitch?
The Family Room (TFR) is an innovative immersive experience that combines connectivity and activity for young kids and the adults in their lives. TFR creates a virtual family room where young kids can talk, play, draw, read, do homework and watch videos with adults while on a video or audio call. The app will run on both Android and iOs devices so the entire family can enjoy a kid-centered experience – where FaceTime meets family time.
In The Family Room, the adult and child do activities together. FaceTime and Skype are a step forward over just a phone call, but even with these tools we lose a key way children best interact and build relationships with adults, which is by actually doing things with them. They want to show you something they did in school that day, or watch a video, or read a book, or play a game. So what TFR does is it allows you to do what you would normally do with a child — but in a virtual space. So the basic functionality is like a FaceTime or Skype, but once you’re in the room, either the child or the parent can move their now-shared screen to any number of activity nooks. So for example, when a child opens a book, the book opens on the adult screen; when the child turns the page, the page turns for the adult.
How did you get the idea?
With my background working with an education nonprofit, along with work I’ve done recently around parent engagement funded by the Department of Education, I saw the critical importance for children to have strong adult relationships in their lives. When that doesn’t happen, it has a real impact on social, emotional, and educational development throughout their lives. Then recognizing that, for so many families, distance between children and close adults is such a reality, we saw that technology is not currently being well-utilized to solve this problem. So that’s how my educational background led into looking for a technology tool to support healthy, productive relationships between children and adults.
Simultaneously, Stacey had a conversation with a friend about his difficulties communicating with his young children after a divorce. The distance and their ages made conversation hard, and he felt disconnected. Stacey shared this conversation with me and together, we conceived of The Family Room, an online platform as comfortable as home.
Funding or bootstrapped?
We self-funded to build a full working prototype in Android, which is the most widely utilized platform. In 2015, we completed the prototype in Android and launched a private test in Google Playstore. Based on the feedback from the beta, we expanded offerings, and in 2016, we completed the Android version and built the iOS version. We are using the balance of this working capital to market for initial traction and develop content. TFR’s path to commercialization requires investment in expanding the platform, adding content and targeted marketing/sales. Our overhead will remain low for the foreseeable future, as each component can be served through existing staff and consultants. We are currently seeking $500-750K in seed funding.
What problem are you solving?
TFR tackles meaningful communication for children and adults when separated by distance. In over 100 million U.S. families, children are separated from loved ones due to jobs, divorce, military deployment, etc. Research shows children experience difficulty bonding with their physically-absent adults; they experience higher rates of behavioral and emotional issues or academic declines even in kindergarten. With current technology options like Skype or FaceTime, talk is not only difficult for young children, it is ineffective.
TFR combines connectivity with activity – the best recipe for effectively communicating with young kids. We address the gap in technology with an Immersive Technology where both users simultaneously engage in activities, including watching, reading and gaming, while they are also able to talk and see each other in separate but embedded technology. TFR Activity Nooks contain content curated for the child user’s specific age and interests. Kids guide the action, but adults can intervene.
Revenue model?
We will look at three main revenue models:
- Partnership: Our core revenue will come from our B2B Distribution model where TFR will be a member or HR benefit through distribution partners.
- Freemium w/In-App Purchases: We will market to customers using the freemium model – a core package of high quality services are free to all users with an option to pay an in-app fee for content.
- App Store: Additional revenue will come from TFR App Store featuring home-grown and third-party developed apps sold individually.
We’re in conversations with a couple of potential partners around revenue partnership models. We’re in conversations right now, for example, with companies who want to provide tablets to prison systems for incarcerated parents to stay in touch with their children. We’re in conversations with a number of the major organizations that provide support to military families. With this B2B model, we want to make sure the product meets the needs of these specific target audiences — whether that’s military parents, grandparents, incarcerated parents. So we can customize the product slightly and the third party would get it right into the hands of the parties they work with.
We’ll next address the in-app purchases portion after that; I would anticipate this to roll out over the next six months. The app store is more of a stage II phase.
