I built ChildStep for my own family. We kept setting the big ones — learning to jump rope, growing taller, getting through a whole song on the guitar — and then losing them somewhere between a busy week and a reminder nobody saw. So I made the smallest thing that actually helped: today's step, on the person it belongs to, where the whole family can see it.
— Paul Pham, a Dad & a Developer, and the only person who writes this app
Four things we hold to, whatever else changes.
The goal is not a better dashboard for parents. It is a child who opens the app, sees one short list, and does it — with a grown-up nearby rather than behind them. Every design decision gets judged by whether it moves agency toward the child.
No feed, no streak-panic, no notification we send just to be opened. A family app earns its place by being quiet most of the time and exactly right at the moment a step is due.
A family tool earns its place by never losing what somebody wrote — offline, on a bad connection, on a phone that dies mid-tap. What you answered is what the app says, and when something cannot be sent yet it tells you which step and which day rather than quietly dropping it.
What a seven-year-old needs is not what a teenager needs. Where the app goes next is teenagers with their own accounts inside the family, and less of the parent in the loop as the child earns it.
Questions, trouble signing in, a bug, or anything about your family's data — write to support@childstep.app. We aim to answer within two working days; there is no ticket system and no bot in between.
Tell us what you tapped, what you expected, and what happened instead — plus the phone you were using. If it happened at a particular time, say when: it makes the difference between a guess and a fix.
You can export or delete everything yourself from Settings → Manage data, or from our data-deletion page. To ask what we hold, or to have it removed for you, write to the same address. What we collect and why is in the Privacy Policy.