Louise Bazalgette: Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. If you're joining from the UK, I hope you managing to stay cool in the heat. Welcome to second event in Nesta's early years tech series. Today's event is to mark the launch of our latest report could parenting apps help improve outcomes for children? Thank you for joining us.

Today we'll be sharing our latest research into the landscape of early years apps and discussing whether parenting apps add a potential to help improve outcomes for children. With smartphone and tablets now being a big feature of young children's home environment, could there be an opportunity for digital technologies to play a larger role in supporting child development?

Today, we are joined by fantastic panel of experts from the early years sector and tech industry to take an in-depth look at parenting apps. And before we get going, I'll start with some introductions. Nesta is the UK's innovation agency for social good. We design test and scale solutions to society's biggest problems.

And our three missions are to help people live healthy lives, to create a sustainable future where the economy works for people and the planet, and to give every child a fair start. I'm Louise Bazalgette, deputy director of Nesta's fairer start mission. The goal of this mission is to close the early years outcome gap between children from low income backgrounds and their peers. Today's event is going to be split into two parts.

First we'll be hearing from three fantastic speakers who are Karlis Kanders, who is at senior data foresight lead working in Nesta's discovery team. Karlis will be sharing findings from Nesta's recent analysis of early years apps on the play store. And then after Karlis we'll hear from Eleanor Ireland, who is program head at the Nuffield foundation.

She leads the foundation's early years research portfolio and is one of the authors of Nuffield's recent time for parents review. And then our first third speaker is going to be Hannah , who is senior early advisor save the children, UK. Programs aimed improving early learning outcomes for children and growing up in poverty in the UK.

I think I might have had some connectivity issues there. Our first set of speakers are going to be reflecting on the findings from Nesta's research and sharing their insights on the opportunities and constraints around how we use digital technologies to support parents. And then once we've heard from our three panelists, it'll be your turn to contribute to the discussion and put your questions to them.

And then in the second half of the event, we'll have a similar format you'll hear directly from three app developers, as well as hearing a perspective of view as a parenting. And a quick bit of housekeeping, if you're joining the audience, please rejoin the conversation by posting a comment in the comments box on the right hand side of your screen, you can post questions to our panelists at any time during the event.

And we'll pick these up during the question and answer session and also closed captions, if you need them can be accessed via the LinkedIn live stream. So with no further ado, I'm now gonna hand over to Karlis Kanders, Nesta's senior data foresight lead, and he's going to share findings from our recent analysis early years apps for parents on the play store.

Welcome Karlis.

Karlis Kanders: Hey, Thank you. Thank you. It's really great to be here today. And I'm really excited to tell you about our report and analyzing the market of early years apps for parents. And if you go to the next slide. Let me just give you a really quick overview of this project and the fundamental question that is driving our research is what role can digital tools and resources play in supporting parents and improving the home learning environment.

And so to so start finding answers to this question we did several things first our analysis primarily focused on mobile apps for young children and parents. And then we complimented this literature review and also analysis of the global venture capital that is falling into companies, working on parenting our early years, products and services.

And so today I'll present you some findings and highlights on parenting apps and then in addition to this, we have also published report focusing on toddler tech and the market for apps that are aimed specifically at children. And then we are also working on an article, which will be more about the general innovation trends in this space.

And so to say the context of our research, I'd like me first provide a few reflections on the parenting in the smartphone era, if you like. And I'm also sure we'll hear many more insights from our wonderful panel of speakers today. From, so from ofcom reporting, we know now that smartphone ownership is fairly ubiquitous in the UK and also internet usage has been reported to be very common.

Particularly all parents of children age between three to 17 have been reported to have access to broadband connection. And so when it comes to parents looking for parenting advice, they're now drawing on a combination of offline and online resources and research is indicating that uptake of pregnancy apps for example, is higher among first time mothers and those who have had a smartphone for longer.

And then of course, parents are also increasing the, your information and support social media. However about the digitalization of parenthood offers new routes to reach parents and support learning at home. There are also challenges of course. For example, it seems like usage to support parenting might not yet be widespread as it's reported that less than a quarter of UK parents have downloaded an app to support the child's learning.

And also uptake of pregnancy apps have been shown to be lower among women with lower income or whose first language is different from the language of the app. And so as a first step to, to better understand the layer of the land we wanted to and to, we wanted to see what digital tools and are available for parents in their young children.

And so we have started here, we're looking at mobile apps and what we did was we used data analytics to perform a very thorough search of the Google play store. And these efforts are summarized in this picture. Where we are visualizing the landscape of different parenting and also children apps. And in this picture, every circle is an app and apps with similar descriptions are located closer together, and the color is indicated different categories of apps.

And if you go on Nesta's website on the, our report is published, you can also explore this landscape yourself, actually, and see all of the apps and so click on the circles and look them up in the play store. But of course, our first observation just by looking at this was that there's just a simply a striking number of different apps.

And so in total, in the journey from preconception to preschool, we identified more than 1200 offerings in UK play store. And so in the next slide, if we'll zoom in in the lower half of the slide, which is the parenting app section of this landscape. And if you go from the, if we start from the bottom and we go up, you'll notice it we have apps for.

Fertility tracking, for example, various period calendars. And then we jump to apps that helps track the progress of pregnancy. And then once the baby's born, we have also apps that we would do what we call tracking baby's rhythms, for example, recording child developmental milestones and tracking tracking sorry, sleeping and feeding.

And then there's also in, in the upper, like in a corner, you see a very prominent cluster, which is concerned with helping babies to sleep. And then we also have something that we call parental support apps. And these actually are the ones we are most interested in because this category contains apps that provide advice or activities that might facilitate child's early development and learning.

And two examples of such apps are also easy peasy and baby buddy, which we looked more closer in the report as our case studies. And you also hear from them today. So in the next slide, you can see more quantify this picture of the constitution of this parenting app landscape.

You can see that in total identified 303 apps designed for use for parents. And about a quarter of these apps are for helping babies to sleep. So this was the big cluster in the upper corner. And then another 25% are for tracking baby's rhythms. As I mentioned, like for tracking the feeding schedule or sleeping or developmental milestones, and then about 15% of these apps are in the parental support category.

And so these are the ones that provide device and activities. You can facilitate early development as well as other support, so there are also in this category, there're also apps that help to recover from pregnancy are also that connect parents to for example, babysitter services. And then if you go to the next slide, we can see a bit about the temporal trends in this marketplace. What we see is there are at least 30 new parenting apps overall that have been released every year since 2016. And just for comparison, like when we looked at children's apps, we found it actually about a hundred, at least a hundred new children apps released every year since 2016.

So there more developers developing apps specifically for children, but there's also a rising number of apps for parents. And what is particularly interesting for us is that what looks like is that this parent support category that through a particularly interested in has been growing particularly strongly in the past years, you can see in our sample that we identified only two parental support apps released before 2015 and then there are around nine new apps per year in the years between 2018 and 2020. And if you go to the next slide, you'll see that the number, so basically the number of apps in this category still is relatively modest. This category has strong, the strongest relative growth. And and so it's 75% growth across the past five years.

That's an interesting signal. Then if you go to the next slide, you'll see also another way, how to look at this, which is by using user reviews they have posted in place for, and use them as a proxy measure for app usage. It also tells a similar story where we find that parental support apps are in the upper left corner in this picture.

And so we're showing here is the on horizontal axis. We have the average number for reviews per year, across the past five years. And then on, on the vertical axis, we have the growth across the same period. And so you see that those support is in the upper left hand side corner, which we call emerging corner because there's a small number, relatively small number of reviews, but it's growing very so about 170%. And as a comparison, you can see on the other opposite corner, there are things like pregnancy tracking or fertility tracking, which have a large number of reviews, but their growth is slower and so they look like they're stabilizing. And it's also interesting that apps for tracking rhythms or for helping babies to sleep actually in the, in, in the bottom left where it's the dormant corner where there's perhaps not much happen.

So to summarize, it seems like the parental support category of types is emerging. And so another way to look at it is in the next slide where you can see also the number of installations and here we don't have access to, to look at installations across time, but we can just look at the total number of installations for these apps.

And when we compare this we see something that makes us think that there is still a lack of adoption of postpartum apps. So it looks like the fertility and pregnancy apps are much more popular compared to the other types of parenting apps. You can see, for example the apps to track periods and fertility have an average family installations and then postpartum apps are markedly, less popular, an order of magnitude smaller number of installations ranging between 200,000 to 350,000 per app.

And It makes us think that perhaps there's basically, there's an overall drop in usage for postpartum maps after after the birth of the baby. And then if you go to the next slide, another way to another interesting insight is to also look at the average user's core is, and yeah, sorry.

And Here. We can see that actually the average scores in all of these categories of parenting apps are quite high and average score is about 4.3 out of five. So these are the scores that that the users leave on the play store. And interestingly, only parental support category stands out as an average score below four, there's still large variation.

You can see with the black horizontal bars for the typical variation of these scores. And for example, apps that's we have looked as case studies like maybe buddy and AZ Z. They have much higher score in the, than the average score here of this category. And so these small difference suggested probably it's.

These apps are similar quality as the postpartum apps are similar quality as a P part maps, but they're just not yet reaching their users. So it could be that people have positive experience of apps supporting their pre-trial burden needs within perhaps very disappointed with a subsequent offer, or maybe it's just harder to engage actually with these apps once they, once they become apparent.

And so in the next slide, just to highlight that we did these case, so we talked to developers of baby buddy and easy PE apps and to look at sort of their insights. And of course we'll hear from them later in this event. And so I will not go into too much detail, be just to maybe highlight one takeaway of things, just especially sailing and in context of just on the findings we just discussed.

And this is that it seems like word of mouth recommendations and promotion via app stores is probably not sufficient to encourage a wide scale take up of parenting apps in the UK. And what both of these developers have done is to pursue partnerships with local public services to help promote uptake of their apps and also pursue endorsement from trusted institutions.

And then just to, before we move on to the rest of the panel let me also leave you with a few more kind of future looking trends that we found around parenting tech that we have noticed from analyzing the venture capital data. And overall what's interesting is that this sector appears to have seen a large growth of investment in the past decade.

And there are excellent products and services that are coming up right now. And of course, these might be still further away in terms of mass adoption and afford affordability, which is of course really important, but I think it's interesting to see the shape of things to come. And for example, we have things that I would call Alexis for parents, which is spec smart assistance that are specialized in providing parenting advice.

And then we also have family super apps which help produce mental load. And the key interesting thing here is that these apps are not just like a sauna or Monday for parenting, but they also can connect you to many other services. For example, food services or household repair or child mind.

And so the app becomes more like a platform or smart assistant rather than just an app. And so hence the term super app. But yeah, so with that let me just conclude having the last slide from my side. It parenting the parenting support apps have the potential to help narrow the school NCE gap by bringing evidence based advice and supported parents at low cost.

But it seems like this type of digital channel might be underused in the UK at the moment. And we have identified three opportunities for future innovation, which are number one to work with parents to co-design and experiment. Number two, to embed these digital tools in the delivery of local parent support services.

And thirdly, to also keep building the evidence base on their effecti. And with that, I thank you very much for your attention and also to Louise. And my colleague, Matt, who did the heavy lifting on the data analysis and collection. And I'm really looking forward to the discussion.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, Karlis.

For that really interesting overview of your research both those trends and takeup, and also some of those exciting new developments in terms of what's on office parents. So that was great to hear about. If anyone in the audience wants to pose a question to Karlis please be posted in the chat box and we'll pick up questions later in the Q and a session.

Our next speaker is Eleanor Ireland program head at afield foundation, and LNO will share with us some key findings from their recent time for parents' review and also discuss research that N foundation is found in this space. Welcome!

Eleanor Ireland: earn, thank you so much, Louise. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks to the really fascinating presentation Karlis.

Parents' use of digital tech is such an under-researched area. So the findings you've shared to date are really exciting. At the Nael foundation, we've recently completed our changing face of early childhood series. And the series involves six evidence reviews, which you can see on this slide at the moment, covering a broad range of different topics relating to early childhood.

And in the final report from the series which we published yesterday, we set out the public policy. Hasn't kept pace with the changes in the lives of families with young children. And this includes a digitalization of parents and children's lives, which is why the findings you've shared today are so innovative.

If I could have the next slide, please. Thank you.

Eleanor Ireland: There are a few findings from our sick review time for parents that are particularly relevant for the discussion here today that I'd like to share with. Firstly, one of the key things is that we don't actually know that much about how parenting itself has changed over time.

We do know that mothers of children under five are still responsible for the most childcare. However, the proportion of care that fathers do has marginally increased over the past 20 years. We don't also know a great deal about how the home learning environment has changed over time, but there is some evidence that parents are spending more time on learning activities than they were compared to 20 years ago.

And as we've seen from today from Karlis's presentation and also from your other recent report on toddler tech, digital technology is an important part of the lives of families with young children. And this represents a huge change over the past 20 years. We know that parents use of digital technology with their children.

They use it for both learning and for fun. And we also know that parents often struggle with managing their children's digital device use and they welcome advice on online safety. There is also evidence of significant inequalities with parents from more affluent backgrounds or with higher levels of education, having greater access to digital devices, being more likely to make use of them, having better digital skills being, and being more likely to mediate their children's activity online through, for example, using parent or control settings, one area we do need to know more about is the effects that parents using their own devices has on their relationships with children.

I know I'm certainly guilty of being on my phone too much when I'm around my kids. And there is some preliminary evidence from the us showing that when parents are very distracted by their phones, then the quality of attention they're able to give their children is affected and they tend to talk less and interact nonverbally less with their children.

If we could just go onto the next slide, please. Thank you. Some of your findings some, sorry, some of our findings are also really relevant to the three opportunities that you've just outlined. Karlis, in relation to future innovation in the parent tech space, your first opportunity about working with parents to co-design ways to connect them with expert advice by digital channels is really important.

Now we know from our work that parents often don't get the kind of support that they need and they don't get it at the times in their lives when they really need it. So as you explain, digital tech represents a great opportunity to provide parents with better support. We also know, however, and this is supported by the work he presented to date that there are issues with take up of support services for parents, both digital supports and in, in terms of in person support services, which is why co-designing with parents is so important and the second opportunity you identify about embedding digital tools in the delivery of local parent support services. Now, in relation to family hubs, we understand that many of them may well be hybrid in nature with a large online offer. So it's going to be really important that these services are designed to be as successful and as useful to parents as possible.

We look at parenting programs in our reports and the government is putting 50 million towards parenting programs delivered through family hubs. the moment, there's fairly limited evidence about the effectiveness of parenting programs delivered digitally. The evidence is growing, but it's important that digital programs are evaluated robustly, which leads us onto your third opportunity.

About building evidence on the effectiveness of digital parent support tools for improving children's outcomes. Now, I can't support this strongly enough. We know from all of the evaluations of interventions that we fund that actually bringing about and cha a change in children's development is not easy.

And we found in the parenting programs that we looked at, it was actually more common that they were able to improve parent skills or bring about a change in the home learning environment, but that it was often much harder to bring about a change in children's outcomes. And in order to do this programs often needed to be quite intensive and delivered over a reasonable period of time.

So it's really important, therefore, to ensure that digital parents support tools are properly evaluated. And we always recommend that early intervention foundations, 10 steps to evaluation success, they providing a really clear guide to the different stages of evaluation. Intervention should go through in order to establish their impact on children's outcomes.

Finally, I just wanted to note a couple of ways in which digital tech is being used to enhance support for parents. There are some effective parenting interventions that are delivered online, and that means that parents are able to do them in their own time without leaving home. And that means that parents who wouldn't necessarily be able to access an intervention in, for example, a children's center can access those types of interventions.

And there are also face to face parenting programs that use digital tech to provide advice and support in a way that wouldn't be possible. Without it, for example, the video feedback intervention to promote positive parenting and sensitive disciplines, a mouth fault's bit SD for short is a home based parent, a home based program for parents of young children.

And during the sessions, the parent and child are filmed playing together. And then the parents and the person delivering the intervention, play the video back and watch it together and discuss ways in which their parent might be able to change their interactions with their child, focusing or giving them positive feedback.

And the program's been found to have positive effects on children's earlier behavior problems. So just to conclude, if we take the findings of your report and our report together, we know that parents do want support with parenting and digital devices are a huge part of family's lives. And at the moment represent an underused opportunity.

So it's really important to understand how parents and children are using digital technology and how we can make it work best for them.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much. Eleanor for those really interesting insights into trends, affecting parenting and home learning environment. And I can say for myself, a lot of this brings true from my own experience as a parent, too. So that's really interesting to hear about if anyone in the audience would like to pose a question to Eleanor, please do post it in a chat box and we'll pick up questions in the Q and a session later.

Our third speaker on the panel is Hannah Pentith who is senior early as advisor at save the children UK. Hannah's going to share her own insights into the role of apps and digital tools and save the children's UK parent support programs. Welcome Hannah, and thank you so much for joining us.

Hannah Pentith: Thanks Louise.

And hi everybody. It's great to be here today to talk to you about our work. So I'll be drawing on save the children's insights and reflections into the work that we are doing to support low income parents through apps and digital tools in the early years. And we're very much at the start of this journey at save.

And there's a lot of alignment between the recommendations that Des are drawn out in this report and the work that we are exploring. I'd say the children were particularly interested to explore and test and develop robust evidence about apps. App based approaches do have the potential to particularly support parents, confidence, knowledge, and skills to support children's plan learning at home.

So what have we discovered so far on the value and challenges of digital tools and apps for parents? Okay, get the next slide, please. Thank you. Number one, the role of a trusted professional to support parents modeling, practicing, and adapting is really important in that digital space, in response to COVID and the lockdown restrictions.

We took our evidence based parenting program, families to connect and transferred it into an online version called families connect, blended learning. And during this adaptation we considered, how do we retain those core components of families connect around modeling, practicing, and adapting in a digital violent environment, really thinking how does this translate and is still effective for parents attending an online dimension.

And one approach that we introduced was a new tool called the families connect my journal, which is on the slide in front of you, which is a reflective learning tool that allowed parents to take what they learn in the online session and take that into the home with their children and practice out and adapt that to their child's unique interests and needs.

And using the journal, parents would reflect and prac and write down what, how they felt that practice in adapting with their children went and also record any feedback from their children. And this tool we use to really also incorporate children's voices, which allowed the program to be child led, even though in the online space, we took a decision for children not to be present whilst they normally are in the face to face.

And that modeling really. It's very true within apps that we've tested with parents where the key ingredient to app having sticking power was that it was introduced by a trusted professional who knew the family and were able to introduce that to them, that allowed the professional to show the value of the app, to make it accessible, to make it relatable and fun, and to show parents ways it can be adapted to their child's needs and interests.

And number two, parents and professionals, we've learned that parents and professionals have varying levels of technical skills and confidence, and that causes a challenge across both where we've developed digital tools like families connect and apps, parents in practitioners that we've particularly Parents that we particularly worked with on families, connect, blending, learning.

We, we learned that they really struggled with some of the kind of online facilitation and they weren't very used to that kind of space. So we really had to build in that time to guide and support the professionals in using blended learning and really build in their, developing their confidence. We've also learned that accessibility really varies.

The blended learning families connect was really positive for families, that it was huge strength for it to go digital, particularly when lockdown restrictions were in and out, which really allowed fam families to have that comfort of their own home to join, they had more flexibility to tend.

It didn't mean having to schedule in the travel time and the cost, which we know is difficult for low income families, and really allowed them to have that space to to join and make time for it. But there were also some barriers to access. So where we've delivered apps, we know that for some parents, they weren't accessing any apps at all.

And for some, they didn't know which apps were the best ones to use. Obviously our work with low income families, we know that digital poverty still remains an issue for many families. And also we learned that some professionals that we worked with didn't have the right phones to showcase those apps.

If we're talking about the importance of that modeling, being able to demonstrate that through their own devices is really important to making that digital solution stick. We also learned, there were some misconceptions around whether apps were designed to be parent facing or whether apps were children to use via their phones.

And of course, some parents were a little bit more reserved about parent children using their phones to play games. And so really clarifying the use of that app was important. So what are the opportunities if I get the next slide, thank you. What are the opportunities and building on the recommendations that came out of Nesta's report and the work that we've learned so far?

There's definitely still a lot to learn. We know that modeling is really effective tool to support parents and know that. And what we're really looking for is, as Nesto is also talking about is there was a lot of apps out there and clearly parenting support is an emerging space. So what we're basically interested in is how can we build bite size modeling into app based approaches?

How do we develop research about if this could be a sustainable approach to building parents or behaviors and strengthen their capabilities to play alone with their children at. As previously mentioned, how do we innovate and te co-design with parents and professionals. Again, we really endorse this recommendation from Nesta.

If we're planning to get apps, we really need to bring parents into that design, that development and testing of app based approaches so that we can really draw on their unique experiences and perspectives, particularly the adversities of poverty and how we, how apps could how could apps could work to support them.

This is an area that we're particularly interested at save the children through our building blocks research program. I think opportunity. Number two is how do we make sure that families are accessing quality apps and digital tools such as easy PE easy peasy and baby buddy, how do we continue to build apps that are high quality, incorporate the best evidence and practice around what supports parents in the home that really focus on those key behaviors that we know make a difference to children's outcomes.

And how do we provide consistent messages across this space that provides parents up with a quality home learning environment. Again, there's a definite need to call for robust evidence around what apps that really make a difference to low income families. And to be really clear about which families we're talking about, recognizing that parents are not a homogenous group and we need to make apps and digital solutions both accessible and attractive to parents who would most benefit from them.

And that leads me onto the third opportunity about taking apps and digital resources to the spaces and places that PA, perhaps parents are already at. And what are the opportunities there? We need to learn more about what appeals to families facing challenging circumstances, and how do we get apps in front of families who would benefit from the most?

Is there the power in endorsement from influencers, celebrity figures, corporates platforms like TikTok, Instagram TVB shows about reality styles, become moms, are these spaces that we want to be sharing and infusing our key messages and showcasing and demonstrating what a quality home learning environment looks like.

Given that we know that these are really successful ways to improve children's learning outcomes. So that's a quick run for of what we've learned and really just want to conclude that there's a lot of alignment between the report that Nesta has produced in the areas that we're exploring. And just in those boxes, as you can see, the two pillars that really unpin that is thinking really carefully about that co-design process in innovating or strengthening existing apps, but also being very clear about which families and parents are we specifically talking about, who are we really aiming to support?

And who's the most marginalized in the system and experiencing multiple layers of disadvantage in order to get that right for those families. Thanks for your time.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, Hannah, for really interesting presentation. It's really good to hear about how say the children adapted your delivery for online access and some of the challenges there as well as what's worked well.

So when I'll go into the Q and a session and everyone in the audience, thank you for the questions that you've already posted, and please do keep posting your questions and I'll feed these into the discussion. So a quick question for me first as chair Karlis, could I ask you which of the emerging technologies that you've picked up through your research, are you most excited about?

Karlis Kanders: And that's a fun question. I think, yeah, I think all of them are quite exciting, but perhaps a little bit still a little bit away in terms of, mass, mass adoption and really benefiting especially those families who need we in the most, but. I think one recent, an interesting example that I heard from a, when I was talking to colleagues from UCL, who then research in math apps and they and and particularly math apps that are not just for kids to use themselves, but for [00:31:00] kids to use together with parents, And one, one thing that really resonated with me was that, parents might have anxiety about their knowledge about certain topics, especially about maths and even maybe preschool preschool caregivers might have also anxiety about maths and they highlighted a sort of parent based app, which is supposed to be used together with parents and children, so promoting interaction, and they show that actually it has good outcomes for young children to learn maths and also support them.

And also the outcomes kind of persist down the line when the children become older. So I thought that was really interesting. And promoting the interaction between parents and the child.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you, Karlis. That's great to and I also had a question for which is could you tell me about what some of the gaps and evidence are in this space that you would most like to see filled.

Eleanor Ireland: I think there's unfortunately a lot of gaps in evidence in the whole of the parenting support space particularly relating I think to how we can provide support for parents, which is hybrids. We know that there's definitely, all parents. Use digital. It's a massive not all parents.

It's a massive part of many parents' lives, but I think we don't want to lose sight of the fact that face to face interaction can really help build up trust between parents and practitioners. And that those kind of relationships are incredibly important for taking someone on the journey that they might need to go on in order to get the kind of support that they need.

So I think it's really important to think about the role of digital alongside the role of other sort of methods, particularly face to face methods of providing parents with support. Yeah, that's just in relation to providing parents with. More generally. And we, in our report, we looked a lot at parenting programs.

Some of which are, have been of adapted to be moved online and as Hannah was just talking about one of the things that is really important to think about is longer term outcomes often evaluations are designed or, and in fact funded so that they're only able to measure outcomes immediately after the program is finished.

So it's really important to also look at whether there are any kind of outcomes, two or three down years down the line for both children and parents.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you really interesting reflections there. And then Hannah what do you think are some of the opportunities for future innovation and research to improve support for families including use of digital.

Hannah Pentith: Yeah, thanks, Louise. I think building on what Eleanor has said, some of the work that we're particularly interested in that save the children is thinking around the co-design parents around what it is that would really make a difference for them. So thinking through. If it is apps, what is it that really gets them interested in and what really speaks to them?

What does that look like? And I think some of the research that we are wanting to really understand with building blocks is as absolutely as Ellen was saying that it probably is not going to just be digital based apps on their own, whilst they will definitely meet a need and be a be available to parents.

It could be something very different. We know through a lot of our work, the focus on peer to peer support is really important. And we know that it's massively since COVID a really key part of what parents are looking for, but we also know that one to one nurtured care through health visiting and early as professionals is massively important to families.

But we've also got to recognize where the system is at and the kind of pressures and current job crisis that are happening within the earliest sector. So what can we do that helps to bolster what and join with that kind of face to face nurture. Or peer support. So I think the key thing really is to go and understand what are the needs in a local community?

What is it that parents are really looking for? And how can we develop that with them and test that, to see if that works and in the long term, absolutely. Ellen, I was saying around the 10 steps to evaluation. So building bot's very much built on that. How can we really start to see what that long term thing look looks like?

What are the long term outcomes and how can we start to maybe see if there's ways in which or solutions that we've developed that may then get built into mainstream services, such as health visiting that really adds and strengthens to the work that they do.

Louise Bazalgette: Absolutely. Thank you for those reflections.

Moving on the, some of the questions from the audience. So we had a question from Helen Lindner and she said, do the programs, consider families of children with a disability? So I wondered if any of the panelists have any reflections on that one. Be one to pick up in our section on apps as well.

To see if anyone's aware of particular kind of products or offers specifically for children families, with disabled children.

Louise Bazalgette: So moving on to question from Z 3, 1 7 music they said how many parents to perceive training to be parents nationally, which I thought was an interesting question.

And I wondered if any of you have reflections on that one.

Eleanor Ireland: Yeah. I just, I don't know. Yeah. I just, I don't firstly, I don't think national training to be parents is available in this country. I think someone in the, a couple of people in the chat mentioned antinatal classes and then there's also health visitors as well. Antinatal classes. Certainly my experience focus very much on pregnancy and childbirth health visiting will often focus on the child's health. And there's the opportunity to ask questions about parenting as well. But I don't, I certainly don't think that's routine by or universal by any means.

I'm happy to be corrected on that though, if anyone else knows of that.

Louise Bazalgette: Yeah. I think that's a really interesting reflection. I think it's a really interesting question actually. What training might parents or parents benefit from? Perhaps there's an offer there that we don't currently have that people would benefit from.

And maybe gone to question from Edward Watton he said, have you got any insights for families on kind of financial education? And I wondered Hannah, is that, is anything like that included

Hannah Pentith: as part of save the children's programs? Yeah, I we do offer I say the children, we offer families on a low income access to grants the early years grants.

And obviously through, through that work, we're really trying to support the immediate needs of families living in poverty and making sure that both children and parents have access to items such as vouchers to purchase food. Things that really create a welcome home learning environment and also educational resources.

And through that work, we've learned a lot around the kind of financial risks and predictability that families are going through. And so we've drawn lots of insights, which I'm happy to share around that work in the future, for people who may be interested. Yeah. I I hope that gives in some insight into that question.

Louise Bazalgette: Yes, absolutely. And we also had a question about specific areas where parents require digital solutions to support parenting. So I was wondering if any of you had thoughts on, where digital, perhaps adds value specifically in terms of how we can support parents

and that might include any kind of digital solutions that are being evaluated for example,

Hannah Pentith: Yeah, I think with families connect, blended learning, obviously that took an evidence based program for three to six year olds that we've been dev developed and delivering and save the children for some time.

And I think when we moved it to that digital space which was built on lots of kind of ACE and EIF frameworks to really make sure that we were doing that effectively. What we've learned is that still ha families and professionals are still accessing blended learning families connect.

It's still something that really meets that need it's as that layer of flexibility. So quite often we see that hybrid and I think LNA, you were talking about hybrid as well, where that's quite a common approach now where programs may be delivered both in person and and online and what we've seen with families connect.

Parents really like the online space. And then they may come together at the end and have that lovely celebration part of families connect in person. And that's even more exciting. Another thing that we found that was really beneficial of the digital solution of parenting program online was we had an informal Ben, on either side of a formal session, informal space for tea and chat.

And I think particularly in lockdown and still today, that creates a lovely forum where parents can get to know other parents. They can ask those questions. Sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable asking formally, or you can share ideas or you can ask for signpost tips. And it really is a space that's been really well received in that digital space, as well as it was very successful in person, but that we've been able to adapt that really well with families connect, blended learning.

Thank you,

Louise Bazalgette: And did you have a quick what you wanted to add as well?

Eleanor Ireland: only just anecdotally that providing support parents online might gives opportunities for parents to access, support that they might not be necessarily be able to do face to face. For example, I have heard about more dads being able to access programs that provides online cause they can do so in the evening.

And they're not maybe necessarily available in the day. And just writing back to one of the questions that one of the that Helen asked earlier in relation to families with disabilities, again, I guess a digital provision provides The opportunity for access in a way that face to face support might not necessarily.

So yeah, just some opportunities there really.

Louise Bazalgette: Fantastic. Thank you. So thank you so much to our speakers and to everyone who has posted questions. We've had a really interesting discussion. And for those of you who [00:40:00] aren't quite address your question yet, some of them were gonna say for the next panel discussion.

So it'll come up later. So thank you so much to Eleanor and Karlis and Hannah for those interesting thoughts, and we'll now move on to our next set of speakers. The, our next speakers all represent apps who develop that are developed to support parents for babies and young children. And so first up, we're going to have Erika Brok who is CEO of Kami, and she's an award winning entrepreneur philanthropist life coach, and keynote speaker.

And we will hear from her about her aimed democratize access to perinatal support via parenting at Kami. So really looking forward to that one and welcome Erika. And then after Erika, we're going to hear from Nilushka Perera, who is head of evaluation, impact and policy at best beginnings, and Nilushka will speak about parenting out baby buddy which is featured as a case study in our recent report.

Welcome Nilushka. And then after Nilushka , we'll hear from Jen Lexmond, who is founder and CEO of Easy Peasey and Jen will speak about the benefits that can bring by supporting parents to enhance their children's development. So welcome to all of our speakers. It's great to have you with us. So first off, I'll hand, over to Erika CEO, Kami.

Welcome.

Erika Brodnock: Thank you. Thanks for for having me today, Louise. So as Louise said, I'm AmErika, Rob knock. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Cami and Cami is a patent pending data driven intelligent assistant we're a little bit like Alexa, but specifically for parental Mel wellbeing. So in a post pandemic world, parents are really struggling.

Cliff 19 found that 77% of parents have a negative maternity leave experience and 17% of women leave their employment within five years of giving birth. It also takes new parents on average four hours of searching time. Every time they have a question about their parenting and even then they're left feeling confused by conflicting answers that aren't personalized to their specific needs.

Finally, there's a distinct lack of follow on support for the 25% of parents who sadly lose their children through miscarriage. So our research, it can be concurred with the findings that Karlis shared earlier. Uptake and engagement with apps is quite low among parents when the support is geared at them as opposed to for their children.

We are looking at exploring that more deeply to understand whether it's stigma related But suspect that parents don't tend to to think that they need the level of support that that they do when it comes to their own mentor wellbeing and health. We also found that that parents aren't the only people that are experiencing this problem, as I say, 17% of mothers are leaving the workforce.

And are saying that they're having negative maternity leave experiences. So we found that employers who fail to support their working parents are bearing costs of more than 8 billion pounds per year. And we suspect that this will continue to rise through hybrid working post pandemic and and now through the economic downturn can I have the next slide please?

So Kami is actually a digital assistant and a platform. That's powered by a human backend rather than an application that people need to to download. We're also training algorithms that will enable us to act as AI, as peer taking over some of the the triage side of what the consultants currently do.

And that will enable us to be able to to scale our provisions in a very cost effective way. We've designed Kami for buy and with parents. So I, myself am a mom, a mum of five. I'm a PhD in behavioral science at the LSE. And I'm also sky news is resident parenting expert. One of my co-founders pictured here is Helen.

She holds a PhD in computer science and one in N N. LP from the university of Cambridge. And she has been instrumental in ensuring that we've been able to create a product where we are able to meet parents where they are, understand how they're feeling and target the level of support that is provided by our team of consultants accordingly.

Our product lead, Nick Bingham is also a seasoned user centered designer. And we've been supported by. 153 parents and 20 health wellbeing and and midwife consultants from a variety of backgrounds ethnicities cultures and socioeconomic classes to ensure that all of the biases that are currently present in the kind of maternal and paternal care system are minimized when using the application.

And we are able to meet the needs of all parents, no matter their walk of life. Most specifically, including those who are under underserved and come from similar backgrounds to to. So next slide, please to talk you through how Kami works a little bit we are aiming to provide an AI's peer platform, as I say.

And what we do is we answer parents questions instantly. So we eliminate that for our search and offer people. Piece of mind quite quickly we then connects them to a specific consultant in the event that they need extra help and support in that space. We are have also developed some emotion and sentiment detection, algorithms that are really central to ensuring that we are one able to meet parents exactly where they are.

And two offer them the right support at the right time. And that really takes into consideration their unique circumstances. Kami currently reaches parents through employer subscriptions. They range from between one to nine pounds per month, depending on the size of the employer and the level of support that they want to offer their teams.

And we also operate a three to one ratio through a partnership with parents first, and that enables us to support one low income family for every three that are paid for by employer. Most frequently parents access our web based platform without needing to to download an app. They're able to ask a question, be matched to consultant for either chat or video support, as well as access Mo multimodal content that provides them with a little bit of education.

We are working to deploy integrations of Cami to to, to places like slack. Workplace teams and WhatsApp. So again, we can more effectively meet parents where they are, and we are really keen to to work with other partners to to specifically reach parents that are considered hard to reach, because we found that our approach of anonymized chat led support relieves some of the stigma that parents feel.

They don't feel intimidated by necessarily asking a chatbot question. And we are hoping to to be able to expand that support. And we are seeing that That people are staying with the app more than 53% of parents that start stay with us for a month. And that's from a wide variety of backgrounds as well.

Thank you very much for allowing me to tell you a little bit about Kami today. I'm looking forward to answering any questions that you may have in the Q and a session that we'll follow. Brilliant.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, Erika, for highlighting both kind of range of issues that parents might need support with.

And also that really exciting introduction to cam app. So if anyone in the audience has a question for Erika, please depost it in the chat and we'll pick it up later in the Q and a. So our next speaker is the Nilushka Perrera head of evaluation, impact and policy at best beginnings and Anica will speak to us about their parenting out baby buddy.

Welcome.

Nilushka Perera: Thanks Louise. It's wonderful to be here. So hi everyone. My name is Nilushka. I we'll be talking a little bit about baby buddy and how we strive to support parents and their sort of diverse experiences through pregnancy and also early childhood. See if we can go to the sh okay, great.

So baby buddy essentially is a free advert free, and it's just approved app and it's endorsed by eight Royal colleges including Royal college of midwives and Royal college of obstetrician and gynecologists. And the second version of the app with a unique father's pathway was launched in November, 2021.

So that's what on the screen is the second version is a snapshot of the second version of the app. The app has Dell information for you as a parent, which is bite sized and gives you the opportunity to read a little bit of information. And then if you have time and space, which is limited when you're a parent It gives you the opportunity to explore further through video based and written content.

We are keen on key on addressing inequalities and understanding the evolving inequalities in the sort of digital and parent communities. The video content has helped us reach communities who don't have English as a first language. The app also has has localized information, including information on your maternity units.

And it's designed to be a digital maternity record in accordance with maternity transformation, but also be a digital child health record, where it gives you the space to monitor and put in your child's growth information as well as have have a space where you can basically. Have all the questions that you would want to have to share with your healthcare provider, because the app is designed to augment existing healthcare pro processes and to of support those relationships between midwives and health visitors and other earliest professionals and the parents themselves.

So if you can go to the next slide the design and development of baby buddy is very much rooted in collaboration. So every piece of information that is in the app, the design of the app, the colors, everything goes through a parent panel that we have that, that feeds into the strategy of the app.

That, and also the strategy of how we'd implement the app in different communities. It's made of mothers, fathers, co-parents caregivers from all different backgrounds. And it, we try to encompass the diversity of parental experiences across. Different communities. The other aspect of it is the editorial board where each of each piece of content goes through an editorial board, made up of frontline professionals representatives from the Royal colleges and academics and experts to make sure this is up to date, evidence based information.

And technically we play the part of making sure that evidence based information is as access accessible to the parents that we want to reach. And the parents who need it the most. And we do that through policy engagement, through research consultations, and being part of evidence reviews. One of the other parts of the work we do is really recognizing that digital doesn't do itself.

We can have the coolest, Funt most technologically savvy app out there, but when it comes to really implementing it in communities, it comes to the next slide where we are very mindful that a digital tool needs to be adapted and adjusted into the communities that we need to work with. So we are very intentional of using participatory approaches in co-creating activities with local care pathways and other integrated partners and making sure that the app is accessible to those who need it the most in those communities.

And we can adjust the implementation of the app to make sure that it aligns with the health priorities in those specific areas. If you look at a little bit of the impact of the app, and currently we have embedded in over 49 localities across the UK, and we are currently with baby buddy, 2.0. We are working with Sur heartlands, Northeast London, Southwest London, and leads to really explore how baby buddy, as a, as an integrated tool could work in the sort of diverse communities that they would have in these areas.

So the impact of the app, we are currently at over 400 at almost 400,000 registrations. So that's in the next slide. And most of our users are moms, but we have a growing number of users of dads because now we have a special pathway with content created, especially for dads, with fatherhood charities, which is really encouraging to see.

And we are constantly now working on improving that content for the fathers as well. So we do have a special login in for healthcare professionals, so that in that interaction between the parent and the healthcare provider, they. They are able to explore the app and say, these are places that you can get more information and support that parent to get evidence based information when in areas that, that they needed the most.

So when you look at reflections of really developing and designing an app and having it in the different communities, the process of understanding inequities, inequalities and that evolving , where does really digital fit in is a really core interest for the charity and digital poverty is something that we're looking at more.

We are trying to make the app as small, as possible, as offline as possible with videos that are very short, which will work offline, but also recognizing Content needs to be designed with certain communities in mind. So the sustainability continuity of a resource that's digital and the re and the resources you need to keep it going is also a constant learning thing for us.

And we are now looking at expanding the app to diverse parent experiences, including LGBTQ plus parents parents who, with parents with disabilities and also translating the content of the app to priority languages in an area. That's in a nutshell, what I have to share with you about baby buddy and the way we engage with committees.

So thank you for having me and thank you for this. It's a wonderful piece of work that helps us also reflect on the wider landscape of digital tech and parenting.

Eleanor Ireland: Thanks, Louise. Thank you

Louise Bazalgette: so much. NAICA for that great intro FA body app. Really interesting to hear about that. So we'll now move on to hear from Jen Lexmond, who is founder and CEO of E easy PEY, and Jen will speak about the benefits apps can bring by supporting parents to enhance their children's development.

Welcome.

Jen Lexmond: Hello everyone. It's great to be part of this really fascinating conversation. Our mission at easy PEY is to help parents give their children the very best start in life. And a lot of us will know some of these key facts about how 85% of a child's brain is developed by age five.

I think it's always worth repeating we know that parent child interactions are really the driving force of early child development. So finding ways to support parents and carers of all different kind of backgrounds to have those more positive interactions in the real world with their young children is a really important endeavor and it continues to be the primary design challenge that we are tackling at E easy PE.

I think this particularly with reference to the significant gap in outcomes, that's already emerged between children of different backgrounds by this time. And so this brilliant Nesta report points to this biggest potential of parenting apps to potentially close that gap as well as pointing out a lot of these challenges that we're seeing to engagement and uptake.

I just think we really need to keep our eye on the prize here because the potential is so significant. And it's great to hear about the work that others are doing to push this agenda forward. So firstly, I think one of the key challenges to engagement actually starts right back with parental attitudes and knowledge.

What we're seeing still is that there isn't a high level of understanding amongst parents about the role that they play in their child's early development. So the Royal foundation center for early childhood that the Duches of Cambridge is leading on, has done some amazing work about UK attitudes.

And we see that still less than one in five parents recognize the unique importance of the early years and the role that parent child interaction has in shaping positive outcomes. So I think still right now, we just don't have parents full attention. And for me, that was like a key reflection and what we're seeing in those trends, in the report secondly, I think there's still limited awareness of what's available to parents.

So we also know that the majority of parents around 70% say that they are looking for and struggling to find sources of support, and also that they feel judged by others in their approach to parenting. And we see that these challenges are also all the greater for marginalized groups including low income families parents of children with S E N D L G B T parents, ethnic minorities.

And so on. And thirdly, I think is this challenge of availability. So in our user research with our parents, we see them really crying out for advice and support in their early years on a whole range of topics from handling challenging moments like bedtime and introducing new foods to how to know if their child is on track in their development and just what they can do to help.

And in particular, we see a real gap after like that first year and before children get into school, it's a sort of a no man's land for support where parents often feel very much on their own. And what we see is that a lot of what is on offer is either prohibitively expensive or too generic to be useful for parents unique and changing circumstances.

So I think there's clearly a role for technology and good design to play in this space. And I'm just gonna spend a little bit of time now describing a couple elements we've developed at easy PEY through listening and working with our user base, which is comprised of around 200,000 parents and carers, as well as our partners across the UK Australia and the USA.

And if we just move to the next slide, you can have a little kind of thumbnail image there of what our app looks like. Firstly, we know that parents primarily seek support from their peers as opposed to from official sources. And so I think there's a really big question about how we more effectively use peer-to-peer networks to provide safe, relevant content to parents.

At the core of easy peasy is a content feed that's made up of parenting ideas, advice and inspiration that's created from our community of parents, earliest experts and brands, and then quality assured by us. . And what we've found actually is that if we're able to take a user on that journey from consuming content to creating and sharing on our app, we actually see some of the biggest increases in retention within our user base.

So that's just a kind of interesting piece on the retention point. Secondly is personalization. And we've heard a little bit about this from Erika. At Kami, there's a lot of information out there, but parents often have very specific and also like rapidly changing needs. So we also developed AI for easy Z into a recommendation engine that really sits at the core of our.

And so we're able to take profile and behavior data from our users to provide them with the [00:58:00] most timely and relevant content for them. So our algorithms are learning and growing with each user over time. And that allows us to provide a highly personalized and adaptable experience. And since we introduced AI onto our platform, we've actually seen retention rates increased by over fivefold.

So there are really some amazing benefits I think, to be reaped from smart technology. So thirdly, I think digital offers this great opportunity for better cost benefit ratios. We've heard a little bit about this from others, but speaking before in terms of what we are doing, the lowest unit cost to deliver easy peasy that we've achieved so far.

As part of public sector partnerships that we run with local authorities and central government is 16 around 16 pounds per household or 30 pounds per disadvantaged household. But our modeling shows we could get as low to five pounds per household with greater scale. And this is really a fraction of the cost to deliver face to face workshops or coaching that involve expensive training and limited scale.

And I also it's [00:59:00] worth pointing out that digital can achieve as good as results to these other approaches. Although it's really important that we continue evaluating. But in our case we know that over 90% of our parents agree, they know more about what they can do to help their child's development after they start using the app.

And we've also seen that born out in independent evaluation of our app. So all four randomized control trials that our app has been subjected to. We've found statistically significant impacts on child development, as well as parent wellbeing outcomes. And that's been in around after 10 weeks of our users using the.

So lastly is just about, for me inclusion and equity and the potential for digital here. We've heard about the importance of working with with practitioners and with health and education systems. And we do this to help distribute and refer easy peasy to hard to reach parents. So I just wanted to share one example.

We have integrated our app with the UK's income deprivation affecting children. And what [01:00:00] that does is it allows us to track our reach to deprived households. So what we can say in the UK is that right now, 50% of our users come from the top 40%, most deprived households in the UK. And that means we can effectively narrow the gap through those working partnerships.

So I think that's something to really hold onto and to be developing as well. Yeah, just to end, there's 2.4 million households in the UK alone with children from birth to five. So I think the opportunity for impact at scale is pretty vast. And I don't think we're gonna get there if digital isn't a big part of the solution.

So I really welcome the report today and the discussion and looking forward to hopefully answering a couple of questions as well. Thank you.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, Jen, and all of our speakers who have been representing parenting apps in that section. We're now going to hear from two speakers who will consider the challenges and opportunities for parents in making use of parents.

Support apps. So first we're going to hear from Naomi as Yaku, who is a parent champion for cor and family and childcare. She's also a mother of [01:01:00] three and founder of mom monopoly, which is a platform that empowers parents in wellbeing, confidence, and self love for success. Welcome Naomi.

Naomi Azianku: Hi. Hello. Hello everyone.

Thank you for having me today. I have found this topic particularly interesting as I do use quite a lot of parenting apps and I have a few views and hopefully some opportunities that we can discuss further in order to help parenting with using apps in order to help them with, developing their children and also as a mother as well as some of the challenges that I have specifically faced is that sometimes I'll go to download an app and then that there would, it would say you need about 500 megabytes or something of space in order to download the app. And then that would put me off and then I'll look for something else.

So sometimes the size of the apps can be off putting. Also another thing that I have found is that the icons on the app, sometimes they may depict that it's child friendly or for kids. My daughter may go onto an app [01:02:00] and download something, but actually it's for a parent. So sometimes the icon can be a bit deceiving in terms of how it portrays, what the, what, who the apps are for and what they may be able to give for the child.

Also financial constraints could be another option as has been previously discussed from the other speakers in terms of subscriptions.

Sometimes you want to download an app, but the subscription is too much, or they are asking for too much for a small portion of the app and the contents of the resources that are available, that can also be offput but looking at how apps have been so fundamental during lockdown has also given me an insight into how developers can make it more useful for children and families, particularly with education. What I found useful was the fact that a lot of the tuition over the. Lockdown period was very good with using apps such as Google classroom, where parents have the opportunity to see [01:03:00] how the children are doing in their tuitions and also have an input and the teacher can also connect with the child.

I think that's a good opportunity for developers to think of maybe liaising with schools or coordinating with schools, to produce apps where children can have the ability to liaise with the teachers and also their parent at the same time. And it also gives the children the ability to download apps where it's friendly for learning and also for having fun another another thought that I have thought about is the longevity of the materials provided.

Sometimes the apps will have contents where it's beneficial for maybe two, three weeks. Or one or two months. And then after that, there's not really much use in terms of what is available for the parent and how you can use it with, your child at the time. Another I'm just blanking my notes here. Another improvement that I have found would be to make it more interactive parents do love to have a [01:04:00] chat, particularly mothers from single parenting backgrounds. Sometimes it's not just having advice, but also the support, having someone, another mother to speak with. Sometimes you do want to.

I wouldn't say advice, but you do want to have a chat with another mother and see how they are doing things. What has helped them in the past? So professional is good, but also, having access to other parents. And I found these very useful with pods and live pods where, parents have forums where they can join together and have discussions sometimes about relationships, sometimes about developments with children, coping with children with special needs.

I have found that beneficial and I know other parents have also found it be beneficial and also having the opportunity to have professionals is also key, particularly with those, with, mental health and some parents may feel lonely at times and having somebody just there to have a chat with is also important and gives parents the [01:05:00] confidence that, they have the support behind them, cuz it's not always parents from two parent households that will be used in apps.

It's also single parents and, having the support of those through midwives or, pediatricians that can support through the apps would also be beneficial as well. And having the ability to be anonymous as well for parents and not always be innovative to, share your face all the time. And yeah, I think those are the key aspects.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, Naomi, for those really thoughtful, reflections from your experience. It's really interesting hearing about how you've experienced it yourself and also some those reflections and what other parents will benefit from. So we're now gonna hear from cliff Manning, who is research and development director parents' own, and cliff is exploring ways to improve outcomes for children in a connected world through better services and support the families and the professionals they turn to.

So welcome.

Cliff Manning: Hi, thanks. Fascinating discussion. And I don't have an awful lot to it. I think a lot has been raised already today and some fantastic comments and questions. But just a few considerations, [01:06:00] having looked at the report previously. So if you have a next slide, parents own works to improve outcomes to children, through supporting families in the connected world and the trusted adult, the trusted partners that they turn to for advice and support that we've heard a lot about today and underpinning a lot of that is how do we support delivery of authoritative parenting which we know everybody shows is the most effective way.

What we find often though, is digital tools, is that. That becomes more of a challenge in a digital landscape that it digital can nudge parents into more uninvolved parenting or authoritarian. There's a, being able to look at what children are doing or feeling that technology is undermining their parenting skills.

And stepping away from it or over reliance on the technology to resolve a problem. And so that can take away some of the power of parents to resolve some of these. So it's a particularly interest of how do we get that sweet spot between the opportunities that digital provides that everybody's talked about here about increasing that opportunities, but also building on parents own skills, [01:07:00] understanding, and the relationships that they have as well.

So those are reflections that I had really, it'd be interesting to have more discussion, just a few points in discussion. Next slide. Is looking at all of these, I think for any app developer when considering technologies or any technology system is how, and it might be completely inadvertent, it might be in best intention, but do some, does some of the digital nudge parents away from the authoritative parenting that we're striving for and does it lead people into kind of assume that it's covered because there's the thing and I've got that and that app has now got that covered or it's now I can do everything and I, and it adds in a more, a different mindset as well.

So it's even the most, intentioned can have that sort of nudge effect in different directions. And I think it's less to do with the support, but we see what we saw in the report about, the kind of tracking of children. The apps that kind of tell you when things, when to do things and write moments and milestones and stuff, and, just does that identification, that digital tools convert everything into a bit of a [01:08:00] binary.

Does that actually capture the whole experience of the child? Does that actually are we seeing the whole. Aspect of children's lives within that. And again, as technology, just leading us into a way of thinking that kind of is against that holistic view of the child. So again, you get the benefits of the data and being able to analyze and AI and things like that.

But the risk of that is also then just seeing only the snapshot of the data and actually that doesn't give you the full picture and again, undermines your own ability to respond in a human way. And then it was really interesting to hear around, the benefits of being able to speak to other parents and but also having a, an expert to turn to.

And I think we need to be clear about the difference between those two things. And there's been a lot of conflation in some of these that we talked about today, and I think they both have huge benefits in themselves, but they are, have different strengths and different weaknesses. And I think sometimes that can be a bit confusing.

Just making a clear distinction between peer to peer support and where evidence based. And sometimes those can be aligned, but quite sometimes they can also be in intention between those. So how [01:09:00] do we address that and how do we make that clear and how do we get the benefits of both of those. And then I think just reflecting on the next slide, the the points from the report, I think this quote that sort of, while back on, on the Twitter just summed up.

I think a lot of what people have talked about today and what the intentions are for these services, is we want digital tools to strengthen the existing relationships not to just automate those away and become a placement. And one thought that occurred to me today is about this equity question about, are we inadvertently with a lot of talk about disadvantaged families and digital poverty?

And are we saying you can, there's not enough capacity in the system. There's not enough funding in the system. So you can have the screen mediated, digital, automated robot version of care, and those who can afford it can. The per the person centered the people thing. And I know it's not as simple as that, and there's huge advantages as others pointing out, but there's a risk that we start to lead into that for some who are less familiar with the nuances of this sector.

So I think it's something that we need to keep coming back to is how are we actually strengthening human relationships [01:10:00] to get the benefits from it? And then just finally just reflections on the areas of opportunity agree with all the points. I think the co-design is really key with parents that local support and integrating it into localized, the networks of support, trusted turn to professionals that families turn to understanding local needs is really key.

I suppose just how do we get that evidence of the effectiveness? Because we know that digital is worth into so many aspects and poverty is a huge driver of that. I'll leave that there. Thank.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you so much, cliff, for those really interesting reflections and provocations. I love the question is the data five child, the whole child lots of you over there.

So we now have an opportunity to pose some of the questions from members of the audience, to our panel. Thank you to everyone. Who's already posted questions. We had a question earlier on from Jeremy Boish who said, have you got any insight or data regarding mental health and wellbeing apps and how they're being received by parents and young people?

So I wonder any of our panelists, if you raise a hand, if you have any reflections there on mental health and wellbeing perhaps particular parents and how [01:11:00] that's being used.

Yeah, I was cliff.

Cliff Manning: Just it's a slight tensions, not necessarily middle class for parents, but parents own. We support from children need, we developed O L w, which is up for parents and children to use.

And we've heard about couse of apps. And so that was part of the pathways that we talked about. And it was for slightly older children, eight to 11 year olds to reflect on their mental health and reflect on the things that may be worrying. They can then follow a pathway, find suitable support and advice around that.

But also then they can notify a trusted adult and share that with them. And then the adult gets an adult version and similarly adults can follow that. And then the work we've been doing consulting with families and children around that, they've all found it quite useful. And the parents have we heard about the modeling and the importance of that.

They found that actually it was saying the same things that they wanted to say that the child maybe listened more to the app, but also it encouraged the parents cuz it built on their own it's oh, I was saying that. And so it actually built their confidence. So we found it's had advantages there and that couse is a really [01:12:00] interesting space.

I don't think we've quite got it right in this bit. It's something we're certainly looking on. So it's something to explore. And that's the only app that we've been developing from that. Brilliant.

Louise Bazalgette: Thanks cliff for those thoughts. And then I had a question from Z 3, 1 7 music who said Kami sounds brilliant.

What's the most asked questions by parents. So if I could hang to for that one.

You're on mute.

Erika Brodnock: Erika, sorry. I should, after two years know how to unmute myself before I speak now. But the most asked questions tend to be around sleep. And most recently we've been getting a huge influx of questions around how to return to work and how to manage the emotions of children as people are are having to return to work full time post the kind of pandemic and hybrid working situations.

Louise Bazalgette: Really interesting. Thank you. And Philip Noal asked how does easy peasy deal with the emotions of children which are based on the five senses using digital devices?

Jen Lexmond: Yeah, I'll have a crack at that. Thanks Philip. [01:13:00] So the easy psy app is a parent facing app, so it doesn't involve screen time for children.

And so if I could just give an example, I suppose that would be a piece of content from one of our parents that deals with emotions. This is one of our parents just called. Her profile's autumn, something. She has a child with autism about three years old and he would get really stressed out around bedtime and really needed a lot of routine to stay calm and calm down.

As he got towards bedtime, autumn shared an idea on the easy peas app, which she came up with, which was to build a bedtime routine through a series of tabs that her son would pull down every evening. So it was, get into PJ's brush teeth, glass of water. Story time, et cetera, et cetera.

And going through that routine really helped him to calm down and, ease a lot of pressure off of autumn as well. And so an idea like that could be discoverable by another parent who has a child of a similar age with autism. We would know that because of the profile data that they've entered [01:14:00] into the easy app and then our algorithms would help to send that and get them the most relevant content.

So that's just a little example about how the app can work in practice.

Louise Bazalgette: Thanks about Jen. And then we had a question from ALA Goel who said, which of the parenting support apps are free and paid. Has any research been done on what parents would be willing to pay and what are the healthier financial models to ensure quality content?

So does anyone in our panel want to share some reflections on that?

Erika Brodnock: So I did some research in this space. But it was back in 2019 as I was completing my MBA. We surveyed around a hundred parents and the majority, the vast majority of parents did not want to to pay for parenting support of via app.

They wanted that to be provided by the NHS or some other source that said through the pandemic. We were regularly approached by parents who wanted to pay us directly in order to connect with the consultants that that we have on the [01:15:00] app. Application because of the fact that they were in an incredibly stressful situation and not necessarily coping as well as they may have been PR pre pandemic.

So I think that things have shifted slightly and they may yet have shifted back again. As people have returned to work, and most importantly, parents have children who have returned to school in childcare. But I do think that the initial findings from the survey was that parents weren't willing to pay at all.

Louise Bazalgette: Thank you, Erika. And that that corresponds with them, what we've learned as well. In our report we found that most apps more than 80% are free to install, but the majority of them more than 50% also have in-app purchases are likely to restrict available content or have ads say thank you, Karlis, for pulling out that, answer that question as well.

And then a final question We had a question from Neil party and he said, he'd be interested to hear any thoughts or advice of practically tackling the issue of digital poverty. So is there anyone on the panel who's got any reflections on that or anything they heard about that's worked well in a local context?

Yes. Nilushka.

Nilushka Perera: Yeah, I mean I can start and I [01:16:00] think it's something that is constantly, I think our our insights are always evolving. So with baby buddy, we've tried to make the app as small as possible. So I think Naomi said, you do get put off by the size of the app when you start, when you look through the apps and look for support.

So looking we've. Looked at how to use servers and cloud based mechanisms to make the app as small as possible, because we do have a lot of video based content thinking about what does digital poverty mean for different communities is a really key question because there'll be issues of access.

So not have you would have a smartphone in your family, but maybe it's shared. How would you basically be interacting with digital or tech to support your parenting journey? What how do you really navigate that space? So that's something that we are constantly looking at our data to draw insights from of what do parents ask, what do they click on first?

And then what, how do they navigate that journey? And I think also data is a really interesting space to be in, in terms. AC being able [01:17:00] to download. So how would we work within a space? Where do you need to be connected to sign up to an app? How do we work? Create content that is accessible offline?

How do we create content that's small and short so that it also supports parents in their sort of limited time to absorb and reflect on their parenting journeys. And also. I think the key thing has been really asking parents how they interact with an app and what helps we've found that co in certain communities that integrating with WhatsApp has been really helpful.

So we take content from baby buddy, and really look at how you can use social media networking tools to support. Dissemination of information because we try to play that in between evidence based and peer to peer. We don't have a peer to peer forum as yet, but we do have what we call a spaces feature, but that's how.

That's just I guess I would just start off that inequality speak and digital poverty.

Louise Bazalgette: Oh, fantastic. That's very very full and really helpful answer to that question. So we have reached the end of our [01:18:00] time, so I just wanted to thank everyone, all of the speakers for such an interesting discussion.

It was great to hear from all of you and it's provided so much people thought. And thank you so much to everyone in the audience for your fantastic questions. So now that we've reached the end of the event, I'd be really grateful if everyone in the audience could please put in a short survey the links can be shared in the chat and it'll be available in the events description.

And there'll also be a prize draw for those who take part. So please do look out for Nesta's next publication on parenting tech, which is coming soon. And we've also got our next early years themed event on Wednesday 21st of September, which is Anesa talks to you session with Juno Sullivan. So lot's coming up.

So thank you so much to all our speakers and everyone in the audience for joining us. And I hope you really enjoy the rest of your day.