Role of Parents in Early Childhood Development: Top Parent’s journey

‘Serve and Return’ are the interactions between a parent and child, that shapes brain architecture, and lays the groundwork for the child’s successful future. Much like tennis, a child ‘serves’ or reaches out – with a smile, a cry, a babble. And expects a ‘return’ from a responsive caregiver through a hug, a word, a sentence, or even back babble. It has a direct impact on their brain development by the time they enter school.

It’s the most basic human behavior. One that we take for granted. But for millions of children who grow up with adversities or come from low-resourced communities, this is not always the case. Parents from low-income communities feel challenged and lack resources to support their children’s learning and development at home. It's a big unmet need in early childhood education in India, where I ( Sashwati Banerjee ) felt technology can play a central role. Top Parent was borne out of that idea. A free mobile app that could equip low-income parents with resources, strategies, and language that they could use to support their children to get ready for school and for life.

We launched Top Parent during the pandemic. We got over 150K downloads and endorsements from various state governments. But we soon realized that most of our users were leaving us after 12-15 weeks. We used a human-centered design to build Top Parent. We decided to go back to our users to build the next version.

Based on user insights, we revamped the app completely and launched version 2.0 in April 2021. Currently, we have over 350K downloads and over 50% of our users are active on the app – which means that they are doing all the things they are supposed to do – playing games, completing worksheets, and watching videos. That is great news for us.

What is even better is that independent offline research validates our online data: kids are learning, especially girls, and we are shifting knowledge among parents and caregivers. Winning The Learning Agency TOOLS ’21 competition was another validation that we were doing something right.

Our current focus is to address the huge learning loss that the pandemic has caused in children. Research shows that one way to help children catch up is to accelerate their learning. It means moving them forward into grade-level content, scaffolding their learning journey, prioritizing high-level skills, and creating learning pathways based on where they are today.

Complex right! Imagine doing this on a digital platform. We are fortunate to have Professor Ryan Baker from the University of Pennsylvania, to guide us in building a learning engineering system that enables us to personalize and deploy content based on performance and provide nudges to parents so that they can scaffold their child’s learning at home. Serve and return in action. We are simultaneously developing Top Parent in Marathi and keeping our BHAG of reaching 1M families by June 2023 in sight.

All of this is not possible without champions. I am lucky to have a team that is committed and passionate. It’s they who keep the engine running, the fires burning. Investors who have taken a bet on us – Central Square Foundation and the ACT Fund. Without their vision, Top Parent would still be a gleam in my eye. Most of all our users keep us on our toes and push us to constantly evolve.

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to tackling development challenges. The road is not a straight path. But if you stay true to the cause and embrace failure – my advice: Think Big. Start Small. Act Now.

Team Members: Akshina Gupta Pradip Singh Tomar Damanpreet Dhall

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