What If the Solution to Too Much Screen Time Was… a Simple App? A Question for Parents
It’s 4:30 in the afternoon and I’m standing at the kitchen sink scraping dried mac and cheese off a plate. My son, six years old, is orbiting me asking for the fifth time whether he can watch a show. My daughter is supposed to be drawing at the table but she’s using her crayon to poke her brother’s elbow. The baby, strapped into the highchair, is methodically throwing crackers onto the floor one by one like she’s testing gravity.
I say the usual things. “Go play.” “Find something to do.” “Can’t you just… play?” These are useless commands, and I know it. The house has toys. The house has art supplies. The house has a backyard. But there’s a gulf between “there are things to do” and “I have enough energy to help you get started,” and that gulf is getting wider the more tired I get.
So I do what every parent I know does. I pick up my phone to search for ideas. And there it is — an infinite scroll of Pinterest crafts requiring cork coasters, printable templates, and a hot glue gun I don’t own. Another photo of a rainbow made out of painted bottle caps. A PDF with instructions for a “fort-building kit” that clearly took someone three hours to assemble.
I close the phone. I open it again. And that’s the thing that gets me: to pull my kid away from a screen, I’m staring at a screen.
That’s the moment I asked myself whether there was a better way. And honestly, after weeks of thinking about it, I’m not sure. Which is why I’m writing this — because I need help. Parents, I want to validate an idea with you.
An app that is absolutely not for your kids. Not a kids’ app, not a gamified thing, not a digital toy. It’s for the parent. It’s a simple, screen-free activity deck, applied through a screen. You scroll for three seconds on the couch before you get up, find something that requires no trips to the craft store, and then you put the phone down. That’s the design. Ninety percent of the value is just having the idea handed to you so your depleted brain doesn’t have to invent one from scratch.
Here’s what happened the first time I actually tried to make something like this work.
I had just gotten my son off his tablet after a doctor’s appointment that ran too long. It was barely 11am and I was done. I flipped through my own mental list: Balloons? No. Play-doh? He’d peel it into tiny pieces and leave them in the carpet. Puzzles? They end up arguing about who gets which piece.
I opened a note on my phone. I typed a list of things that didn’t require me to buy anything or think too hard.
1. Tape a line of painter’s tape on the floor. Use cars as traffic.
2. Build a robot out of the recycling bin.
3. Give them a spray bottle of water and a towel. Send them outside.
4. Stack empty soup cans into a tower.
5. Put a towel in the middle of the floor. Declare it an ocean.
They sound almost stupid, written down. But here’s what happened: I picked number one. I put the phone down. I ripped off a piece of painter’s tape and stuck it to the floor in a curvy line. My son drove cars along it for twenty minutes while I sat on the couch, drinking a coffee that was still warm. That felt like a small miracle.
The ones that worked weren’t clever. They weren’t aesthetic. They weren’t the kind of craft projects you’d post online. They were just things that required zero explanation and under a minute of setup. That was the whole trick.
I started to pay attention to why some ideas worked and others died on arrival.
An activity fails the second it needs me to gather fifteen items from three different drawers. An activity fails the second my daughter asks “and then what?” and I have to explain. An activity fails if it makes a mess I have to manage. You know what succeeds? A cardboard box. A roll of tape. A timer. Water. The phrase “whoever can hold the most in their hands wins.”
But I’m also a realist. I know the problem isn’t a lack of activity ideas. You can Google “things to do with kids” and get eight million results. The actual problem is the barrier between the thought and the movement.
When I’m overwhelmed, I don’t need a hundred ideas. I need maybe three, and I need them to meet me at my exact level of functioning right now. If I’ve had a terrible night with the baby, I need activities that involve my son being next to me while I sit. If it’s raining, I need indoor ones. If I just cleaned the floor, I need things that don’t involve liquid.
I think there’s something honest about building an app that is boring on purpose. No badges. No streaks. No “parenting hacks.” Just a categorized list that you filter by space, by mess, by how much attention the parent can offer. The phone plays the role of the person who says “here — try this one,” and then it gets out of the way. That’s the design intent.
But here’s what I keep turning over. Do we need another app? Every parent I know has a notes app. Half of them already have a “things to do with kids when I’m desperate” note that they barely open. Why would they use mine instead of their own mental list?
Maybe the answer is searchability. When you’re at your lowest, your memory stops being reliable. I know I’ve stood in my kitchen absolutely unable to think of even one thing that didn’t involve a screen. You know the feeling. Your brain is a white wall. Somebody says “I’m bored” and you genuinely cannot manufacture a single option.
So maybe the app doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be there. Like a spare key taped to the underside of the porch. You don’t use it often, but when you do, it solves the problem of being locked out.
I shared an early version of my list with a neighbor who has two kids under five. She kind of laughed. “It’s not the ideas,” she said. “It’s that someone already did the thinking. I have like two extra brain cells when I don’t have to invent it myself.” I think she’s right. The app isn’t selling ideas. It’s selling mental bandwidth.
I still don’t know if this is worth building as an actual app, or whether it should just be a laminated card stuck to the fridge. That’s the part I need help validating. If you’ve ever stood in the bleak light of an afternoon and genuinely had no idea what to do with the small human asking for attention, you know the problem is real. The question is whether a simple, screen-free idea generator is the thing that helps you put the phone down for real — or whether it’s just another device between you and your kid.
Right now, I’m leaning toward it being okay, so long as it doesn’t ask for more than three seconds of your attention. The moment an app becomes a rabbit hole, it’s just another screen.
So what do you think? Would you save a list of activities to your phone that you only open when you’re running on empty? Would you trust it to be simple enough that you could actually follow through? I’m not looking for the perfect product. I’m just trying to figure out whether this helps a parent in a real afternoon, not in an idealized one. Because the only way I can tell if this matters is by hearing from the people who’ve stood exactly where I was standing — dishwater on your hands, a kid pulling at your shirt, and the willingness to try almost anything.
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