Web 2.0 parenting

I have loved spending the past two and a half years with Elisabeth and watching her explore and develop on a daily basis. I have loved taking thousands of pictures and keeping this blog to be able to record our memories. Learning how she is developing, and finding appropriate ways to encourage and stretch her has been a delight.

As I spent hours perusing book lists, searching the shelves of libraries and bookstores, and wandering (mostly frustrated) through toy stores, I wondered if there was a service that told you what skills your child was currently developing, and recommended great books, toys and activities for each developmental stage - in short, a service to make parenting simple, so parents could spend more constructive time with their kids.

So I looked, and came up empty. There are lots of lists: lists of milestones, lists of books, lists of toys, and lists of activities. But no one had pioneered web 2.0 parenting, by providing parents a simple, customized, interactive environment to learn about and support each stage of their children's development.

At the same time, my childhood best friend, Jonathan, had seen that although parents (like me) take thousands of digital pictures, and there are many services for printing and sharing photos on the web, no one seemed to realize that the rate of computer replacement by home users would mean that parents needed a better and more reliable way to store their memories and photos for the long haul.

Thus tumblon was born. We could provide parents a simple, customized, interactive environment in which parents could learn how to support their child's current development and save those memories in stories, photos, and videos. It would be an interactive online 'baby book' so that grandparents (and other friends and family) could enjoy all the memories 24/7 - and for many, many years to come.

As an educator, I believe that parents are the key players in the education of children. I also believe that their greatest responsibility lies in the first five years of life (thought it certainly doesn't end there), as those early years mold the character, shape the personality, and even affect the intellectual capacity of children. So the prospect of creating a service that enabled parents to fulfill their responsibility, celebrate all of the milestones along the way and create a rich archive of memories is a dream come true.

In the not-so-distant future, that dream is going to come true when we launch tumblon. There is a teaser site up now, where you can sign up to learn more. And I'm posting on the founders' blog as we get closer to launch. Before too long, I'll start posting on my new tumblon blog, so you'll know that the transition has arrived, when this blog redirects you there!