Why I built this.
Started as a late-night rabbit hole, became a thing for my own kid, became a thing for other parents.
When you understand your kid, everything changes.
Your toddler insists on wrapping a hand towel around herself like a dress. She has an entire wardrobe of actual dresses. But no, it has to be the hand towel. And it keeps slipping. And she keeps trying to fix it. And it keeps slipping again. And now she's screaming. And you're standing there thinking: what the fuck? You have so many dresses. Why is this the hill we're dying on today?
You don't get it. Because it doesn't make any sense. Because they're toddlers.
But here's the thing. Toddlers are real little people with their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own things they're trying to get done. They just don't have the language to explain it to you, and half the time even if they could, it still wouldn't make sense to an adult brain. That's not them being difficult. That's them being 3.
The towel thing? I realise now my kid could imagine what she wanted it to look like. She could picture the dress in her head. But her fine motor and the actual physics of how towels work were not cooperating. She wasn't really having a tantrum about a towel. She was having a tantrum about the gap between what her brain can do and what her hands can do.
I didn't understand any of that until I ran the report on my own daughter. And then it was like: oh. OK. Now I know why.
And once I knew why, everything changed. Not just how I felt about it. What I actually did about it. Instead of saying "just wear a dress," I started problem-solving with her. How about a bigger towel? What about a clip so it doesn't slide down? Maybe try a different material? These aren't genius parenting moves. They're obvious. They're just only obvious once you understand what's actually going on.
I stopped trying to reason with her mid-meltdown and started co-regulating instead. I made a visual calm-down sheet. She actually uses it now. She points to what she needs.
The meltdowns didn't disappear. She's still 3. But I went from "what the fuck is happening?" to "OK, I know what this is and I know what to do." That's what understanding your kid actually gives you.
How I got here.
It started as a late-night rabbit hole. Over Christmas, some apparently new research came out from the Australian government, and buried inside it was a finding that kids going to childcare did worse than kids who stayed at home. My mum guilt kicked in immediately, even though my kid wasn't in childcare and we were actively considering our options. I went down the research rabbit hole. And then I found out that the influencer I'd been following had their own agenda and had misrepresented the data.
And I was like: I am so sick of this shit.
I am so sick of sweeping generalisations about what's good for your kids and what's not. I am so sick of being told to pick a system, pick a side, pick a philosophy, and then feeling like whatever I pick, my kid is behind on something.
At the same time, I was in a bunch of mums' groups. Some were about which schools their kids were going to. Some were homeschooling groups. And in all of them, the conversation always came back to: which framework are you using? Montessori or Reggio? EYFS or play-based? The implicit message was always: pick one, and build from there.
And I was like, well, why can't I just see what they all look like and then do my best to kind of replicate so that she's, like, well-rounded and can slot into any kind of system? What if I move countries and have to find a new school? What if the right system for right now isn't the right system in two years?
So basically that's what started this whole rabbit hole. I stopped asking "which framework is right?" and started asking "why do I need to pick just one?"
I started building something. Not a product. Just a thing for my own kid. I was already using Claude (the AI) to manage a ton of context about my daughter Mika. All the activities I'd designed for her, her routines, what she was into, what she was struggling with. I started asking it to take everything I knew about her and map it against all 9 frameworks.
And I was like, holy shit. It's actually making it easier for me. Like, I feel like I actually understand the kid in front of me now. She can't tell me these things, but I can see the patterns.
It's not a clinical tool by any means. It's more like, okay, I realise Mika really likes engineering stuff. I realise her fine motor is emerging and the Montessori writing window is open right now. I realise she can reason like a 5-year-old but regulate like a 3-year-old, and that's why the meltdowns feel so out of whack with the rest of her.
Mika was thriving in language, cognitive, and creative initiative. She was building these elaborate systems, like a flower-drying machine out of an upturned stool, a bowl of flowers, a tea towel, and a book with a button to "turn the machine on." Another day I set up a water activity with pipes outside, walked away, and came back five minutes later to find she'd attached a two-metre pipe to the tap and had our nanny inside filling bottles while she controlled the water flow. She was 3.
And then I was like: wait. Is this actually useful for other people?
I mentioned it to a friend. She wanted to try it for her kid. I asked Claude if we could turn it into something other parents could use. A quiz anyone could fill out about their own kid.
So I put together just, like, a quiz. 100 questions. I threw it into a baby group I'm in. I was like, just wondering, is anyone interested in this kind of thing or is it just me? There's only 60 parents in there. 30 of them reached out to ask to do the quiz. 25 of them did it. The response was insane.
Parents kept asking to share it. And every single one of them asked the same thing: "OK, but what do I actually do with this?"
It wasn't just mums. Early years educators in my network started engaging too. They asked thoughtful questions about how the math section worked and how I'd framed fine motor. A couple of them offered to help me review the methodology. One parent compared it to a genetic-talent test she'd paid 7,000 baht for and told me mine gave her something that one couldn't. Not a fixed readout of what her kid might one day be good at. An actual picture of who her kid is right now, and what to do with her next.
'Cause this literally started as, like, me solving my own problem. And it turns out a lot of parents have the same problem.
Ready?
If any of that resonated, the quiz takes about 25-35 minutes. Be honest. "Not yet" is just as useful as "yes."