Helping Cards came from complaints, observations, and ideas. You’ve probably made complaints yourself; I know I have.
‘Why am I the only one who does housework around here? Why can’t you put your clothes away? Does that towel really live on the bathroom floor? Would it kill you to get the vacuum out once a week? Do you think your dog is going to walk itself? You know, the one you said you’d take care of if you got one?”
All that, and love them though you do, sat struck mute on the sofa, glued to their phones, your family. Silent. Oblivious. Just waiting for Mummy to clear it up, as happy as pigs in … well, a stye.
The glue was online games: Xbox, GTA, and Call of Duty. It was funny how the duty only seemed to include shooting people, not being buffed up and smartly on parade, standing to attention.
So we thought about a game that got kids to help clean the house. The first thought was that it should be an app, and for a good fifteen seconds, we thought about where to find someone to write it. The more we looked into it, the more we saw a huge amount of information that suggested that was the wrong way to go. Apps weren’t the solution. They were part of the problem.
The American Psychological Association, Sheffield University, and a raft of other academic research said much the same thing: the more time young people spend online, the more their well-being suffers. 2012 was the turning point when mobile phone use reached critical mass. The date when. The date when saying ‘everyone's got a phone these days’ became as true as it made no difference. It was also the year that well-being among young people started to decline, in their estimation.
Helping Cards set out to help. Our first product, Pocket Money Cards, is a physical card game that engages children aged 4 to 14 with household chores and the real-life survival skills they’re going to need to become self-reliant, balanced, confident and competent adults. It gets them face-to-face around a table, finding ways to solve problems, collaborating and celebrating their success without a phone or a screen. We can’t get rid of mobile phones or the Internet. We don’t want to. Life is about balance. Helping Cards can help you get the balance back in your family, wherever you live.