Children: Awareness
Understand what parenting involves, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
The parent-child relationship is one of the most consequential human bonds. The quality of this relationship – not specific parenting techniques – is what predicts outcomes most strongly.
Cross-cultural research in Communications Psychology (2024) found that higher recalled parent-child relationship quality predicted adult flourishing and current mental health across a diverse group of countries. The foundations for lifelong wellbeing begin in the early years.
Quality of interaction matters more than quantity. Research in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (2023) found that insufficient parent-child quality time is associated with lower flourishing, and specific interactive activities like singing and storytelling drove the strongest outcomes.
Across more than a thousand studies, greater wellbeing is seen for children with higher combined parental care and lower combined parental psychological control. Warmth, responsiveness, and appropriate boundaries matter far more than any particular parenting method.
People approach parenting with different priorities. This site scores every parenting intervention across four core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these four values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Wellbeing
Supporting your child's overall physical, emotional, and psychological health. Creating a stable, nurturing environment, attending to mental health, ensuring adequate sleep and nutrition, and prioritising the child's current happiness alongside future outcomes. People who lean towards this value focus on the child thriving now, not just preparing for later.
Relationship
The quality of the parent-child bond – warmth, trust, communication, and genuine connection. Being emotionally available, enjoying time together, knowing your child's inner life, and building a relationship they want to maintain into adulthood. People who lean towards this value invest in connection as an end in itself.
Achievement
Supporting your child's cognitive, academic, and skill development. Structured enrichment, high expectations communicated warmly, and preparation for future success. People who lean towards this value believe parents should actively cultivate capability.
Development
Fostering independence, resilience, and character through age-appropriate challenges and progressively expanding autonomy. Allowing risk-taking, supporting self-direction, and building executive function. People who lean towards this value focus on who the child is becoming, not just what they can do.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each parenting value:
Magda Gerber developed the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach, built around deep observation and respect for children's emotional states from birth. She raised her own three children using these principles before formalising them into a teaching methodology. Her approach – treating even very young children as full people whose emotional experiences deserve attention – produced measurably more secure attachment outcomes in the children of parents she trained, and her methods are now used in early childhood programmes across the world.
Barack Obama maintained nightly family dinners throughout his presidency, rarely missing them even during major crises. He has spoken extensively about structuring his schedule around his daughters' school events, sports fixtures, and everyday conversations. Both Sasha and Malia Obama have described their father as deeply present and emotionally available despite the pressures of his role, and the family's closeness has remained visibly strong through their adult years.
László Polgár set out to test his theory that any child could reach exceptional levels in a chosen field with early, deliberate training. He and his wife Klara raised their three daughters – Susan, Sofia, and Judit – to become chess prodigies. All three became among the strongest female players in history, with Judit widely regarded as the greatest female chess player of all time. Polgár documented his methods and the children's development in detail, and all three daughters have spoken positively about their upbringing.
Lenore Skenazy became known as "America's worst mom" after writing about letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway alone. She went on to found the Let Grow movement, advocating for age-appropriate independence and unsupervised play. Her own children grew up with progressively expanded freedoms – navigating public transport, managing their own schedules, and solving problems without parental rescue – and she has documented how this approach built their confidence and self-direction over years.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Wellbeing
Relationship
Achievement
Development
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published research on parenting behaviours and child development. All items in this area are scored.
You now understand why parenting matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about wellbeing, relationship, achievement, and development. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Children. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions