The Independence Planner: Hand Them the Tablet and Walk Away

TL;DR

The Independence Planner lets you build a full day of routines, social stories, and activities, then hand the tablet to your child and walk away. They work through it on their own, one step at a time. No more being the middleman between tasks.

Key Takeaways

• String everything together. Routines, social stories, and token boards scheduled into a single day your child works through independently.
• Hand it over once. The child-facing dashboard locks the experience to just their day. No settings, no distractions.
• You stop being the dispatcher. The planner replaces the cycle of hand-tablet-take-back-hand-tablet with real independence.

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The routines were working.

That was the thing. My son, Carson, was actually following them. Step by step, on his own, doing the task without me standing over him prompting every move. That part of Gentle Journeys was doing exactly what I built it to do.

But then he'd finish a routine and I'd have to take the tablet back. Not because anything went wrong. Because if I didn't, he'd go foraging through the app settings, and suddenly we're in a different situation entirely.

So the pattern became: hand him the tablet, he does the routine, take it back before he wanders, cue up the next thing, hand it back. Repeat.

The whole point of Gentle Journeys is independence. That's the mission. And here I was, still a required step in the process. The routines themselves were building independence, but the space between routines was all me. I was the dispatcher, managing the device, managing the transitions. A product built to remove the need for constant prompting still needed someone prompting between tasks.

That wasn't going to work long term. Not for Carson, and not for the product.

I started talking to other parents and therapists using the app to gut check. It wasn't just a Carson thing. The individual tools were working, but the transitions between activities were where independence broke down. Everyone was the glue.

That's where the Independence Planner came from.

The idea was simple. What if I could string all of Carson's routines, stories, and activities together into a sequence for the whole day? Set it up once, hand him the tablet, and actually walk away?

That's what the planner does. You schedule any combination of routines, social stories, and token boards onto a day. Set recurrence rules if you want - weekday mornings, weekends, custom. Then the Independence Dashboard takes over. It's the child-facing side. Shows them what's next. Big buttons, low cognitive load, clear sequence. They work through their day, one activity to the next, without anyone stepping in to manage the transitions.

The dashboard locks the experience down. No settings to find. No app to accidentally close. Just their day, in front of them, waiting for them to own it.

The shift was going from "here, do this one" on repeat to "here, you're on your own." And meaning that as a good thing.

That's always been the north star for this product. Not managing kids. Not automating parenting. Building the scaffolding so they can do it themselves. The planner is the closest I've gotten to that vision actually working the way I imagined it.

See the Independence Planner in action - walk through an interactive demo of how a full day comes together.

Ready to try it with your child? Start your free trial and build their first independent day.