Nobody is selling anything to your child.

What it will not do.

• It will not diagnose your child

  It has never met them. You have.

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  A diagnosis is a judgement about one particular child, made by someone who has watched them, asked you questions, and can be wrong in front of you and correct it. None of that is available to a system reading published research.

  So it will describe what is typical, name what a behaviour is usually called, and tell you what the research says about its course. It will not tell you what is happening with your child, and it will not tell you that nothing is.

  If you want an answer about your child specifically, the honest route is a person who can see them. We will say that rather than fill the gap with something that sounds like an answer.

• It will not answer when the research does not

  It says it cannot, and stops.

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  There are questions parents ask constantly that nobody has good evidence about. A system that always produces a fluent paragraph will produce one for those too, and the tone gives you no warning that it has run out of ground.

  So the refusal is built in. Where there is no sourced answer, you get told that, and the question goes on the list of ones being written.

  This is the part that costs us. An empty answer looks like a worse product than a confident one, right up until you check it.

• It will not compare your child to other children

  No percentiles. No charts. No age by which something should have happened.

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  Ranges in child development are wide, and the ends of them are full of children who are fine. A percentile turns that width into a position, and a position invites a verdict.

  The questions worth asking are about direction and change, not rank. Are new words still arriving. Did something that was there go away. Those we will help you think about.

  There is no leaderboard here, no streak, and no chart with your child on it. Not as a setting you can turn off, as a thing we did not build.

• It will not speak to your child

  No child account, no voice, no chat. The answers are written for you.

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  The answers on this site are the parent surface, and they are addressed to an adult. There is no route by which a child reaches them, because there is no child account and nothing to log into.

  When the app exists, Sparky and his friends will talk with your child. That is a different surface with different rules, and it will never be the thing answering your questions about them.

  The two are kept apart on purpose. A system that both advises you about your child and talks to your child has an obvious way to go wrong.

• It will not sell you anything with what you tell us

  No advertising, no data sold, no trackers.

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  What you ask is kept so we can send you the answer and so the unanswered questions become the list of what to write next. That is the whole of it.

  There is no advertising network, no data broker, and no arrangement under which your address is worth money to anyone. There is no analytics script on this site and no pixel, which you can check yourself in about a minute.

  One email a month, and one click to leave from any of them.