This little tablet made my son clean his toys

Don’t underestimate the power a cheap pill can have on a child under six.

Skylight Buddy is a device with one function: to be a cute little guy that helps your child follow routines and chores around the house. It’s $139.99, including optional subscriptions. And to my surprise, even though it offers a limited feature without the $39-a-year “Plus” features, it worked.

Skylight recommends Buddy for children ages four to 10. An adult should set it up, naturally, for what you do within the Skylight app. From there, you create a profile for your child and assign it to Buddy, which is limited to one child per device. This may not be ideal for large families, but in my one-child household it worked fine. In this program you can set recurring or one-time tasks and divide them into morning, afternoon, and evening routines. They appear on Buddy’s screen as large cards with emoji characters on them, so it’s a great option for a kid like mine who can’t read yet.

Buddy has several other features that are available without registration, such as the ability to use it as a night light and set a wake-up alarm. But the “Buddy Plus” subscription for $ 39 per year is required for other features such as reminders, the ability for children to receive rewards for completing tasks, or to set up screens during each task. Buddy Plus features are included “for a limited time” if you already have Calendar Plus connected to its other features. We don’t, and we have a white noise system and a night/wake light, so that reduced Buddy to a daily list on an Android tablet.

I thought: “Surely my son wouldn’t mind looking at things on the screen without being rewarded. I thought I’d try the basics and upgrade to Plus when it didn’t seem to work. As a result, the basics are all I need, so I couldn’t try the extras.”

My son he likes looking at things on his “screen.” There is not much to it; I create a morning and evening routine with activities such as “eat breakfast” and “brush teeth.” They enthusiastically tap the corresponding card as they complete each step, and when each task is completed at the end of the day there is a computer celebration with an emoji shower. The emojis change, so it’s been an event to see which emoji will be every day: “MOM AND WAFFLES,” etc.

That’s it! I couldn’t believe the tricks I was running. Like, really? You’ll wash your toys when the tablet tells you to, but not when I do? Without dangling the carrots of overtime or an ice cream trip? Again: Do not reduce the screen power.

Buddy is cute, which really helps. My review unit came with a green silicone case, which is an extra $20. It helps with beauty. But I think Buddy is so interesting because it’s a canvas for him and no one else. As I put it on the counter in our kitchen, I noticed that it wasn’t as tall as the Echo Show, which would make it more comfortable for a tall person to use. It looks straight ahead, especially at the eye level of a four-year-old. Wise.

I wish the app was easier to use. Setting up a task as part of a routine is easy, but when you have a task scheduled for a certain day, you can’t move it to another day. We usually shower every other night, but you know, some days require a long shower. I want to be able to develop the project one day and have revisions later; instead I have to make it a part of the daily routine and remember to write it down as a “skip” on non-shower nights.

I can’t even update any of the normal tasks – you can do that with Skylight Calendar, which I don’t have. Skylight’s VP of product, Anubhav Sarkar, tells me that this will be coming to the app this month, but until then I’m stuck with the projects I’ve created. It’s really painful to add one extra step to the day’s activities.

There is also no way to display a calendar on Buddy, although you can add calendar events in the app. Buddy seems to want it to match the other Skylight calendars in the house, which, again, we don’t have. But if you do, this may not be a concern. Personally, I was hoping I could get the bad news that there is school today on the screen, but no luck.

Look, it sounds silly to use a $140 screen to make a $5 sticker chart, or whatever cheap looking crafty thing you can cook up. But there is something very powerful about a child using their device, and the awkwardness it gives a parent. For a while, we tried to set up a “pizza chart” where our son earns cardboard pizza slices for every task he completes in his daily activities. At the end of the day, pizza slices can be sent to the viewing area. It was very difficult for us to constantly pester him about the pizza he did or did not get, and it only took a few weeks. Maybe it’s just that my son is a little older now, but even the free version of Buddy we’ve been using has been more successful than our attempts to turn fake pizza into slices. Paw Patrol.

I highly recommend Buddy if the software was a little more flexible. Being able to move tasks around without having to re-create the routine can always go a long way. Even so, it has come in handy in our home. We still have problems in the mornings and evenings that no screen can solve, but I think it has really helped my son to be more creative. It seems like an easy addition if you have young children and are already planning events around your home with the help of Skylight calendars. And lord knows I’ve spent a lot of money on temporary equipment to try to control labor pains. If you’re thinking of de-stressing your home, then you could do worse than this $140 cute set.

Photo by Allison Johnson/The Verge