Several months ago, I interviewed Accidental Pren-her Moschel Kadoku for this month's broadcast of Stories of the Unexpected.
You can listen to it from your computer by clicking on the play button, download the MP3 file and listening on your iPod or other MP3 listening device, or read it in full below.
Enjoy!
The original Accidental Pren-her™
Welcome to another episode of the “Accidental Prenuer: Stories of the Unexpected.” My name is Susan Reid and we have as our guest today entrepreneur Moschel Kadokura, President of Timely Matters, Inc. Welcome, Moschel.
M: Oh, thank you very much.
S: It’s great to have you here, so thank you for taking your time today.
M: Oh, it’s my pleasure.
S: Well, ladies and gentleman, I am excited to tell you that Moschel has just launched a brand new, innovative product that all of you parents out there will want to know about. It’s called On-Task On-Time For Kids and this cool product promises to keep kids on task and stop parents from nagging. That sounds almost too good to be true, Moschel.
M: I thought so, too, when I set up my first system for my kids, but it really did work.
S: Well, tell us how you got the idea for On-Task On-Time For Kids, and more about how it really does keep kids on time and on task while stopping parents from nagging.
M: First of all, I should explain that I’m a mom of four children and my oldest three are triplets. They are close to 18 and this idea came up close to 13 years ago when it was the first experience I had with having to get all three of my kids to school on time, every day. What I found was…I thought I could do this, you know, I could get them up, get them dressed, out the door…but as the days went by I found myself all morning long, until we were in line at school, that I was nagging them. I had to remind them: tell them to get dressed, tell them to put their shoes and socks on, tell them to eat, and by the time we were out the door, I thought, “What am I doing? Why is it that I feel like I’ve nagged them the whole morning long?” It’s not starting off their day very well, and it got to the point where I said, “I have to do something. This is just not working.”
The first time I came up with this system, what I found was that if I put everything that the kids needed to do, along with a timing feature, they could go to this device and get themselves ready. It had all their tasks. It indicated not only what they had to do, but when they needed to do it, so it kept them on task and on time. And the first time that they used this, I remember feeling an incredible freedom from being this nagging mom, and they enjoyed it so much they were laughing. They were racing each other. They were racing the timer and at the end of that, they kind of said, “Look Mom, I did this on my own.” So they had a very positive feeling from using this system. So that was where the idea came from. Just managing my three kids and getting them off to school on time. I didn’t even think that this was a product; I thought that this is just something that I need to use because I was raising triplets.
S: Yes, I bet it did.
M: And so I kind of kept it to myself. There were some friends that came over and said, “Oh, what is this thing that you have up on your wall?” And I said, “Oh, it’s just this thing that we use to get out the door on time.” And they would say that it is a really good idea, but it didn’t go any further than that. It wasn’t until I had our fourth child and he started kindergarten and I thought it was easier raising the one child than the three, and I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to have any problems getting my youngest out to kindergarten. It’ll be fine.” But the same thing happened – he would get up and I would have to remind him we need your shoes and socks, we need to brush your teeth, we need to move on to eating breakfast, and I thought, “Well, why do I need to nag him?” So I made a second prototype of On-Task On-Time for Kids and he looked at it and he loved it and he said, “Yeah, I can use this, Mom.” And he, from kindergarten then, was able to get himself completely ready for school, brush his teeth, without me reminding him. And I think that’s the big thing. He felt that he was able to do everything on his own. And that’s what this system does. It gives the kids a real sense of self esteem and independence, and gives parents the freedom to go and do whatever it is that they need to do in order to make their morning successful as well. It just helped our family tremendously and, again, I didn’t really think that this was a product until the following year, after all my kids were out of kindergarten. I started substitute teaching for the kindergarten teacher who had all four of my children and she asked me a question. She asked, “What parenting tips or tools do you have that I can pass on to other parents?” There were some issues that were coming up in the classroom. And I said, “Well, I do have this one thing that I try to use with my kids so that I’m not nagging them all the time,” and I showed her my prototype that I used for my youngest son. She looked at it and she said, “Every single parent can use one of these.” And that’s where the business gears started ticking and started going and I thought, “Well, if every single parent can use one of these and if it would help every single parent, than I have something that may be the start of a business.”
S: Well, indeed, this started out really as a survival method for you.
M: Exactly.
S: Getting all of your triplets out of the house on time without turning into what we all hate and that is a nag. We all hate that; children, as well as parents or adults. Nobody likes that nagging thing.
M: No, and I found that, in such a negative way, that nagging is sometimes synonymous with mothering. Parents have to nag their kids, and why is that? It’s because, when you nag, you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over and over again and the reason why you’re doing that is because there is a routine set up within any certain part of the day. And I find that the transition times of the day, when you’re transitioning from home to school or from school to home, especially in the evening when you’re trying to transition your child from family time and awake time to bed time.
When I started to think that maybe this did have a business application, I started to research when parents have struggles with their kids. What are other transition times? And the bedtime thing – that’s a big one. It wasn’t one that I felt was a problem in my house. I just felt that getting the kids to school on time was just a primary, a first lesson you want to teach your kids about how important education is. You’ve got to be there on time to start your day properly. In the evening, I was a little more relaxed but I know that in other families, to have a successful morning, you need to have a successful evening. And so, when I started researching it and I saw how important it was to have a bedtime routine, I thought, “Well, that’s another area where this type of system would really help out.”
When we started to formulate this, I knew it worked great for us and my husband saw it working and he thought it was a great idea, but I wanted to try it with other families so we decided to build 25 prototypes. We made stickers. We made pictures of children doing the little tasks that need to be done in order to go to bed: brush your teeth, floss your teeth, and take a bath. All of the tasks that you could think of: lay out your clothes for tomorrow, organize your backpack. The final product has 52 task stickers to cover the three times of the day: the morning, the afternoon and the evening.
S: You know, I’ve been to your website and just for everybody that’s looking out there, you can check out this amazing product at www.timelymatters.com. When you go there, you’re going to see a picture of this product and you’re going to see that the drawings on it are just so cute and so appropriate, age-level appropriate, that kids will really enjoy not only the visual aspect, but, as you talked earlier, the empowerment that they get and the pride that they develop within themselves when they independently complete a task or move through a transition with ease.
M: Yes, that is what we are hoping all the children feel. There is a way to reward success. We have a reward chart on the back. What we found with the prototype families, all the kids who tried it, that they just felt so good about taking ownership of that very important time of the day. I don’t think any of the families used a reward system. It was more just the kids getting the feeling that, “Hey, I did this by myself!” You know, I’m a big kid, too.
So those were the three areas that we identified. I didn’t think about the afternoon routine. It was the prototype families that came back to me and… some of them had older children…and they said that the afternoon transition was really tough. Getting the kids to sit down and focus on their homework and then move on to soccer practice, or baseball practice, and getting them to get their stuff together. Those types of things in the afternoon, that came directly from families who tested the unit and said this is something else that we need. So the system comes with a timing unit and then three routine disks where you can set up times of the day. I think it’s real important that parents and children set those routines up together. that it’s not something where the parent sits by himself or herself and decides, “These are the kinds of things that we need to do.” I think if a child has real input in deciding what the routine should be and what makes that part of the routine successful, that just adds to their ownership into the system.
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