Why We Built HumanUp

Parenting is beautiful. It is also messy, frustrating, exhausting, funny, humbling, and constantly changing. Just when you think you have figured something out, your child changes. Or the problem changes. Or a new chapter begins.

We know because we are right there with you. We’re both dads, raising four kids across our two families, from high school to college. We’ve spent a lot of years parenting, and we still find ourselves wondering all the time: Are we handling this the right way? What should we say? Is this normal? Should we step in or back off? What do we do next?

We have read the parenting books. Some of them have genuinely changed how we think about raising our kids. We just don’t have time to read all the ones we want to read. And even when we have read the right book, remembering exactly what it said when something difficult is happening in our own family is another matter entirely.

That gap between knowing and doing became one of the ideas behind HumanUp. You can understand why your child might be acting a certain way and still have no idea what to say when they are standing in front of you. Parenting doesn’t happen on the pages of a book. It happens in kitchens and cars, at bedtime and school pickup, during rushed mornings and difficult conversations when nobody is quite at their best.

At the same time, there has never been more parenting information available to us. Google can produce thousands of answers. Social media can produce hundreds of opinions. Smart, well-meaning parents can confidently recommend completely contradictory things. We realized we didn’t need more information. We needed a better way to get from trusted knowledge to something useful for the particular child and moment in front of us.

Because parenting is incredibly particular. A two-year-old is very different from a five-year-old. A thirteen-year-old is very different from a nineteen-year-old. And two thirteen-year-olds can be completely different from each other. Every child has a different temperament, and every family has its own history, values, relationships and dynamics. What works beautifully with one child may fall flat with another. What worked six months ago may suddenly stop working because your child has changed.

Parenting isn’t a collection of fortune-cookie tips. It is a relationship that unfolds over years. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we try something, see what happens, and try again. We wanted support that could work that way too: something that could understand more of the context, become more useful over time, and help with the real situation a family is facing rather than dispense another generic piece of advice.

Then AI changed what was possible.

We are both genuinely excited about AI. One of the things that struck us early was also one of the simplest: suddenly, instead of searching through information, you could just talk. That matters in parenting because parents don’t naturally think in search queries. We tell stories. We vent. We give context. We say, “I don’t even know if I’m explaining this right, but here’s what happened.”

And so much of parenting itself comes down to conversation. What do I say to my daughter tonight? How do I bring this up without making my son shut down? How do I hold this boundary without starting another fight? Sometimes what a parent needs isn’t another explanation of child development. It’s two or three things to keep in mind and some words that might actually help.

The more we thought about what AI could make possible, though, the more we found ourselves thinking about what we didn’t want to lose.

We didn’t want parenting guidance built from an anonymous sea of internet content. When it comes to our kids, we care where the guidance comes from. We want to know who is behind it and why we should trust them.

So we asked ourselves a very personal question: if we could assemble the team of parenting and child development experts we would want for our own families, who would we choose?

We set the bar high. We sought out leading authors, clinicians and researchers whose work is grounded in evidence, whose books and research have shaped their fields, and whose judgment is respected by parents and professional peers. But we didn’t want to simply license their names or take their work and put an AI layer on top of it. We wanted them involved. We wanted them to be partners.

That mattered for another reason too. Many authors and researchers have spent decades creating work that is now being absorbed into an AI world they didn’t necessarily choose. We believe those people deserve better. The people who create valuable knowledge should be recognized, respected and fairly compensated for it. Technology should be able to extend the reach of extraordinary human expertise without erasing the humans behind it.

One by one, twelve extraordinary experts agreed to build HumanUp with us. We are enormously proud of the team that came together, not only because of what they have accomplished, but because they are people we genuinely trust. They care deeply about children and families. The opportunity to help their wisdom and life’s work reach more parents, in the moments when parents actually need it, is one of the things that makes this company so meaningful to us.

It also helped clarify a larger belief we have about AI.

AI can help a parent understand what might be happening. It can bring forward the right piece of expert guidance at the right time. It can help someone prepare for a difficult conversation or find better words. But it cannot be the parent. No technology can take your place in your child’s life, and no technology should try.

We want HumanUp to help parents be more confident and capable in that role, not outsource it. And as technology becomes more capable, we think the distinction matters. Information may become almost unlimited. Human judgment, trust and connection will not.

Trust also shaped another decision we made early. We wanted parents to have somewhere they could be completely candid. Parenting can bring up things we don’t necessarily want to post publicly, ask in a group, or even say to another person face-to-face. Sometimes we’re worried. Sometimes we’re embarrassed. Sometimes we’re frustrated with our kids. Sometimes we think we handled something badly and just want help figuring out what to do next.

We wanted HumanUp to be a place where parents could say what is really going on without feeling judged. That is why privacy has mattered to us from the beginning. We wanted to build something we would feel comfortable using with information about our own children and families, including the questions we might hesitate to ask anywhere else.

All of these choices come from the same place. We want to build HumanUp in a way we can feel good about as parents ourselves. It is also why we chose to make HumanUp a Public Benefit Corporation. We want to build a strong, enduring company, but we also want its success to create more opportunities to serve families and communities, including families who might not otherwise have access to this kind of support. We are still early and still figuring out exactly what that will look like, but the commitment is important to us.

None of us knows exactly what it will mean to be human in a world of increasingly capable AI. We certainly don’t.

Parents will still worry, wonder, make mistakes, learn, try again and love their kids fiercely. We will still look for people we trust when something really matters. And the relationship between a parent and a child will still be one of the most important relationships in our lives.

We built HumanUp because we believe technology can serve those things rather than compete with them. It can make extraordinary human wisdom more accessible. It can help us find the right guidance for the child and moment in front of us. And, at its best, it can help us be a little more confident, thoughtful and present with the people who matter most.

That’s the kind of parenting support we want for our own families. And it’s what we’re building for yours.

If that resonates with you, we hope you’ll give HumanUp a try. And we hope you’ll tell us what helps, what doesn’t, and what you wish existed next.