GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Never underestimate the power that a cheap tablet holds over a kid under six.
The Skylight Buddy is a device with one job: to be a cute little guy that helps your kid track routines and chores. It’s $139.99, plus an optional subscription. And to my surprise, even though it offers a pretty limited set of features without the $39-per-year “Plus” features, it actually worked.
Skylight recommends the Buddy for kids aged four up to 10. An adult has to set it up, naturally, which you do inside of the Skylight app. From there, you make a profile for your kid and assign it to the Buddy, which is strictly one-kid-per-device. That might be a non-starter for bigger families, but in my household of one kiddo it worked fine. In the app you can set up recurring or one-off tasks and group them into routines for the morning, afternoon, and evening. They appear on the Buddy’s screen as big cards with emoji labels, so it’s a viable option for a kid like mine who isn’t reading yet.
The Buddy has a few other features available without a subscription, like the ability to use it as a night light and set a wake-up alarm. But a $39-per-year “Buddy Plus” subscription is required for extra features like reminders, the ability for kids to earn rewards for completing tasks, or setting visual timers for individual tasks. Buddy Plus features are included “for a limited time” if you already have the Calendar Plus subscription associated with its other products. We don’t, and we already have a white noise machine and a night / wake-up light, so that reduced the Buddy more or less to a daily checklist on a gussied-up Android tablet.
“Surely my child won’t care about checking things off a screen without a built-in reward system,” I thought. I figured I’d try the basic feature set and upgrade to Plus when that proved ineffective. As it turns out, the basic features were all I needed, so I never ended up testing the extras.
Kids who aren’t reading yet can still mark off the right tasks thanks to the big emoji.
My kid loves checking things off “his screen.” There’s not much to it; I set up basic morning and evening routines with tasks like “eat breakfast” and “brush teeth.” He eagerly taps on the corresponding card when he’s done with each step, and when every task is finished at the end of the day there’s an onscreen celebration with a shower of emoji. The emoji changes, so it’s become kind of an event to see which emoji it’ll be each day: “MOM IT’S WAFFLES,” etc.
That’s basically it! I couldn’t believe the con I was running. Like, really? You’ll clean up your toys when a tablet tells you to, but not when I do? Without dangling the carrots of extra screentime or an ice cream outing? Once again: Do not underestimate the power of a screen.
I couldn’t believe the con I was running
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