The moment of birth and seeing this child, you just can’t help but want to give them the very best. I had this nagging feeling that there was something more that I could be doing to help my child’s development.
So the science behind child development, there’s neuroscience, there’s occupational therapy, there are practitioners in the field like Montessori instructors. A child is multifaceted, and so our research had to be as well. How apparent in an every day caretaker could actually make a difference in a child’s development by doing some really simple, nerdy, cool things that I could do with my child.
At Happy Family we created a movement arount baby nutrition. I thought the same curiosity about really learning that I had about infant nutrition. I started thinking about the Play Gym. It is such a perfect platform for learning for the first 12 months. It can be this one thing that you use to help your baby develop really important growth and fine motor and cognitive skills, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I found on the market. I started hacking together different pieces from one and putting them onto another: “What would the perfect Play Gym look like?”. When we hove so much research and science behind what children need at each stage of development, just like we have the same research in nutrition, why is it not reaching parents in a meaningful way, in an easy way, in a beautiful way that fits in with our lives.
My co-founder Rod and I went across the country to all these different parents’ homes asking people that we never met before questions about play gyms and every time we did it, we learned something new. We’ve had so many iterations of this gym, we end up discovering so many things of what a child needs, what parents want, how to improve the product and it’s throughout that iteration process that we landed on Play Gym by Lovevery. Children are so dynamic, we wanted to cover every facet of their development and the gym breaks down for you how to play with your baby in every month of the first year. To distill the Play Gym to the simplest, purest purpose and babies love it. It is so amazing to see as a parent a child so deeply ingrowthed in what they’re doing.