⭐ Free — and every accessibility support stays free
The chore app for the kid who needs structure … and the parents who need support
Clarity Board is a chore and token-reward app for the family tablet. A child taps a chore, the tokens land straight away, and they spend them on rewards you set. It is built around how neurodivergent kids actually experience rewards — and it is honest about what a reward system can and cannot do.
Most people find this page after a bad evening. That's the normal reason to be here.
No child accounts. No ads. No trackers. Works in any browser.
How it works
Three steps, and the app does the rest
Set it up once at the kitchen table. After that the tokens look after themselves, and you answer requests when you get to them.
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You set the chores and the rewards
Decide what each chore is worth and what tokens can buy — screen time, a trip out, a savings goal for something bigger. Chores can carry a picture checklist and a visual timer.
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Your child taps "done" and is paid instantly
The token count moves the moment they tap, on their own screen, with a celebration pitched at whatever level suits them. No waiting for a grown-up to notice.
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Requests reach you with a promised answer time
When they ask for something that needs your say-so, they see exactly when you will answer — and you get a queue instead of being interrupted mid-dinner.
One tablet, different kids
Designed for the kid who needs the most structure
Build for the neurodivergent child and the neurotypical sibling gets a better app too — it does not work the other way round. These are per-child settings, so one sibling can have a timer and a picture checklist while another has a plain list.
Visual timers
A countdown you can watch shrinking, for the child who cannot feel twenty minutes pass.
First–then view
A whole list at once is too much for some kids. This shows one thing, and what comes after it.
Picture steps
"Tidy your room" broken into pictures, so a child who cannot start a vague task can start a small one.
Celebration intensity
Full, gentle or off. Confetti delights one child and overwhelms the next, so it starts at gentle and you move it up or down per child.
Hide the counts
When a running total becomes the thing a child watches instead of the thing they're doing, you can switch the numbers off entirely.
Must-dos first — or not
Earning can wait behind the non-negotiables, per child, because that gate helps one kid and defeats another.
Promises, not preferences
What this app refuses to do
Most of these are enforced in the code rather than left to a settings page — which means they cannot be switched on later by a future feature, or by us on a bad day.
Weekly counts add up and roll forward on Monday. A missed day costs that day and nothing else. Nothing already earned is ever rolled back.
The ledger has two kinds of entry: earned and spent. There is no deduction type in the database at all, so response cost is not a feature we chose to leave out — it is one the system cannot express.
No leaderboards, no shared totals, no "who did more". Each child's screen carries their own numbers only, and one family's data is unreachable from another's.
No diagnoses, no medications, no clinical notes, no therapy records. This is a habit tracker a professional can be invited to look at — not a medical record system.
You will not read that this app trains focus, builds executive function or rewires anything. We looked; the evidence for that kind of generalization is not there.
No ads, no trackers, no analytics scripts, nothing sold to anyone. The parenting coach runs on first-party models only — your family's routines are not training data for a third party.
Evidence
What the research supports — and what it doesn't
This section names mechanisms, not studies we did not run. Where the evidence is thin, it says so.
- Immediate beats delayed, especially with ADHD. Sensitivity to delay is one of the most consistently described features of ADHD — a reward promised for Saturday does far less work than one that arrives on the tap. So tokens land the instant a chore is marked done, on the child's own screen, rather than at a weekly settling-up.
- Structured behaviour programmes have the best evidence here — for the things they actually change. Behavioural parent training and classroom behaviour management are rated well-established for ADHD (Evans, Owens, Wymbs & Ray, 2018). The honest detail: when outcomes are rated by assessors who don't know which group a family was in, the reliable gains show up in parenting and everyday conduct rather than in core attention symptoms (Daley et al., 2014). A home token board is one component of those programmes, not the whole of one. Treat it as scaffolding: it helps a routine hold while it is in place.
- The best-evidenced help in this space goes to the grown-up. Of everything studied here, support delivered to parents has the strongest record — including under blinded assessment, where it reliably improves parenting and day-to-day conduct (Daley et al., 2014). That is why the coach in this app talks to you, not to your child, and why it is free.
- Uncertainty and anxiety travel together. Across autistic people aged 4 to 70, intolerance of uncertainty is strongly associated with anxiety (Jenkinson, Milne & Thompson, 2020, meta-analysis — a consistent association, not a demonstrated cause). Visual, predictable structure is long-standing practice in autism support. So every change is announced before it happens — including a chore's value going down — and no request is left open-ended: each one carries a time by which a grown-up will have answered.
- Taking tokens away is a choice we made, not a finding we're reporting. Be clear about this one: response cost — removing earned points — is not a discredited technique, and it appears in behaviour programmes that work. Our reasoning is about what a piece of software should hand a tired adult at seven in the evening, with no clinician in the room to keep earning far ahead of losing. So the ledger has no deduction type at all. That is a values decision about this product, and we would rather say so than dress it as evidence.
What we do not claim. There is no good evidence that a home reward system generalizes into lasting attention, motivation or executive function. If the scaffolding stops, expect the scaffolding to stop. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a brain-training story.
The design panel
Every rule here came from a review, not a hunch
Before a feature was built it went through four review lenses — and several obvious, engagement-friendly ideas did not survive them. To be exact: these are review lenses, not people. Nobody named below has endorsed, advised on, or seen this product.
Developmental psychology
Peer-reviewed developmental and motivational research, applied to anything a child sees: token values, badges, praise wording, approval flows.
An ADHD lens
Russell Barkley's executive-function model of ADHD, applied to timing, task chunking, the must-dos gate, and anything resembling response cost.
An autism lens
Tony Attwood's clinical work on anxiety, special interests, literal language and sensory load; monotropism (Murray, Lesser & Lawson) on why switching tasks costs so much; and the systemizing account of why a countable, rule-governed system suits many autistic children.
A synthesis stage
Whose job was to make those three disagree productively, then settle on something buildable — because what helps one child can defeat another.
What the panel actually changed
| The obvious design | What shipped instead |
|---|---|
| Streaks, because they drive engagement | Cut entirely. Cumulative weekly counts that never roll back. |
| "Ask a grown-up", then wait | Every wait carries a stated time by which you will answer. |
| Confetti for everyone | Celebration intensity per child: full, gentle, or off. |
| Quietly drop a chore's value once it is a habit | Announced to the child first, then tapered over weeks. |
| Charge tokens for favourite-interest time | Tokens buy extra. The baseline is never taken away. |
| Playful, idiomatic copy for kids | Literal language — no idiom a child could read straight. |
To be exact about what this is. The panel is a set of structured review lenses built on those researchers' published frameworks, applied to every feature before it shipped. It is not an endorsement from any of them, and we will not imply one. Where the lenses disagreed with each other, the disagreement is written down in that feature's spec rather than smoothed over. Where an autistic-led account explained something better than an older clinical one, we used the autistic-led account.
Comparison
Next to a sticker chart and a streak app
| When… | Paper sticker chart | Streak-based habit app | Clarity Board |
|---|---|---|---|
| a child misses a day | the gap sits on the fridge all month | the streak resets to zero | the weekly count keeps every completion already earned |
| a grown-up is angry | stickers get peeled off | some apps deduct points | impossible — there is no deduction in the data model |
| siblings both use it | both charts hang side by side | leaderboards and shared totals | each child sees only their own |
| a child asks for a reward | "we'll see" | usually instant, or not supported | instant if it doesn't need you — and if it does, a stated time by which you'll have answered |
| two kids need different things | one chart for everyone | one design for everyone | timers, steps, celebration level and counts set per child |
| a chore stops needing a reward | it just disappears | not supported | the change is announced, then tapered over weeks |
A provider view — so a therapist or psychologist can follow progress with the parents' explicit, revocable consent — is in development.
Pricing
Free, and the free part is a commitment
Every child-facing feature and every accessibility support — timers, picture steps, first–then, celebration settings, hidden counts — is free and stays free. A support behind a paywall would fail exactly the child it exists for. If paid tooling arrives it will be for grown-ups, and it will never stand between a child and something they need.
Questions
Straight answers
What is Clarity Board?
Clarity Board is a free web-based chore and token-reward app for families. A child taps a chore on the family tablet, earns tokens immediately, and spends them on rewards a parent set up. It is designed for households with a neurodivergent child — ADHD, autistic, or another executive-function difference — and works just as well for neurotypical siblings sharing the same tablet.
What research is this based on?
Every feature was reviewed before it shipped through four lenses: peer-reviewed developmental and motivational psychology, Russell Barkley's executive-function model of ADHD, an autism lens drawing on Tony Attwood's clinical work and on monotropism, and a synthesis stage that reconciled them. These are structured review lenses built on published frameworks — not an endorsement from those researchers. The no-streaks rule, the answer-by promise, per-child celebration settings and announced changes all came out of that process.
Is it really free?
Yes. Every child-facing feature and every accessibility support is free and stays free permanently. Paid tooling, when it arrives, will be for grown-ups only and will never sit between a child and a support they need.
Does my child need an account or an email address?
No. Children have no logins, no email addresses and no passwords. A parent creates the family account, and children use profiles on the shared family device. Parent-only screens sit behind a PIN.
Why no streaks?
A streak deletes weeks of real effort the first time a child has a hard day, which turns one bad morning into a reason to stop trying. Clarity Board counts completions cumulatively within the week and rolls the count forward on Monday, so progress is never taken back.
Can I take tokens away when my child misbehaves?
No, and not as a setting either. The ledger records only earning and spending — there is no deduction type in the database, so no parent, and no future feature, can turn a child's earned tokens into something that can be removed. Consequences are a normal part of parenting and plenty of good programmes use them — they just aren't something this app can do, so they stay between you and your child.
Will this improve my child's focus or executive function?
We do not claim that. There is no good evidence that a home reward system generalizes into lasting focus or executive function. What a token system can do is support a specific routine while the support is in place, which is what Clarity Board is built to do well.
Do siblings see each other's tokens?
Never. There are no leaderboards and no cross-child displays. Each child's screen shows only their own chores, tokens and progress, and one family can never see another family's data.
Can a therapist or psychologist follow my child's progress?
A provider view is in development. It will require a parent to grant access per child, it can be revoked at any time, and it will never hold medical information — Clarity Board stores habits and tokens, never diagnoses, medications or clinical notes.
What devices does it run on?
Any modern browser. It is designed first for a shared tablet left somewhere central in the home, and also works on a phone or a computer.
What happens to our data?
It stays your family's. No ads, no trackers, no analytics scripts, nothing sold. The parenting coach for grown-ups runs on first-party models only, so your family's routines are not handed to a third-party AI provider.