Website · UX/UI & Visual Design
Parent Starts
A concept website where parents learn to raise healthy, resilient children — by understanding themselves first, then how their child’s brain grows.
Parent Starts is a self-directed concept project — a website where parents come to learn how to raise healthy, resilient children. It grew from a simple observation: most parenting advice jumps straight to the child, but the hardest moments of parenting are usually about the parent.
So I built the site around a journey in two stages. First, parents get to know themselves — the old emotional “buttons” that make them react. Then they learn the basics of how children’s and teenagers’ brains actually develop. Because this is my own concept, I owned the full scope: research framing, information architecture, UX, UI, visual design, and the four screens here.
Advice usually jumps straight to the child and skips the parent’s own reactions, while developmental guidance is scattered and clinical. There was room for a calm site that starts with the parent, then explains the child.
Parents rarely struggle for lack of information — there is an ocean of it. They struggle in the moment: a child pushes a button and the reaction that follows is far bigger than the situation deserves. Most resources skip that entirely and hand parents a checklist for the child.
There was a gap on the other side too. When parents do look for developmental guidance, it’s often scattered, clinical, or pitched at the wrong age. A calm, plain-language place that connects a parent’s own self-awareness to what’s actually happening in their child’s brain didn’t obviously exist.
A two-stage journey — “start with yourself” (triggers), then “understand your child” (brain development) — in one warm, calm visual system, with every claim traced back to a cited source.
I designed Parent Starts as one clear journey in two stages, each with its own colour so the path is legible at a glance. Stage one, in warm terracotta, is “start with yourself”: it reframes parenting triggers as old emotional buttons from our own upbringing, and offers a simple move from reacting to responding.
Stage two, in calm sage, is “understand your child”: it explains how the brain builds from back to front, why the thinking brain keeps maturing into the twenties, and what that means day to day. One warm, editorial visual system holds it together — a cream canvas, a serif display face, rounded cards, generous space, and a single accent action per screen — and a Resources page credits every source.
The Design Process
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test & Conclusion
Empathize
As a self-directed concept, I didn’t run formal user studies. Instead I framed the audience and the problem from published, evidence-based parenting sources, and let those shape every decision — what to teach, in what order, and how gently to say it.
Who it’s for
- Parents and caregivers of children and teenagers
- People who feel they react more strongly than they mean to
- Anyone wanting plain-language, evidence-based guidance
- Parents who want the “why”, with sources they can trust
The site is one path, not a menu: a parent moves from themselves, to their child, to the sources — in that order.
- Home The two-stage journey
- Start with yourself Know your triggers
- Understand your child The developing brain
- Resources & sources
- Triggers guide
- Teen brain
- The early years
- Cited sources
Define
Maya, 38
Working parent of a 13-year-old, trying to stay calm through the teen years
Maya grew up in a home where big feelings were shut down, and she catches herself doing the same. She wants to parent differently, but the advice she finds skips straight to the child. She’s ready to change — she just needs a calm first step and sources she can trust.
- Reacts faster and louder than she means to
- Reads normal teen behaviour as disrespect
- Advice she finds jumps to the child and skips her
- Unsure what’s a real problem vs. a stage
- To understand why she reacts the way she does
- Plain-language insight into the teen brain
- A calm first step she can take today
- Trustworthy sources she can go back to
- Guilty after flashpoints
- Willing to change
- Overwhelmed by conflicting advice
- Googles at 11pm after a hard evening
- Wants the “why”, not just the “what”
- Bookmarks sources she trusts
Ideate
Before any colour or photography, I blocked each screen out as a simple stack: reassurance first, the two stages made obvious on the homepage, one clear action per screen, and the sources given a page of their own.
Prototype
These are the four final screens. Terracotta carries the parent’s own journey and sage carries the child’s; a warm cream canvas and a serif display face keep the whole thing calm and human. Photography is warm and candid, and every screen holds a single primary action.
Test & Conclusion
Because this is a concept, I haven’t run usability testing yet. If it went further, I’d test the core idea directly: do parents accept starting with themselves before the child, and can they find the right stage and the sources without help? That question — not a vanity metric — is what I’d want answered.
- Start where it’s hardest.
- Putting the parent before the child is the whole design — and the riskiest choice. It’s the one I’d protect in testing.
- Colour can carry structure.
- Two accent colours do the wayfinding — terracotta for the self, sage for the child — so the two-stage journey reads before a word is read.
- Cite everything.
- Rewording evidence into plain language only works if the originals are one click away. The Resources page keeps the site honest.
- Owning it end-to-end.
- Running research framing, UX, UI and visual design on my own concept showed me how much the tone of the words and the calm of the layout depend on each other.
- Integrated Behavioral Health — “The Unseen Buttons: Understanding Your Parenting Triggers” Stage one — parenting triggers as echoes of our own upbringing, and reparenting ourselves.
- Raising Children Network — “Brain development: pre-teens and teenagers” Stage two — how the teenage brain matures from back to front, and what parents can do.
- ZERO TO THREE — “Resources for Families” Stage two — evidence-based early-childhood development in the first three years.