Everything you might want to know

A daily thinking-skills program for children ages 8–16. Each lesson presents a real-world scenario and walks your child through 6 carefully scored decisions. Over a year, that's 720 graded decisions per child across reasoning, judgment, pattern recognition, problem solving, emotional intelligence, and metacognition.

Ages 8 through 16. Every lesson is age-tiered into 9 levels (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16). The same underlying scenario is rewritten in vocabulary, complexity, and stakes for each age — so a tween and a teen can run the same lesson on the same day, each at the right level.

Click 'Start membership' anywhere on the site. You'll create an account, add your child(ren), pick a plan, and start the first lesson the same day. No waitlist, no setup call.

Yes. Try the interactive sample lesson on this site at no cost — it's the same content children get inside a paid lesson, just unlocked end-to-end so you can click through every step. If you start a membership and your child doesn't engage in the first 14 days, contact support for a refund.

No. There are no live sessions, video calls, or scheduled appointments. Your child opens a lesson when it fits your day.

An email address, a parent password, your child's first name and age, and any device with a modern browser. That's it.

120 lessons per age tier. If your child stays with the program from age 8 to 16, that's 1,080 unique lessons across nine years — every one age-appropriate and re-leveled, never re-used.

1 lesson per day is the default. Each is designed as a single complete experience — not a chapter to be split. A motivated child can do up to 2 in a day, but the program is paced for one.

Every day is unlocked. Lessons are not tied to a school calendar — your child can do them on weekdays, weekends, holidays, sick days at home, or while traveling. The skill-building benefits are most reliable when daily, but you can also do 5 days per week and skip weekends if that fits your routine.

Yes — by design. The dashboard tracks streaks but never punishes a missed day. Skipping a day or a week does not reset progress. We'd rather your child do 4 days a week for a year than burn out doing 7 for two months.

10–15 minutes. Most children finish in 12. The pacing is intentional: long enough to engage real thinking, short enough that it never feels like homework.

Roughly 90 seconds to 2 minutes per decision. Six decisions per lesson — read, weigh, choose, see feedback, read rationale, move on.

Yes — there's no daily cap. But the program is built around 'one a day' because the brain consolidates skills better with sleep between sessions. Cramming 5 lessons on a Saturday is less effective than 1 lesson on each of 5 days.

Nothing happens. Your child picks up the next available lesson when they return. Streaks pause; nothing resets. There is no overdue queue.

Same — pick up the next lesson when ready. No catch-up homework, no penalty. The library has 120 lessons per age, so no one ever runs out.

The 120 lessons in each age tier are sequenced by intentional progression — earlier lessons set up vocabulary and reasoning patterns the later lessons build on. You don't pick which lesson; the system serves the next one.

Every lesson IS the test — and it's continuous. Each of the 6 decisions is scored on a 4-tier scale (Strongest 3 pts → Strong 2 pts → Partial 1 pt → Weak 0 pts), giving 0–18 points per lesson and 0–2,160 over a 120-lesson year. There is no separate exam, mid-term, or final. The score IS the lesson IS the assessment.

Each decision has 4 options pre-scored. Your child picks one, gets credit for the tier they chose, and sees one-line feedback on every option (why each is strongest/strong/partial/weak). The 6 scores roll into a per-skill subscore, then into a monthly skill profile.

Nothing — that's where learning actually happens. The 'wrong' answer reveals the tier-feedback and the rationale, the strongest answer's reasoning is shown explicitly, and the next 119 lessons keep practicing the same skill. No red Xs. No public ranking.

Most families pick after-school (3–5 PM) or after-dinner (6–8 PM). Mornings work too if your child is alert. Avoid right before bed — the dopamine cycle of feedback can make settling harder for some kids.

Real-life behavioral changes typically show by week 4–6, after roughly 25–35 lessons. The first parent report at the 30-day mark gives you the data view. Expect skill scores to start climbing visibly by month 2.

Yes. The lesson is fully self-paced and self-explanatory — no parent input required. Most parents check the dashboard once or twice a week for the report and conversation prompts.

Optional. Some children thrive doing it alone; others benefit from a parent sitting alongside the first 5–10 lessons to model how to read, pause, and weigh options. After that, hands-off is fine.

No. Parker Smart Kids is not curriculum — it's thinking practice. It complements every school subject. The skills it builds (analysis, judgment, problem solving) are the underlying capabilities every classroom subject already requires.

15 minutes a day. If a day is too packed, skip — never sacrifice sleep or family dinner for a lesson. Consistency over time matters more than a single missed day.

Yes — summer is one of the most productive times. With school stress off the plate, kids often do their cleanest, most engaged lessons in June–August.

Plans start at the price shown in the Pricing section on the home page. Single-child and multi-child family plans are available.

Monthly subscription by default. Annual options may offer a discount — check the pricing page.

Securely via Stripe. Your card is charged at signup, then on the same day each month until you cancel.

Yes. Cancel through your account settings or by emailing support. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period — no early-cancellation fee.

Mid-cycle refunds aren't automatic, but contact support and we'll review case-by-case. The refund policy on the Refunds page is the source of truth.

If your child does not engage with the program in the first 14 days and you've completed at least 5 lessons, contact support for a refund.

Your child's lesson history and skill profile are retained on the account for 6 months in case you reactivate. After 6 months of inactivity the data is purged per the privacy policy.

No. The subscription includes all 120 lessons in your child's current age tier, plus the parent dashboard, sample reports, and conversation prompts. No paywalled premium features. No extra modules to buy.

Yes. The family plan supports multiple children, each with their own profile, age tier, and progress.

Perfect — each child runs their own age-tiered lesson stream. A 9-year-old and a 14-year-old can be working on the same conceptual lesson on the same day, but each sees age-appropriate vocabulary, stakes, and complexity.

Technically yes, but we strongly recommend separate child profiles — each child needs their own decision history for the skill profile to be meaningful.

On their birthday milestone (or sooner, by request), the next age tier unlocks. The skill profile carries over — they don't restart from zero. The next 120 lessons reflect where they actually are.

Yes. The parent dashboard shows every child as a row with current streak, last lesson, latest skill scores, and weekly trends — at a glance.

A read-only family-share link is supported. The grandparent does not need a paid account to view reports.

Yes — every scenario is rewritten across 9 age tiers. An 8-year-old sees a recess-and-snack scenario; the same conceptual lesson at age 16 is about peer pressure online, money decisions, or first-job tradeoffs. Same skill, different surface.

No. Scenarios are everyday childhood situations — friendships, school, online behavior, family decisions, hobbies, sports. No graphic content, no political topics, no current-events controversy.

No. The program is non-religious and deliberately neutral on faith, politics, and culture. The skills are universal.

Never. There are no advertisements, no third-party trackers, no in-app upsells targeted at the child. The child UI is pure lesson content.

No. There is no social feed, no chat, no public profiles, no leaderboard. The program is a private 1-child experience.

No. There is no open-ended AI chat in the child interface. All content is pre-written, age-tiered, and reviewed. The decisions, options, scoring, rationale, and feedback are authored — not generated on the fly.

Timothy E. Parker authors and oversees all 1,080 lessons under the Advanced Learning Academy imprint. Mr. Parker holds a Guinness World Record for crossword construction and has spent decades designing puzzle-and-decision content for adults; this is the same authoring discipline applied to children's reasoning.

Any modern browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge — on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. No app to install.

Not yet. The web version works fully on mobile devices and can be added to the home screen as a web app.

Yes — lessons stream from the server. There is no offline mode. A 4G or basic wifi connection is sufficient.

Minimal. A full lesson is well under 1 MB — comparable to opening a few text articles. There are no videos auto-playing.

Lessons are text-light, plain-language, and short-sentence by design. Future updates plan to include text-to-speech for early readers.

Yes, as long as the school's network allows the parkersmartkids.com domain. No special software required.

Yes — fully responsive. Many children prefer a tablet or laptop for reading comfort, but everything works on phone screens.

Each child's row: current streak, lessons completed this month, decisions answered, latest 6-skill profile, trend lines, and the most recent spotlight strength + growth area. View the live sample at /sample-report.

Continuously. Every decision your child makes updates the dashboard within seconds. The monthly summary is generated on the first of each month.

Yes — opt-in monthly email with the highlights of your child's month, including the top strength, top growth area, and three conversation prompts. Weekly emails are optional.

Short questions tied to recent lessons, designed to surface in 60 seconds at the dinner table. Example: 'Ask Emma what she'd do if a friend asked her to keep a secret she didn't feel right about.' These convert lessons into family conversations.

Yes — every decision your child has answered is in the parent log, with the prompt, their choice, the score, and the rationale they saw. No mystery.

A 6-axis breakdown of your child's current standing in reasoning, judgment, pattern recognition, problem solving, emotional intelligence, and decision quality, expressed as a 0–100 score per skill, with trend arrows.

View the live one at /sample-report — it shows Emma's April: 18 of 20 lessons completed, 108 of 120 decisions answered, +5.2 score gain vs March, 78th percentile peer comparison, calendar grid, 6-skill breakdown, two spotlight decisions, three conversation prompts, and recommendations.

Six brain systems, in order, every lesson: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (reasoning), ventromedial PFC + amygdala interface (judgment), hippocampus + parietal (pattern recognition), anterior cingulate + DLPFC (problem solving / creativity), right temporoparietal junction + insula (emotional intelligence), frontopolar cortex / BA 10 (metacognition). The 6 decisions in every lesson hit each one exactly once.

Yes — directly. The problem-solving decision in every lesson is a divergent-thinking exercise: generate multiple paths, sort by importance, iterate. The same neural circuit creative adults use to make new things.

Yes — working memory, impulse control, and metacognition are core targets. Three of the six decisions per lesson hit executive function directly.

Long-term, IQ-test-style gains are not promised — but fluid-reasoning improvements (the underlying skill IQ tests measure) are well-supported by the kind of practice this program delivers. What is reliably reported by parents: better judgment under pressure, better decision-making, fewer impulsive mistakes, more thoughtful conversations.

The methodology builds on widely-replicated cognitive-science results: spaced practice, prediction-error feedback (the brain's strongest learning signal), and explicit metacognition. We do not run our own clinical trials — we apply established findings rigorously.

Math and vocab apps train domain knowledge. This program trains the underlying thinking skills that every domain uses. A child with strong reasoning, judgment, and metacognition learns math faster, reads more critically, and makes better life choices — those skills transfer; subject knowledge does not transfer back.

Chess and coding are excellent — they train one or two of the six skills very deeply. Parker Smart Kids trains all six, every day, in real-life scenarios kids encounter daily. It complements chess and coding rather than replacing them.

Six is the smallest number that hits all six target skills exactly once. Five would skip a skill; ten would dilute attention. The program is engineered, not arbitrary.

Those are subject-knowledge platforms (math, reading, history). Parker Smart Kids trains thinking skills — the meta-layer above any subject.

Duolingo trains language. We train reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. They're complementary, not competitive.

A tutor is helpful but expensive, infrequent, and subject-specific. This is daily, scalable, and skill-general — at a fraction of the price.

Gifted programs accelerate subject mastery for already-strong kids. Parker Smart Kids works for any child — gifted or not — because it builds the underlying thinking skills regardless of starting point.

Most educational games optimize for engagement (more time on screen). Parker Smart Kids optimizes for getting your child off the screen in 15 minutes with measurable thinking gains. No infinite-scroll loops, no cosmetics, no streak-pressure manipulation.

First name (or nickname), age, lesson history, and decisions made. No phone number, no address, no photo, no school. See the full Privacy policy.

Never. We do not sell, share, or rent any account or child data to anyone.

No. Your child's decisions are not fed into any external AI model. They live in our private database for the sole purpose of generating your reports.

We follow COPPA principles for under-13 users — verifiable parent account, no targeted ads, no public child profiles, parental control of data deletion. Full details in the Privacy policy.

Yes — anytime. Email support and the account is purged within 7 days.

The founder of Advanced Learning Academy and author of all Parker Smart Kids lessons. He holds a Guinness World Record for crossword construction and has spent decades designing decision-and-puzzle content for adults — this program applies that authoring rigor to children.

The umbrella imprint behind Parker Smart Kids and a growing portfolio of educational properties focused on real-world thinking skills, reasoning, and decision-making for both children and adults.

Because the AI era will reward children who can think — not children who can memorize. Schools train memorization and subject knowledge well; almost nothing trains thinking, judgment, and decision quality on a daily, structured, measurable basis. This program closes that gap.

Email TParker@braingameshub.com. Real human responses, usually within 24 hours.

Refresh the browser. If still missing, log out and back in. If the issue persists, email support — progress is server-side and recoverable.

The decision counter requires all 6 decisions to be answered. If the count is short, scroll back through the lesson — usually decision 5 or 6 wasn't fully clicked.

Use the password-reset link on the login page. If your email isn't recognized, you may have signed up under a different one — email support and we'll find your account.

Email support with the charge confirmation. We'll match it to your account same-day. No charges go un-credited.

Yes. Contact support to pause billing for 1, 2, or 3 months. Your child's profile and progress are preserved.