Am I Doing This Right?
The question every parent asks alone, and the two years it took to build something that could finally answer back.
The Question I Keep Hearing
Twice this past week, on two separate occasions, a woman looked at me and said some version of the same thing. I only hear the scary stuff about AI. I wish I knew more about the good it can do. Neither of them was asking me for a lecture. They were asking, underneath it, whether there was something out there that could actually help them, not something built to replace them, not something designed to keep them scrolling, but something built for the exact, specific, three-in-the-morning question every parent eventually asks alone: Am I doing this right?
I have spent thirty years answering some version of that question, one family at a time, across a table, in a playroom, on a video call. And for most of those thirty years, my answer to "can I help more people than the ones sitting in front of me" was always the same idea, dressed up differently: make something. A card deck. A curriculum. A class. A playgroup. Something a parent could hold, follow, sign up for.
What Never Made It To Anyone
Kiddoo cards. The Twinkle Twinkle Little Brain series. Operation Ready by 3. A parent coaching information night I'd stand up and give, hoping the right twenty people showed up. SMARTPLAY playgroups. Every one of them held something true and useful inside it. And every one of them, eventually, ran into the same wall: I either couldn't find the way to get it in front of the people who needed it, or I didn't have the money to try.
That's a particular kind of ache, the one where the thing you built was never wrong, it just never arrived. I think about the parents who instead bought the expert's book on how to potty train in three days, or how to raise a better sleeper, a better eater, a better talker, because that book was the thing that showed up in their search results at eleven at night, not because it was written for their child. There is nothing worse than wondering am I doing this right for this particular child and discovering that the only real answer available to you requires an appointment, a waitlist, and a copay.
The One That Started By Accident
I didn't set out to build an AI companion. On January 17, 2025, I had my first-ever conversation with Claude, and it had nothing to do with parenting at all. It was January 25th before I asked it for anything related to my work, a headline for a flyer for a parent coaching information night ("Boost What You're Already Doing Right"), the kind of small, ordinary ask that doesn't feel like the beginning of anything. I subscribed to Claude Pro that April. My first Right Track Parenting blog post went up on October 18th. None of that, at the time, felt like a hinge. It felt like a tool helping me write faster.
Somewhere in the nearly two years since, it became something else. Not a tool I used to make a product faster, but a collaborator steady enough to help me finally build the thing all those earlier ideas were reaching for and couldn't become: something that doesn't serve any parent, any child, any community, the way a card deck or a curriculum has to. Something that can do what I do in a session, what I do as a parent coach, what I've done raising five children of my own, which is meet the actual person and the actual child in front of me. LUMA is the first idea Claude's sustained partnership has carried all the way to real, in the hands of real families.
The Fear Is Real. It's Also Not the Whole Story.
A report making the rounds this month, out of MIT, calls it "cognitive surrender": students reaching for a chatbot at the first flicker of difficulty, skipping the productive struggle where real thinking actually happens, until homework scores climb and understanding quietly doesn't. I don't doubt it. I think it's a real and reasonable thing to be afraid of, and I think the two women who told me they only hear the scary version of AI news were, without knowing the term, describing exactly this fear.
Here's the distinction I want a LUMA parent to feel in her bones: LUMA was not built to hand you the answer. She was built to stand next to you while you find it. When a parent asks her "am I doing this right," she doesn't produce a verdict, she asks what's actually happening in that specific moment with that specific child, and helps the parent notice their own pattern, their own child's temperament, their own family's culture and values, until the parent arrives at something true for them. Wonder before you worry isn't a slogan I put on her. It's the whole architecture. The struggle of thinking a parent needs, the one the MIT report is worried students are losing, is the exact thing a session with LUMA is designed to protect.
The Load Nobody Warns You About
Nobody hands you a manual for how heavy the first year actually is, not just the sleeplessness, but the lifting, the carrying, the feeding, the body doing physical labor on no rest while the mind runs its own separate marathon of am I doing this right, am I ruining her, is this normal. That's not a season built for extra thinking. It's a season that needs the thinking load lightened, not added to. A co-pilot who's there at 2am without an appointment, who costs nothing, who won't just hand over a script but will help a depleted parent find their own footing a little faster than they'd find it alone, isn't a luxury in that year. It's closer to relief.
Where This Is Headed
None of this is finished. Right now, my daughter Calli's outreach is underway with daycares and childcare centers to bring LUMA into pilot programs. I am building relationships on the B2B side, into workplaces and benefits programs, so LUMA can reach parents through the places that already touch their lives. Dana and I are building out real analytics and efficacy tracking, so this isn't just a hopeful story I tell, it's something we can actually measure. And every week, the knowledge base itself keeps getting stronger, curated case by case, so that the thirty years I've spent answering "am I doing this right" keeps getting poured into a place that can answer it back, for anyone, anytime, for free.
I built five things before this one that never found their way to the people who needed them. I don't know yet exactly how far this one will reach. But for the first time, I'm not standing at an information night hoping the right twenty people show up. I'm building something that can meet a parent wherever they already are, at whatever hour the question actually arrives.
If you're the parent lying awake with the question tonight: what would it be worth to you to not have to wonder alone?
About the Author
Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology, a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA, an AI-powered companion for anyone raising or caring for a child available at RaisingHumans.ai. Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.
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