Parents Who Pay to Be Watched - Behaviorally Architecting the Family

Parents Who Pay to Be Watched. Kim Brooks. The Cut, Aug 22 2017, https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/cognition-builders-family-intervention-parenting-help-adhd.html

An educational consultant they’d hired, Myrna Harris, suggested something that at first seemed extreme — a relatively new company known for helping children in crisis that could set up a highly structured, highly regimented environment in a home.
The family architects were the foot soldiers of the company, but the most critical part of the strategy involved the installation of a series of Nest Cams with microphones all around the house.

The company was called Cognition Builders, and Harris explained that they would send people to a family for a period of weeks to observe everyone’s behavior and to figure out how parents could get better control over their kids. The people they sent were called “family architects.” They’d move in with a family for months at a time, immersing themselves in their routines and rituals. The family architects were the foot soldiers in the Cognition Builders team, but the most critical part of the company’s strategy involved the installation of a series of Nest Cams with microphones all around the house, which enabled round-the-clock observation and interaction in real time. At the end of each day, the architects would send the parents extensive emails and texts summarizing what they’d seen, which they’d use to develop a system of rules for the family to implement at home. Over time, the role of the family architects would evolve from observing to enforcing the rules. Through this kind of intensive scrutiny and constant behavioral intervention, they claimed to be able to change a family’s, and a child’s functioning from the ground up.

The idea, I learned by speaking with employees and clients of the company over several months, is that if you want to truly change the way a person parents, you need to be there as they’re parenting, not occasionally but immersively and consistently. “We are a fly on the wall of a family’s home,” the company’s clinical director, Sarah Lopano, explained. “We take a very behavioral approach to everything we do.”

The science behind Cognition Builders “approach” isn’t exactly straightforward. Lopano insists that the core of their program is educational, not therapeutic, and that they tailor their approach to the needs of a particular family and borrow from many different types of intervention. The family architects are young; many have advanced degrees in fields like education, behavior analysis, clinical psychology, or social work, but aren’t necessarily licensed therapists. The “service” they provide comes down to watching you parent, suggesting changes, and making sure you do what they say.