This chunky little tablet has my kid cleaning up his toys

Never underestimate the power that a cheap tablet has on a child under six years old.

The Skylight Buddy is a device with one job: to be a cute little baby that helps your child keep up with chores and household tasks. It’s priced at $139.99, plus an optional subscription. To my surprise, even though it offers a very limited set of features without the $39 per year “Plus” features, it actually works.

Skylight recommends Buddy for children ages four to 10. An adult must set it up, of course, which you do inside the Skylight app. From there, you can create a profile for your child and assign them to Buddy, which is just one child per device. This may not be a suitable option for large families, but in my house of one child it was fine. In the app you can set up recurring or one-time tasks and group them into routines for morning, afternoon and evening. They appear on Buddy’s screen as large cards with emoji stickers, so they’re a viable option for a kid like mine who doesn’t read yet.

The Buddy has a few other features available without a subscription, like the ability to use it as a nightlight and set an alarm to wake you up. But a $39-a-year Buddy Plus subscription is required for additional features like reminders, the ability for kids to earn rewards for completing tasks, or set visual timers for individual tasks. Buddy Plus features are included for a “limited time” if you already have a Calendar Plus subscription associated with its other products. We don’t, and we already have a white noise machine and a night/wake light, which more or less reduces Buddy to a daily checklist on an Android tablet.

“Surely my child won’t be interested in checking things on the screen without a built-in reward system,” I thought. I considered trying the basic feature set and upgrading to Plus when it proved ineffective. As it turned out, the basic features were all I needed, so I didn’t finish testing the add-ons.

My baby He loves Checking things off his screen. There’s not much to it; I’ve set up a basic morning and evening routine with tasks like “eat breakfast” and “brush teeth.” He eagerly taps the corresponding card as he finishes each step, and when each task is completed at the end of the day, there is an on-screen celebration with a barrage of emojis. The emojis change, so it’s become an event to see which emoji it will be each day: “MOM IT’S WAFFLES,” etc.

This is the basis! I couldn’t believe the trick I was pulling. Like, really? You’ll clean up your games when your tablet tells you to, but not when I do? Without dangling extra carrots or an ice cream picnic? Again: Don’t underestimate the power of a screen.

The boyfriend is great, which definitely helps. My review unit came with a green silicone case, which is an additional $20. It helps with the cool factor. But I think Buddy is the most attractive because it’s clearly a screen meant for him and no one else. As I was placing it on the counter in our kitchen, I realized that it wasn’t tilted up like the Echo Show, making it more comfortable for a taller person to use. It faces straight ahead, essentially at eye level for a four-year-old. Maher.

I hope the app is easy to use. Setting up tasks as part of a routine is easy enough, but once you set a task for a particular day, you can’t move it to another day. We generally shower every night, but as you know, some days call for an off-course shower. I would like to be able to move the task forward one day and arrange iterations after that; Instead, I need to make it a daily part of the routine and remember to mark it as “skip” on nights I’m not in the bathroom.

I also can’t rearrange individual tasks within a routine – you can do that with the Skylight Calendar, which I don’t have. Anubhav Sarkar, Skylight’s vice president of product, told me that this functionality will be coming to the app this month, but until then I’m stuck arranging tasks in the order I created them. It’s a real pain to add a one-time extra step to your daily routine.

There’s also no way to display a calendar view on Buddy, although you can add calendar events in the app. The Buddy appears to be intended to complement other Skylight calendars at home, which, again, we don’t have. But if you do, this probably won’t be a concern. Personally, I was hoping I could outsource the bad news of today’s school to the screen, but no luck.

Look, it seems silly to use a $140 monitor to do the job of a $5 sticker chart, or whatever crafty, low-cost visual aid you might be able to concoct. But there is something very powerful about a child being able to use their own devices, and the lack of interference it provides parents. For a while, we tried implementing a “pizza planner” system where our son would receive small cardboard pizza slices for every task he completed in his daily routine. At the end of the day, pizza slices can be cashed in for screen time. It took a lot of effort on our part to constantly hound him about what pizza he was or wasn’t earning, and it only lasted a couple of weeks. Maybe it’s just that my kid is a little older now, but even the free version of Buddy we’ve been using has been more successful than our attempts to turn fake pizza into soap opera episodes. Paw patrol.

I’d recommend Buddy more freely if the app were a little more flexible. Being able to move tasks around without having to rebuild the routine each time would go a long way. However, it has been a useful addition in our home. We still face hurdles in our morning and evening routines that no screen can solve, but I think it’s really helped give my baby a better sense of structure. It seems like a very easy addition if you have young children and are already coordinating your family’s activities with the help of Skylight calendars. And Lord knows I’ve spent more money on short-lived tools to try to mitigate my parental foibles. If you doubt it will help relieve some stress in your home, you could certainly do worse than this cute $140 checklist.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge