Your first week

Help · Updated 14 September 2026

Start with one part of the day and two useful habits. The first goal is making the check-in easy enough to repeat.

Five places to find things

Today opens the habits for your household. If children and grown-ups both have lists, choose whose habits you want to see. Board summarizes progress and rewards, with links to Trends and your journal. Plan holds Manage habits, daily points goals, rewards, breaks, schedules and rotations. Activities has games and days out. Household holds people, pets and logins. Open Menu for Account settings, notifications and subscription. Groceries and private My routines are available from Today.

Start with a grown-up profile and one or two useful habits. Children and pets are optional. Adding someone's name does not create a login or send an invitation. Use Household, then Logins and access for that. Pet profiles keep pets separate from people; you can put a care habit on a grown-up's list.

Start much smaller than feels right

The setup wizard asks where a little less repeating would help first: morning, after school, chores or bedtime. It then suggests two starting habits per child. Keep the two that fit, swap either one, or choose a different suggestion. The full list remains available later.

Two things they already do, such as making the bed or brushing teeth, are often enough to begin. You are not trying to change every behaviour yet. You are making the check-in itself feel normal.

Day by day

Day 0: the link in your inbox

Creating an account doesn't drop you straight in. You fill the form, we email you a link, and tapping it opens your board already signed in, so there's no password to type twice.

It's one extra step and it isn't there to make life harder. Before it, typing an email into the signup form told you whether that address already had a KinHuddle account, which meant anyone could work through a list and find out which families are here. For something holding children's names and routines, that isn't a door we're willing to leave open. The link lasts a day. If it hasn't arrived in a few minutes, check spam, then fill the form in again in case the address had a typo in it.

Day 1: try one useful habit

Returning and reminders: Today opens the relevant child or grown-up list. A gentle restart also recognizes grown-up checks, shared completions and grocery activity. Daily reminders belong to your login; other grown-ups choose their own. In Menu → Account settings, choose the reminder hour and optional quiet hours, then save. Saving uses your device's timezone, including daylight-saving changes. You can also deliberately select a grown-up profile to receive reminders only when they have unfinished shared responsibilities, including pet care. That filter does not cover private routines or groceries. Quiet hours skip a daily reminder rather than postponing it; email arrival depends on the provider. If an older push registration falls back to email, turn the device notification off and on to connect it to your login. Offline devices do not receive queued daily pushes later. Account security messages are separate from daily reminders.

For something that only needs doing today, open that person's list in Today and choose Add a helping hand today. You can select other people who will help. When checked, each selected person with points on gets the stated points once. If points are off for the original list, the whole check is worth zero. Shared work appears under Helped together on the other participants' lists.

Groceries opens from Today. Add an item, with an optional quantity, note or category. Check it as you shop; uncheck or use Undo check if needed. Removed items can be restored below the list. Changes do not send notifications. You can keep checking while offline, but another device sees changes only after the server confirms them. If two people change the list at once, use the waiting-change review rather than assuming one replaced the other. At 400 saved items, restore and reuse existing entries.

My routines: Open this from Today for a point-free list accessible only to your login, not other household logins or paired displays. Anyone using your login can open it. Choose weekdays, check something done and archive a routine while keeping its history. Share a copy deliberately by choosing a responsible person; its private history is not copied. Account settings downloads include your own list. Removing your login stops access but does not erase its records; household deletion and backup retention apply. Keep the page open if device storage cannot keep a change, and review waiting saves before leaving.

For a different kind of day, open Plan → Schedule and rotations. Choose a date and a household routine, then use Change repeating routines to choose which habits belong to it. Habits without a routine selection keep their usual schedule. You can choose weekdays, an interval and start date, or inclusive time away for one person. A planned absence does not break that person's streak.

Shared responsibilities in Plan → Schedule and rotations are point-free, separate from personal habits. Select people in turn order and how many weeks each turn lasts. If someone is away, the next available selected person covers that date without changing the normal order. A grown-up can check these items in Today. One-date reassignment does not reset the rotation. Week and month overviews show recorded work, and the weekly reset lets you review and confirm the plan. Retiring stops new occurrences from today; earlier unfinished dates and completions remain available. Your practice focus stays on the Board.

Pet care: add a pet profile in Household settings, then open Add pet care in Plan → Schedule and rotations. Choose feeding, walks, grooming or training practice, name each occurrence (such as Morning and Evening), and select the people helping. Each occurrence has a separate check and completion time. A grown-up confirms they supervised or performed it; choose safe, age-appropriate help yourself. These templates do not recommend care frequency or provide veterinary advice. Removing a pet stops future care but keeps recorded completions in Plan.

Skip this date and Move this occurrence change one unfinished occurrence, not the repeating rule. If the habit is already due on the destination date, it appears once. Completed work keeps its original details. Unfinished habits do not carry forward automatically: choose their original date in Plan to review them. Changing a repeating rule can change the calculated unfinished list on earlier dates too.

Points for new checks can be switched off without removing earlier progress. New checks keep their original habit label, points and device-reported recording time, even if the repeating list changes later. Older checks do not have invented timestamps. To change a shared completion, change its check on the original person's list.

Choose one routine and keep the two suggested habits that fit your family. In Daily, check one thing your child already did. Each check is saved as you go. When you're ready, use Finish the day to record the day in your history and charts. The other features can wait.

Day 2: try the same small routine

Open the Daily tab in the evening. Tick the two things that happened. Tap Finish everyone's day. That's the whole loop. Each tick is saved when you tap it; finishing sets the points, starts the streak and feeds the charts and ladder.

Day 3: hand the phone over

Tap 🧒 Kid view and give the phone to your child. Big buttons, big emoji and no settings controls. Leaving always asks for the grown-up PIN or, if no PIN is set, your account password. Set a shorter PIN in Menu → Account settings if you prefer.

Days 4–6: protect the streak, not the score

Keep doing the same two tasks. If a night is chaos and nothing gets ticked, that's fine. One missed day is always forgiven and the streak survives it. If you're ill or away, add a break in Plan → Taking a break? and those days won't count against anyone.

Day 7: add one thing

Only now. One task per child, and pick something you actually want to change rather than something you want credit for. Then leave it another week.

Turn the reminder on before you need it

Menu → Account settings → Daily reminder, choose an hour. It's free on every plan and it only emails you on days you haven't already opened KinHuddle, so it goes quiet the moment the habit holds. The single most common reason a family stops is not disagreement. It's simply forgetting on a Tuesday and never picking it back up.

Day 2, part two: put it on your home screen

KinHuddle is a website that can also be an app, and this is the single change that makes the most difference to whether the habit sticks. A routine that lives behind open browser → find the tab → or type the address is a routine that gets skipped on a tired Tuesday. An icon next to your other apps isn't.

Once it's added, it opens full screen with its own icon and no browser bar, near enough indistinguishable from an app you'd install from a store. There's nothing to download, no account to make, and no updates to install ever again.

On iPhone or iPad

In Safari, tap the Share button (the square with an arrow coming out of it), scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen, then Add.

This is also the only way Apple allows a website to send notifications, so if you'd rather your daily reminder arrived as a quiet notification than an email, this step is what unlocks it.

On Android

Chrome usually offers an Install banner. If it doesn't, use the ⋮ menu → Install app.

On a computer

Look for the install icon in the address bar (a small screen with a downward arrow) and click Install. KinHuddle then opens in its own window.

Inside the app you'll also find this at Menu → 📲 Add to your home screen, with the steps for whatever you're holding.

If someone helps with your week

A grandparent or a sitter can have their own login as a helper. They see the same day and can tick things off, write in the win journal and close out the Night Cap: everything that's about today. What they can't do is reshape the family: no editing tasks or children, no changing the reward ladder or settings, and no claiming a reward, because that spends points you've promised to a child.

Where a helper can't act, KinHuddle says so plainly rather than showing a button that won't work. An affordable reward reads "Ready: ask a parent" on their screen. Invite them from Household → Logins and access. Two logins are free; Plus raises it to six.

If the wrong person set it up

Whoever creates the family looks after the settings, the invitations and the bill. That happens by accident often enough to be worth saying: one parent signs up to have a look, and the household ends up with the account on the wrong side of it.

You can hand it over. Household → Logins and access → Hand this family over, choose a co-parent, type their address to be sure, and confirm with your password. They take on the settings and the billing. You keep your login and everything you can see today, as a parent, and nothing about the children's data changes. If you're on Plus, the subscription moves with the family rather than staying with you, so nobody loses anything and nobody pays twice.

What to ignore for now

Milestones, game night, adventures, the Night Cap, printable packs and the Trends tab are all worth having and none of them are worth having in week one. They'll still be there when the daily check-in is automatic.