frequently asked questions

Our goal library is designed by our team clinical psychologists who specialize in children with behavioral and developmental disorders. Their expertise includes: autism, anxiety, ADHD, sensory issues, emotional issues, and trauma responses.

The idea behind behavioral goals is a framework called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). This therapy is based on the notion that our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors are all connected in a way that is summarized as: “What we believe is how we feel, and how we feel is how we behave.”

This means that the goals itself focus on behaviors, making it easier to track progress and celebrate achievements.

The standard rewards are all ‘clinically’ appropriate, but we recommend you work together with your child to understand what would be the most motivational.

Great goals are usually ‘SMART’ goals, which stands for:

Specific - goals should be clear and without any ambiguity. Helpful questions to answer here are: ‘What exactly needs to be done?’, ‘Where does it take place?’ ‘Who is involved?’, etc.

Measurable - in order to track progress and stay motivated we need to understand when the goal has been achieved. This means we’ll have to understand what its completion looks like and how we measure it.

Achievable - goals also need to be realistic and attainable to be successful and motivational. It is important for kids to build confidence and stretch their abilities by achieving goals. However, setting unrealistic goals can be very defeating and have the opposite effect.

Relevant - make sure the goal that you are setting goal matters to you and your family, and that it also aligns with your other goals. Some helpful questions to determine this may be: ‘Does this seem worthwhile?’, ‘Is this the right time?’, ‘Does this match our other efforts/needs?’

Timely - every goal needs a target date, so that you have a deadline to focus on. In Manatee, you just need to set the ‘expiration date’ for your goals which range from 30 to 90 days.

To assign a goal, navigate to your Child tab and tap the ‘assign goals’ or ‘manage’ button. From here, you’ll have access to our goals library - or you can make your custom goals. To assign or create a goal, tap the ‘+’ button.

You can also read or customize our premade goals by tapping on its name and hitting ‘copy and edit.’ From here, you can also set reminders for your child to complete their goal.

We recommend setting 2-3 goals at a time. More than 3 goals may be overwhelming for your child. To optimize effectiveness of any intervention, it is important to focus on a few key behaviors at a time.

Once your child is logged into their account, all their daily goals are listed on their home screen. Your child can click any goal to view its details and click ‘I DID IT!’

Once marked completed by the child, you will receive a notification on your phone saying that your child completed a goal. Click the ‘bell’ notification button to see which child completed which goal.

If task completion is verified, you can approve it. Otherwise, you may reject it. Either way, the child will get a notification bubble on their dashboard telling them if their goal was approved or not. If approved, the child will be awarded the assigned points. Yay!

We encourage you to approve the goal as soon as you are able to. In the beginning you may need to establish trust by checking in and having a conversation prior to approving. However, as time goes by, you may feel more comfortable approving a goal without any additional evidence. Either way, the sooner the better!

We recommend working together with your child to pick out something that is personalized and most exciting to them. Moreover, we believe that the best rewards encourage bonding time with the people we care about, such as game nights, baking cookies, or going on an adventure together.

We recommend setting about 2-4 rewards. It’s important to mix up easy rewards (5 points) with harder rewards (>20 points). This way your child can receive near instant rewards while also looking forward and working towards something bigger.

A custom reward can be created in your parent profile by going to ‘Manage Rewards’ and tapping the ‘create a custom reward’ button under ‘create new’. Then, assign the reward a self-explanatory name, a description (optional), points required (to claim reward), and finally assign a colorful relevant image to it. All this information will be visible to the child when assigned. The reward has now been created and saved permanently. By default, it is assigned to the active child’s profile but feel free to unassign it if needed. For all other children, this custom goal will now be visible under the ‘custom’ section of ‘Manage Goals’ list.

When a child is logged in, they can press the ‘gift’ button next to the ‘points’ button to get to their rewards list. If a reward is above your child’s points budget, it will have a ‘lock’ symbol in the top-right corner, it cannot be claimed when pressed, and it shows a progress bar stating how many more points are needed to claim that reward. If a reward is within the child’s available points budget, it will not have a ‘lock’ symbol and can be claimed by pressing it. When pressed, the child will be asked to confirm that they wish to use X amount of points for this reward. Once they confirm by pressing “YES - I WANT IT!”, the reward will be marked “claimed” and parents will receive a notification about this claimed reward. Lastly, the parents will have the ability to approve or reject it from their own notifications center. If approved, the child will be notified and respective points will be deducted from their total. If rejected, the child will still be notified but their points will remain unchanged.

We encourage you to give or carry out the reward as soon as you are able to. For example, if your child has redeemed ‘pick out what is for dinner tonight,’ it would be highly recommended to honor the reward that same evening. Keep in mind there are also rewards that require additional planning, in which case it is advisable to start planning the reward as soon as possible.

The satisfaction of having achieved and receiving the reward at the same time will increase the effectiveness of the reward system moving forward.

The chatbot functionality is only enabled for the child app and is based on helpful conversations and exercises built by our clinical psychologists. This means that when your child is ‘chatting’ with Manatee, they are actually engaging with a conversational chatbot who gets its intelligence by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. At this stage of development there is no ‘free text’ option, which means that the conversation functions like a multiple choice quiz. Based on your child’s answer, the chatbot will provide the most relevant and helpful content. After every exercise we ask whether the conversation was helpful or not - we will use this information to make our chatbot smarter!