I know you already know that. But I also know that at 11pm, after the third night in a row, when the house is finally quiet and you're sitting there trying to figure out what you did wrong or what you missed or what you could have done differently, it doesn't always feel that way.
So I'm saying it again. We are not bad parents. We are doing everything we possibly can. And it is still this hard. Those two things are both true at the same time.
I built Keel for my daughter Ella. She is twelve. And this is what our life has looked like.
What it actually looks like
Ella's dysregulation doesn't come from nowhere. Looking back now I can see it builds across days. Something accumulates that I couldn't see or measure at the time. And then at night, around nine or ten or eleven or even midnight, it peaks. Zero to six in seconds. And then anything — a look, a word, the way I'm standing, the sound of breathing — can take it to a nine.
At a seven I can sometimes still reach her. At a nine she is breaking things. She is not there. And the more you push back, the deeper it goes.
We went from full meltdowns once a month, to several times a week, to nearly every day. That last stretch — the daily nines — is what I can only describe as a living hell. Not because I don't love her. Because I do, completely, and I could not help her and I could not stop it and I couldn't see it coming.
That's when we made the decision for thirty days inpatient.
What actually helped
I will tell you honestly what worked during those thirty days. It was not sophisticated. It was structure and no technology and only basic food. That's it. The absence of stimulation and the presence of consistent routine gave her nervous system somewhere to land. When she came home I could see it in her eyes. She was more conscious. She had a little more control. The pattern wasn't gone but the frequency had dropped and the peaks weren't as high.
That observation changed how I thought about what she actually needs. Her nervous system is not broken. It is dysregulated. And dysregulated nervous systems respond to structure, rhythm, and reduced load. The inpatient environment provided those things bluntly. I started asking: is there any way to provide them more continuously, in the real world, without locking a child in a facility?
That question is what became Keel.
What I actually want
I want to be honest about the goal here because I think it matters.
I am not trying to cure Ella. I do not think there is a version of this where the patterns disappear entirely. What I want is to move the ceiling. Right now a nine out of ten happens daily. A nine out of ten daily is a living hell for her and for everyone around her. A nine out of ten monthly is a bad day. It is manageable. It is something a family can absorb and recover from.
Even getting the daily nines down to sevens changes everything. A seven I can work with. A seven she can sometimes work with. A nine is past the point where any of the tools matter.
That is the goal. Not perfection. Not the elimination of hard days. Just moving the ceiling down enough that the worst moments are less frequent and less total.
What we've tried
I'm not going to list everything because you've probably tried most of it too and you don't need the reminder. What I will say is: we have tried a lot. Talk therapy, which she currently refuses to engage with. I would love to do EMDR. I would love to do TMS. She cannot get through the intake process for either. The inpatient stay. Medication conversations. All of it.
The honest truth is that many of the tools that work for dysregulated children require a level of regulation to access. You need to be calm enough to talk about what happened. You need to be still enough for a session. You need to be willing to enter a room with a stranger and try. When a child is in a daily nine-out-of-ten pattern, those doors are often closed. The tools exist. She just can't reach them yet.
Keel was built for that gap. Not as a replacement for therapy or medication or any of the things we're still pursuing. As something that works in the moments before the threshold, in the minutes when there might still be a window, when the nervous system is building but hasn't peaked. Something that operates quietly in the background and doesn't require her to participate consciously or be ready.
On explaining this to people who don't live it
This is the part that is hardest to talk about.
If you have a child like Ella, you know the look you get. You know the well-meaning suggestions. You know what it feels like to be in a public situation where everything has gone sideways and you can feel the judgment of people who think this is a parenting problem. You know the exhaustion of explaining, again, that this is not about boundaries or consequences or what she ate for dinner.
I am not going to try to explain it to those people in this letter. I am talking to you.
You know what this is. You know how hard you are trying. You know that you have been to the appointments and read the books and changed the diet and restructured the household and tried every accommodation and stayed up until two in the morning after a bad night searching for something, anything, that might help.
You are not failing. The system around children like ours is not built for them yet. We are all doing our best in a gap that should not exist.
Why an Apple Watch
Ella already had one. A lot of kids do. That was actually part of the insight. The sensor that could change everything for families like ours was already on millions of children's wrists. The data was already being collected. Nobody had built the layer on top of it that actually mattered: something that reads the physiological state, learns your specific child's baseline, and gives you two to four minutes of warning before the pattern peaks.
That window is everything. Two to four minutes before a nine is a different universe from reacting after the nine arrives. I know this from experience.
Keel watches quietly for seven days first. No alerts, no notifications. It just learns Ella. Her HRV in the morning. Her pattern after school. What her nervous system looks like on a hard day versus a calm one. Then it starts to speak. Gently. A wave on the wrist when things are building. A signal to the parent when it matters. A breathing guide that works even when nothing else does.
It also does something I didn't expect to want until I thought about it: it tells me every morning what kind of day we're likely to have. If her HRV is lower than her seven-day average when she wakes up, her nervous system is already depleted before the day starts. That changes everything about how I approach the day. Not perfectly. But better.
What I want you to know
If you are reading this at 11pm after a hard night, I see you.
If you have sat in a parking lot after something fell apart in public, I see you.
If you have watched your child come back from somewhere unreachable and felt relief and grief at the same time, I see you.
If you have explained this to a doctor or a teacher or a family member and felt like they understood the words but not the weight, I see you.
Keel is not a solution. It is a tool. It is the tool I wished existed when we were going from once a month to several times a week to every day. It will not stop the hard days. But it might help you see them coming. And sometimes that is enough to change the outcome.
If Ella is still struggling, I will still be working on this. That is the honest truth of why I built it.