Glossary
What the words here mean
Every term used across the assessment and the curriculum, defined in plain language — so nothing you read here is a mystery you have to decode on your own.
The four pillars
The assessment looks at four parts of life as a single parent. Together they paint a fuller picture of how single-parent life may be affecting your wellbeing, your capacity, and your relationship with your child.
Emotional Regulation
This reflects how pressure tends to show up in you outwardly — in your emotions, reactions, patience, and ability to stay steady in hard moments.
Mental Load
This reflects how much you may be carrying in your head — the planning, remembering, anticipating, and decision-making that often falls on one person.
Recovery Capacity
This reflects how much space, energy, and reserve you have to recover after the demands of life and parenting.
Parent-Child Connection
This reflects how connected, present, and emotionally available you feel with your child, especially when life feels stretched.
The two most easily confused: Mental Load is what you carry internally. Emotional Regulation is how that pressure shows up outwardly.
How scores read
Each pillar is scored on the same scale, and every score sits in one of four bands. The labels describe the area — what it has left this fortnight — never you.
Running thin
This is where the fortnight was thinnest.
Uneven
Some of this is working, and it is not steady yet.
Holding
This is mostly holding.
Steady
This is a strength right now.
There is deliberately no total score and no grade. Four areas, four numbers, and the lowest one simply points to where to start.
How tracking works
The product is not a single score — it is what changes between your runs.
Baseline
Your first completed run of The Steady Parent assessment. Every later run is compared against it, so your progress is measured against your own starting point — never against other parents.
Re-take
Running the same assessment again later — the paid plan re-takes it at week 4 and week 8. The comparison shows which areas moved, in your own words and numbers.
Movement
The change in an area between two runs. Only a shift of two points or more counts as movement — smaller wobbles on a self-report are treated as noise, not progress or decline.
The two-week window
Every scored question asks about the last two weeks, not about parenting in general. A defined window is what makes your scores able to change between runs.
Flat and light
The outcome when every area comes back holding or steady. The result then names what is working and recommends nothing — you are not handed a problem to have something to sell.
The tools and rooms
Names you will meet inside the app.
The Reset
A short guided tool for getting one evening back — for the moments when the day has already gone wrong and there is nothing left in the tank.
Settle
Two-minute practices for the moment your child is upset: steadying together, without needing to be calm first.
Safe Reply
A tool that helps you draft a steady reply to a hostile co-parent message — so the message stops running your evening.
Kindred Rhythms
Twelve short parent-child rituals across four age bands — small moments of connection built to fit a real day. Two per age band are free.
Guides
Twelve short written guides on healing, child development, and co-parenting. Five are free to read in full.
Strong Roots
The 8-week attachment pathway for single parents: short lessons, worksheets, and journal prompts, about 15 minutes a week.
Weekly reflection
A warm, honest read of your week, woven from your journal entries, with one focus for the week ahead.
Strategy tag
The short, actionable focus your weekly reflection produces — the one thing worth trying in the week ahead.
My Week
The in-app weekly planner: your personal goals and your child’s development routines laid out on one board.
The Accord
A members’ room for parents further along — a quieter space with weekly rhythms and the founder’s weekly sitting.
See the pillars for yourself
The assessment takes about four minutes, and the result is yours to read — free.