Your family’s information.
Clear answers.
A practical guide to the controls in FamilyBucks and what happens when you use Penny. Because trust starts with understanding.
Parents set the pace.
You create the family, add child profiles, and choose the responsibilities, rewards, and currency values that fit your home.
- Kids don’t need an email address. Child profiles are managed within your family account.
- Your currency, your decisions. FamilyBucks tracks family currency for learning and rewards. It doesn’t hold children’s money or require a child bank account.
- Review Penny’s proposals. In the parent chat, proposed task, reward, and balance changes are presented for your confirmation before they are applied.
- Use what helps. You can manage routines and rewards directly, and print routines for use away from a screen.
Account safeguards, explained.
Parent areas require sign-in. Family membership and parent-role checks control access to parent actions and family information.
Passwords are stored as salted hashes, rather than readable passwords.
FamilyBucks uses service providers to run features such as data storage, file storage, email, and AI. Information is processed by those services as part of delivering the product.
What you share with Penny.
Penny is a parent-facing AI guide. When you chat, your messages, conversation history, relevant family information, and saved parent notes may be sent to OpenAI to generate a reply or suggest an action.
Family context makes the help more relevant.
Depending on the conversation, this can include child profile details, routines, tasks, rewards, and balances. Penny can save notes from earlier conversations to help with future replies. It is more than processing just the words in your latest message.
Conversations are stored and may be reviewed.
During beta, the FamilyBucks team, including Dr. Amy, may review conversations to improve Penny and address safety concerns. Safety monitoring can also flag messages for team review. An AI conversation is not a confidential clinical consultation.
Other AI features have their own processing.
If you choose a feature that analyzes a photo or a printable, the content you submit may be processed by an external AI service for that feature.
You don’t need to send medical records, financial account information, passwords, or other sensitive documents to get help with a routine.
A guide, with clear limits.
Penny is built with Dr. Amy Patenaude and can draw on her materials when relevant passages are available. Penny also uses general AI model knowledge. Not every reply comes from Dr. Amy’s materials or has been reviewed by her.
Penny can make mistakes. Treat suggestions as ideas to consider, and check proposed changes before accepting them. She offers educational support for parents, not diagnosis, therapy, medical advice, or emergency care.
For health, safety, or mental-health concerns, contact an appropriate qualified professional. Penny is not an emergency service.
A few helpful habits.
- Use a unique password for your parent account.
- Keep adult sign-in details separate from your child’s access.
- Sign out of the parent account on shared or public devices.
- Only upload photos and share information that are needed for the feature you’re using.
- Read Penny’s introduction before starting a conversation.
This page explains product behavior and safeguards. Read our Privacy Policy and SMS Terms & Conditions for the full details.