YOMU – for the love of books

We’ve been building YOMU for nearly a year now. “We” is a team of 6. More importantly, we are parents to more than a dozen kids aged 1 to 23. All of us have gone through the same cycle you are probably experiencing with your children – they love reading books, then devices enter their life, and then they become obsessive scrollers, finding it difficult to keep their attention focused on anything that’s longer than 6-10 seconds. Our own children (at least those older than 8 or so) have all gone through this process.

As we like to say: It’s not too late to raise a reader! The real challenge is how to create those lifelong reading habits, before the “addiction machines” like TikTok, Instagram, Roblox, etc enter the kids’ lives and make it almost impossible for us as parents to battle them.

There are two books that inspired us in building YOMU above all others:

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt – A wonderful book, explaining a lot of what’s going on in the minds of our younger generations, now that they are by default wired to devices and social media. For many kids, free play, boredom, books, outdoor time, and face-to-face friendships — all things that were the defaults for us as children — have been crowded out by phones, feeds, notifications, and endless digital stimulation.

We don’t believe technology is the enemy. But we do believe technology should serve childhood, not consume it. And we believe reading is one of the healthiest, most powerful alternatives to passive scrolling. Books help kids build focus, imagination, empathy, patience, vocabulary, and confidence. They give children something screens often take away: a slower, deeper way to spend time.

Atomic Habits by James Clear – Breaking bad habits and building good ones can sometimes feel like a monumental task at best, and an impossible one at worst.

One of the ideas we love in James Clear’s Atomic Habits is that big changes often come from small, repeatable actions. That idea helped shape the way we think about YOMU.

Instead of treating reading as an all-or-nothing monumental challenge, YOMU helps families make it visible, trackable, and rewarding. A few pages today matter. Ten minutes before bed matters. Finishing one chapter matters. Each small step helps a child see progress — and progress makes the next step easier.

So we’re here to read all the greatest books and research on the topic of creating strong lifelong habits for your family, and we’re working hard to bake all of that into a product that you can trust and your children can enjoy. We highly recommend reading both The Anxious Generation and Atomic Habits, but don’t worry if you’re too busy for that right now – we’re here to distill the best learnings for you!