Our story
Keepers of Childhood is a family company. Katy had the idea. Jim built it. Everything on this site exists because we needed it in our own house first.
It was a weeknight. The kids were finally down, the kitchen was half-cleaned, and we were on the couch talking about the thing every parent eventually talks about: our children are getting smart.\n\nSmart enough to notice that the Tooth Fairy writes in Mom's handwriting. Smart enough to see that Santa's S looks an awful lot like Dad's. You can disguise it for a while. You can write with your left hand. But you are one careful eight-year-old away from the whole thing coming apart, and you know it.
“I was writing a note from the Tooth Fairy at eleven o’clock at night with my left hand, and I thought — this is ridiculous. I am hiding my own handwriting from a six-year-old. There has to be something better than this.”
— Katy
The other half of it was screens. Not a lecture about screens — just the ordinary, daily, slightly losing battle of finding something for them to do that is not a tablet. And what we kept coming back to was paper. Our kids love paper. They love a project. They love being handed a list and a pencil and being told it is their job. A shopping list. A page to color. Something to fill in and hand back to you, proudly, slightly smudged.
So we went looking for it. And it was all either a subscription box, a pile of ads, a site that wanted our children's data, or a template that looked like a tax form. Nothing that felt like it came from the person it was supposed to come from. Nothing you would keep.
“Katy said, half as a joke, you build things for a living — build this. And then she kept talking, and by the end of the night she had the whole thing: the letters, the keepers, the printables, a book you fill up as they grow. I just wrote it down. She designed it out loud on a couch.”
— Jim
Every decision on this site traces back to that conversation. The letters are typed and printed so nobody recognizes the handwriting. There are hundreds of coloring pages and free printables because we wanted paper on the table, not another app. The Grow Book lives on your own phone, encrypted, because we are not willing to hold other people's children's photographs on terms we would not accept for our own.
There are no ads. There is no tracking of children. There is a Kid Safe Mode that hides every keeper, so a child can be handed the tablet and find nothing that spoils anything. We do not sell data, because it is not ours to sell.
“The test I use for everything we add is simple: would I put this in front of my own kids, and would I still be glad about it in ten years? If the answer is no, it does not go on the site. That is the only rule.”
— Katy
The newest thing we made came from the same place. Every Santa letter in the world arrives before Christmas, in a pile with the catalogs. We wanted one that turns up in the quiet week afterwards, when nothing else does — that asks how they got on with the thing they loved, and that says the hard part of their year out loud, kindly. The year we lost our dog, that would have meant everything.
You can see it here: a real letter in the post.
We are a small family company in Florida. When you buy a year here, it is not going to a fund — it is going to the two people who built this on a couch, and it pays for the paper, the stamps and the hours.
Katy & Jim Cloonan · The Compendium Company, LLC
“Dreams” by The Compendium Company, LLC