About Tell Me Cards

It started with a pattern

My wife is a psychologist who works with adults. Over the years of her practice, she kept noticing the same thing across very different clients: a quiet, recurring feeling of not having been seen as a child.

Not dramatic stories. Not trauma in the clinical sense. Just adults who grew up feeling like their inner world wasn't known by the people closest to them. Who couldn't name what they felt, or ask for what they needed, or trust that the people around them actually wanted to understand them. And who were now spending years in therapy working back through a feeling whose roots were decades earlier.

The window that nobody names

When I started looking into this, the developmental research kept pointing to the same window: the years between ages 5 and 9.

Before 5, memory is fragmentary. After 5, children begin forming the continuous autobiographical memories that shape their sense of self. They also start forming logic, cause and effect, and a working model of which adults are safe to talk to.

That working model is quiet. Children don't announce it. But by roughly age 10, it's largely set. If the pattern they learn is that parents don't have time for the hard conversations, or don't know how to ask, or change the subject when feelings come up, that's the default they carry forward. Often into the therapist's office, years later.

The uncomfortable part is that most parents of 5 to 9 year olds don't know this window exists. By the time the teenage shutdown makes it obvious, the pattern is already in place.

Why a deck of cards

I looked at what already existed and most of it was digital. An app, a course, a program, a subscription. Another thing to open on a phone.

But the kind of relationship I wanted to help build isn't digital. It happens at the kitchen table, in the car, on the floor at bedtime. A deck of cards is a ritual. It's physical, shared, and specific. It's the opposite of one more screen.

So I made one.

What Tell Me Cards is

Tell Me Cards is a 107-card conversation deck for families with children ages 5 to 9." The questions are proprietary, open-ended, and organized across seven areas of a child's inner world: daily life, feelings and emotions, family and relationships, social skills and friendship, dreams and the future, values and character, and creativity.

Every question was built from the same research foundation. I read the most heavily cited books in child psychology. The ones clinicians, educators, and therapists keep coming back to. I pulled the insights that kept recurring and shaped them into question form. Nothing in this deck is guesswork.

Every card is built around a simple idea: children answer a card differently than they answer a parent asking directly. The card creates a third object in the room. It makes being known feel safe.

What we're trying to do

Tell Me Cards isn't a fix for something broken. It's a tool for building something while the window is still open. Five minutes. One question. One answer you didn't know was in them.

That's the whole idea.

- Nik, founder of Tell Me Cards