Ownership and history

About this site.

Two things are worth saying plainly: who pays for this, and what was at this address before.

Who publishes GoBabyApp

This site is written and paid for by the team behind Geopapa, a family locator app for parents, available on iPhone and Android. We are a commercial company and Geopapa is a paid product, with a free download and in-app purchases.

So every page here has an interest behind it. Our working rule is that the app is mentioned where it does something specific, that we describe what it does not do as clearly as what it does, and that no page recommends buying anything as a substitute for the boring parts — practising the route, agreeing the rules, telling staff early. If a page ever reads like an advert with a paragraph of advice attached, we have got it wrong; write and say so.

There is no advertising on this site, no affiliate links, no sponsored posts, and no third-party analytics or tracking scripts. Links to geopapa.com carry a utm_source tag so we can see in our own statistics that a visit came from here. That is the whole measurement setup.

Contact: [email protected].

The blog that used to be at this address

From roughly 2013 to 2018, gobabyapp.com belonged to someone else: a London family blog called GoBaby, connected to an app of the same name that launched in July 2013. It wrote about days out with toddlers — the zoo, Hamleys, the Science Museum, a great many photographs on Sundays — and signed off with a farewell post in January 2018. The record of it is in the Internet Archive.

We bought the domain later, after it had lapsed. We are not the people who wrote that blog, we have no connection to them, and none of their writing appears here — it is theirs, and we have not reproduced it. If you followed a link to an old post such as /2014/05/parenting-fail/, that is why you landed on this page instead.

If you wrote for the original GoBaby and would like the old address to point somewhere you choose, or would rather we did not mention it at all, email us and we will do it.

Why a locator company writes about walking to school

Because that is the decision our customers are actually making, and the app is a small part of it. Parents install a family locator in the same month their child starts going somewhere alone. Most of what determines how that goes has nothing to do with software, and a company that only publishes reasons to buy its product ends up giving bad advice about the rest.

How these pages are written

• No invented statistics, and no research citations we have not read. Where practice varies by country, we say so instead of quoting an average.
• No claims about what Geopapa does beyond what is documented on geopapa.com, including the limitations: alerts depend on connectivity, permissions and battery, and an SOS does not contact emergency services.
• Nothing here is safety, legal or medical advice. School travel policy and the legal position on unsupervised children differ by country and local authority — your school and council are the authorities.
• Pages carry the date they were last updated. When something changes, we change the page rather than posting a correction elsewhere.

The rest of the site

• Walking to school alone

  Readiness, rehearsal and what to agree on the first solo morning.

  Read the guide

• The first phone checklist

  What to set up before the handover, and the four rules worth agreeing.

  Read the checklist

• Days out together

  The five-minute plan at the gate and the first two minutes if someone is missing.

  Read the plan