About

The Story Behind VillageMetrics

VillageMetrics was born out of a deeply personal need. My daughter Sydney has autism and struggles with behaviors that are overwhelming for her — and for all of us — and we’ve spent years trying to navigate them as a family.

Some days, it’s a 30-minute meltdown because someone opened a door she wanted to open herself. Other days, we’re stuck in the parking lot for 45 minutes because she refuses to get in her seat after leaving a store. Sometimes it’s sudden hair pulling, triggered by frustration or something no one around her even understands. And then there are the quieter struggles, like taking 10 minutes to get toothpaste onto her toothbrush and melting down if you try to help.

We’ve been through it all — therapies, specialists, medication changes. Like many families, we’ve relied on powerful medications to try to manage the most disruptive behaviors. But these aren’t mild meds. These are antipsychotics with serious risks: weight gain, sedation, cognitive side effects, and even the possibility of permanent neurological tics. The thought that I could give her a drug that might make her feel even more isolated — just so she might lash out a little less — breaks my heart.

And the hardest part? Even after all that, you can still find yourself months later facing the same behaviors, no closer to knowing if the medication ever helped in the first place. Every doctor’s visit becomes a guessing game: How has she been doing? We compress weeks of ups and downs into a few vague sentences because there’s no clear data to go on.

That’s where the idea for VillageMetrics began. I wanted a way for families like ours to stop flying blind — to have a simple, collaborative way to capture what’s happening day to day and turn it into meaningful insight over time.

When I first started building this, I thought the severity of behaviors we were dealing with was rare. But I’ve since learned that it’s far more common than I ever realized. Over 750,000 children in the U.S. are prescribed antipsychotics to manage severe behavioral issues like aggression and self-injury. And antipsychotics are just one category of heavy-duty meds used in these cases. Based on medication data alone, even accounting for overlap, we’re talking about roughly 2 million children navigating behavior intense enough to warrant serious medical intervention.

That’s thousands of families making medication decisions under pressure — with little clarity, little support, and little sense of whether anything is actually working. What we’re building isn’t an app to optimize behavior. It’s basic infrastructure families need to have in place to collect real day-to-day data against medications and therapies so you’re not walking into doctor’s appointments empty-handed, trying to recall the past month from memory. Instead, you’ll have data on what’s working and what’s not, be able to make better care decisions for your child, and hopefully see a meaningful improvement in the wellbeing of your whole family.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. For families like mine, that’s not just a saying — it’s survival. VillageMetrics was built to bring that village together.

Doug Kerwin

Co-Founder