ChewPaca Support

Help with setting up, running a practice session, and knowing when to stop.

Getting set up

Where should I put the phone?

Propped up, facing your child, roughly at the far side of their plate — about an arm's length away. It needs to see their face, so somewhere it will not get knocked. A cheap phone stand helps; leaning it against a glass works too.

Your child should never hold the phone. If it gets picked up or moved, the app pauses rather than guessing.

It says the camera cannot see a face

Usually one of three things: the phone is too far away, the room is too dim, or your child is looking down at their plate. Move the phone closer, add light, and angle it slightly upward toward their face.

Does it use the microphone?

No. ChewPaca only uses the camera, and never records it.

Running a session

How long should we practise?

One meal a day, at least for the first week. That is not a limitation we added to be annoying — practising a little and often works considerably better than drilling, and pushing harder tends to turn mealtimes into a struggle.

Nothing happened when my child chewed with their mouth open

That is deliberate. ChewPaca only ever responds to success. When your child keeps chewing with their lips closed, their alpaca or horse chews along and footprints appear, one by one. When they do not, nothing happens at all — no buzzer, no red mark, no tally.

Children learn this skill faster from being caught doing it right than from being corrected doing it wrong, and a phone that scolds a child at the table makes mealtimes worse.

What do I actually do during the meal?

Not much, and that is the point. At the end of each round the app prompts you with one short sentence to say out loud — something specific like "I noticed your lips stayed together while you chewed."

That sentence is the part that teaches. The animal holds your child's attention; your praise is what makes the habit stick.

How do I stop a session?

Press and hold the ✕ in the corner for about a second. It takes a deliberate hold so a stray finger cannot end the meal.

The animals

Alpaca or horse?

Either. When you set up a child, choose an alpaca or a horse and pick its look — coat colour, and for an alpaca a scarf and backpack, or for a horse an optional white blaze and a saddle and bedroll in colours of your choice. Give it a name, or tap Surprise me.

What happens when a reward is delivered?

Your child's animal walks off to the barn, and they choose a new one — alpaca or horse, any look. Every animal stays in the barn for good. Tap an animal there to watch its walk again; tap its name to rename it.

Can my child use ChewPaca without the animal on screen?

Yes. On the home screen, switch Alpaca (or Horse) off for a plain progress ring with green lines instead. For ages 11–13 this is the default, and either way your child can switch it themselves.

What is the sound at the end of each round?

A soft hum from the alpaca, or a quiet nicker from the horse. It is your cue to say something, because you probably can't see the screen from across the table. Turn it off with the Sound button on the home screen.

Can my child start practice on their own?

Yes. If you set a parent PIN in Settings, your child can still start a session and switch the animal or sound on and off. The PIN is only asked for Settings, bonus tokens, confirming a reward was delivered, adding a child, and practising beyond the daily limit. Bonus tokens always need a grown-up: without a PIN, the app asks a quick grown-up question instead.

Tokens and rewards

How do tokens work?

A good round earns a token. A few tokens swap for a real-world reward you agreed on beforehand — choosing the bedtime story, picking the music in the car, ten extra minutes before bed.

Tokens are never taken away. Once earned, they are earned, even after a bad meal.

Why are the rewards not sweets?

Tying food to the lesson tends to turn mealtimes into a negotiation, which is the opposite of what we are going for. Attention, choice, and a small activity work better and cost nothing.

How do stages, rounds and tokens work?

Practice has four stages: Learning, Practising, Maintaining and Fading out. Every good round earns one token — that never changes. As the habit forms, a reward takes more tokens: 3, then 5, then 8, then 10. Rounds also get longer, from 20 seconds up to 90, depending on your child's age and stage. A new price only applies after the reward your child is currently saving for, and rounds only lengthen once a reward is earned at the new stage, so the goal never moves mid-way.

Moving up a stage takes a minimum number of meals and days plus a steady success rate. Only a few rounds earn tokens per meal (three early on, one in Fading out). Two hard meals in a row pause progress for a few meals; mostly hard recent meals step practice back one stage with shorter rounds. That is normal, not failure. Learning never steps back.

In Fading out, log meals where your child chewed well with no app. Two logged app-free meals plus a good run suggest graduating — the aim is for your child not to need the app at all.

Bonus tokens always need a grown-up and a reason, and are limited to one per meal and two per week.

When to stop and ask someone

Some children physically cannot chew with their mouth closed.

Blocked nasal breathing, enlarged tonsils or adenoids, allergies, a deviated septum, or oral-motor differences can all make it genuinely hard or uncomfortable. Practising will not fix any of those.

If your child has pain while chewing, coughs or chokes during meals, struggles with certain textures, or usually breathes through their mouth, it is worth mentioning what you have noticed to your pediatrician, dentist, or an ENT before continuing.

If there is little change after a couple of weeks of regular practice, ChewPaca shows this list again as a reminder before the next session.

ChewPaca is not a medical, dental, feeding, or swallowing assessment. Stop and seek advice from an appropriate clinician if you have concerns.

Privacy

ChewPaca collects nothing. No account, no server, no analytics. Video is processed on the device as it is seen and immediately discarded — never recorded, never uploaded. Full details in the privacy policy.

Why we don't say "nothing ever leaves your phone"

It would be a better line, and plenty of apps use it. We think it would be slightly untrue, so here is the precise version.

Nothing goes to us. There is no ChewPaca server. We have no account system, no analytics, and no way to receive your child's name, their progress, or a single frame of video. That part is absolute.

But your phone backs up its apps. Unless you have turned that off, iOS copies app data to your iCloud and Android copies it to your Google account — ChewPaca included, along with every other app you own. So the sentence "nothing ever leaves your phone" would be wrong, even though the spirit of it is right.

What that backup contains is what the app stores locally: your child's name or nickname, an age range, their practice history and their badges. It is in your account, under your password, and we are not part of it in any way. It never contains video or audio, because none is ever saved in the first place — the camera's images are examined and discarded frame by frame while a meal is happening.

If you would rather exclude it, both platforms let you switch off backup for a single app — instructions are in the privacy policy. Moving to a new phone still works either way, using the export and import in ChewPaca's settings.

We would rather explain this than write a shorter sentence that does not survive scrutiny.

Moving to a new phone

Because nothing is stored on a server, progress does not sync by itself. In Settings you can export your child's progress to a file and import it on the new device.

Still stuck?

Email ChewPaca@HeadFirstServices.com and tell us what happened, what phone you are using, and what you expected instead. For privacy questions: privacy@headfirstservices.com.

Sound credits

Horse sounds from freesound.org, trimmed and level-adjusted for the app: