A Fraser Woods Montessori School mother has created an online app to help inspire girls to be clever, creative, and inquisitive. Empowered Girl offers tools and interactive features to help girls understand self-care.

Maria Fuller of Southbury, a mother of two, Alexa and Arya, is the founder of the Raising a Powerful Girl platform and the recently launched Empowered Girl app. While Ms Fuller described her family’s household as “low tech,” this past summer, her 9-year-old daughter Alexa requested to work on an iPad. Ms Fuller was hesitant. She wanted her daughter to have access to a productive space on the iPad, so her daughter challenged her to make one.

The challenge lingered for Ms Fuller, so she began journaling and thinking about what she would want her daughter to do online and about skills that would help her daughter understand self-care. The mobile web-based Empowered Girl app grew out of Ms Fuller’s concept.

Ms Fuller said she wanted all children to have access to the information in the app, which is why she designed it as a web-based app. It is available on any device with access to the internet. The app is available at empoweredgirlapp.com.

According to a recent release, “The app was designed to provide a valuable and engaging online experience for young girls that teaches them powerful skills they can implement throughout their lives.”

“I wanted to create an online experience for my daughter that was not only educational, but inspiring as well. It was created for her, for girls just like her, and for my inner child, too. It has been a joy to connect with so many amazing women and girls while creating content, and it has cultivated a powerful and ever-growing community of unstoppable women as a result,” said Ms Fuller in the release.

When creating the app, Ms Fuller said recently that she thought about skills that would have helped her “at that age.” She focused on self-care and emotional vocabulary for the app. Now, Ms Fuller said, her daughter uses the skills on the app to describe her emotions, to keep track of her moods, and more.

The content on the app is geared toward girls between the ages of 8 to 15, and Ms Fuller said older girls can use it, too.

Ms Fuller worked as a critical paramedic before, and she does not have a background in coding. She took up her daughter’s challenge anyway, and it took her six weeks to create the app. She spent roughly 60 to 70 hours a week working to create it, and she said she would do it again. Young girls, Ms Fuller said, need to be taught how to find their inspiration within themselves.

According to the release, the app was designed around six tenets: Mindfulness, gratitude, mindset, purpose, humanitarianism, and relationships. Ms Fuller controls and creates the content on the website. Her husband, Robert, helps. Ms Fuller said her company, Raising a Powerful Girl, has had a positive impact on her family in many ways.

Once logged into the app, the home page offers six main areas to chose from: Self-care, inspiring stories, word power, challenges, bullet journaling, and quizzes/games. Each area of the app offers a different way to learn or become inspired. One challenge under self-care asks the user to write a letter to themselves to offer advice on how to take better care of their mind, body, and spirit. Another area shares a video interview of a girl speaking about what “normal” means. The app also offers a guide to draw a daily mood tracker, shares inspiring stories, and offers monthly challenges. Ms Fuller described bullet journaling as “an incredible way of organizing everything in your life.”

Ms Fuller said the app teaches “critical life skills that everyone needs.” She said her goal is more women in leadership positions, and she is teaching girls how to have the mindset to achieve that.

Ms Fuller also has a podcast called Raising A Powerful Girl. It is available through Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and Google play.

The app has different rates for users. The monthly charge is $9.99, the yearly charge is $99, and a lifetime membership is $149. Ms Fuller said subscriptions can also be given as gifts. For more information about the app and subscribing, visit empoweredgirlapp.com.