Ninety-eight percent of American children under 10 can reach a smartphone or tablet at home; 45 percent even have one of their own. Over the last decade, modern touchscreen devices have become intuitive and affordable enough to go mainstream among children worldwide in homes across the globe and beyond now.
But despite this high usage rate, kids mainly use those devices to do just two things: watch shows and play games. They don’t use a browser or search Google; too difficult, many adults would say, too dangerous. Although most children are proficient with the touch interface, navigating the web requires advanced literacy skills. The ability to construct a search query, read at an advanced level, skim the results, click on the appropriate pages, and find the relevant content on the page is beyond the capabilities of most kids under 10.
When it comes to the web, written language is a barrier for kids; finding answers to their own questions is too hard for them. Even though children are always curious about the world around them, there is an enormous amount of information online that sits just beyond their reach.
Most adults, and even most parents, do not see this as a problem that must be fixed. After all, whenever kids have a question, the “search engine” called Mom or Dad — or a babysitter or another caregiver — usually does a fine job answering it, sometimes with a little help from their own quick Googling. If a child asks enough times about the same subject, they may even get a book about it. Problem solved.
But accepting this limited idea of “kidtech” — games and shows, ad infinitum — wastes a real opportunity for young children. Giving kids safe, immediate access to the immense store of information online is a challenge worth pursuing. I think there is room for a new audio-visual web browser for kids: one in which they can independently search online and satisfy their own curiosity. And just as browsers have become more important for adults — they are basically an OS — they offer the same promise for children. The biggest obstacle to solving this accessibility issue, though, is not technological — it is philosophical and cultural.
Points of resistance to an “internet for kids”
As many parents and caregivers know, children can hold surprisingly advanced conversations. Starting around age 3, they ask sophisticated questions and can understand an incredible amount when information is presented verbally and visually. Young kids are forming their interests and are eager to make sense of the world they are growing up in.
But when adults are shown the idea of a web browser built specifically for kids, their reaction usually ranges from indifference to pushback. Try asking a parent to picture a world where children can independently search for information on anything they wonder about and you will probably be met with one of three responses.
The first is that children must be protected and kept safe, both from certain information and from certain kinds of people. As a parent of two young children myself, I understand this; keeping my kids safe is part of my job. Parents rightly want to make sure children are not exposed to profanity, nudity, and violence. Likewise, many parents want the power to control who their child is talking with online, usually limited to friends and family.
If children could search for things on their own and browse the web, how would we keep them safe? While managing access to content and people is a hard problem to solve well, I believe it can be done — and done well — through a mix of parental controls, automated filters, and human moderation. In the early 2000s, for instance, email was made almost unusable by spam; these three methods largely fixed the problem.
Of course, it will take time and careful testing to build the right content filters for a children’s version of the web. But the difficulty of this work (and parents’ lingering worry) should not keep us from seeing the ambition of the end goal: giving children access to a wealth of knowledge.
The second reaction adults often have is that “screen time” — the phrase used for the time when children are allowed to use a device — is something bad. Parents often feel guilty about letting their children use internet devices and regard screens like candy: something permitted only in small amounts because their children ask for it, yet not something they believe is truly good for them. If screen time is bad, the argument goes, then making it possible for children to look up anything they are curious about may mean children would use screens even more.
Consider this thought experiment: imagine a child reading a physical book — say, a novel you judge to be of high quality. Now imagine a child reading that same book on an iPad screen. Does moving from paper to glass alter the quality of the time spent reading?
Many parents have decided that screens are “bad” because they see their children taking part in what they consider a low-value experience. But it is important here not to confuse the quality of the content with the medium itself, or with the mode of interaction, whether active or passive. Screens themselves are not inherently good or bad. I believe there is room to rethink our assumptions about screen time by turning the screen from a simple distraction device into a reference tool.
Finally, many adults imagining a web experience for kids are struck by a third concern: they want to know how it will educate children.
The education question may not seem like an obstacle to making the web accessible to children. However, when you unpack what is meant by “a child’s education,” it usually refers to core academics: reading, writing, math, science, and history. For some parents, few other skills, such as computer science or problem-solving, count as education.
But this narrow view of what education means can sharply limit which content is treated as important and worthwhile for children. Most of the things a child might wonder about and want to look up may not be classified as academic, at least in the traditional sense.
Developing core academic skills matters. But I think it is equally important — perhaps even more so — that children build interests and uncover their passions. School is not usually centered on that. Likewise, parents often have trouble nurturing their children’s interests, especially when those interests do not match their own. A child may develop a passion for skateboarding, dance, Star Wars, outer space, video game design, or countless other pursuits that their parents may not know much about — or care about, for that matter.
In my view, we need to let go of the obsession with academics outside school and encourage children to follow their own natural curiosity and sense of wonder. I believe giving kids safe, independent access to the huge store of online knowledge through technology could be a major driver of this change in mindset.
Kidtech’s stalled present — and promising future
Of course, the idea of serving children through technology is not new. It is useful to look at where we have been, as well as where we are headed.
Although technology for kids has come in waves for decades, the first mainstream kids’ products created by tech companies were Netflix Kids in 2011 and YouTube Kids in 2015. This period was mainly about reinventing childhood television, through on-demand video, and later reimagining video games, as kids moved from gaming consoles and cartridges to mobile games from the App Store.
Over the past four years, Facebook, Amazon, and Spotify launched Messenger for Kids, Alexa for Kids, and Spotify for Kids, respectively. Most recently, Instagram announced — and later delayed — the rollout of Instagram for Kids.
But all these products share one thing: many children were already using the “grown-up” version. Before launching its kid-focused product in 2011, Netflix reported that half its subscribers were already streaming shows for children. Likewise, children were already using Alexa, as well as the YouTube, Messenger, and Spotify apps, before kids’ spin-offs existed. According to a 2020 survey of 3,000 parents by nScreenMedia, regular YouTube is more popular among children than YouTube Kids, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, a higher percentage of parents let their kids watch YouTube Kids unsupervised compared with standard YouTube. Importantly, the current wave of kidtech does not give kids new capabilities.
So why make kid editions of these apps? For one, U.S. technology companies must follow parental consent rules in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a 1998 regulation, if they know children are using their products and those products gather personally identifiable information. Also, the kid versions of these apps respond to adults’ worries with content filters and stronger controls.
But the real chance ahead, I’d argue, is not in making kid-friendly versions of existing apps — it’s in building from the ground up for children, rather than from an outside-in, adult-first viewpoint. What new uses will appeal to children? I think we’ll soon see a kids-first money app, perhaps built around allowances and gift cards. Picture extending ecommerce to children, maybe by letting them send birthday and holiday gift lists to friends and relatives. In the end, a browser for kids is not only about giving children access to information — it’s also about opening up a new wave of child-first applications.
After all, kids are not simply smaller adults; they’re a distinct demographic of their own. What online experiences make sense for children, these digital natives? In what new ways could an internet device serve as a platform for imaginative play? With nearly a billion children now online worldwide, tech companies are starting to see children as an important audience with distinct needs.
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Children are now in the AOL stage of the internet, using a walled garden of dedicated services. That is about to shift. There is major potential to broaden what internet-enabled devices can do for kids, beyond watching shows and playing games. This new group of internet users can’t read — at least, not yet at a high level — and do not have the fine motor skills of teens and adults. But kids can still benefit from what technology can provide.
While we have to stay careful about how to handle the safety and specific challenges of kidtech, it’s important not to lose sight of the huge potential of the internet for advancing learning and exploration in the hands of kids. As more and more children use the web, I expect we’ll see a wave of original products built for this new audience — just as happened when the web became popular with adults. In the wake of more than a year of remote schooling, as more kids are using internet-enabled devices than ever before, it’s worth thinking about how to make technology accessible, useful, and interesting to children in new ways.