How to choose a learning app for a preschooler

Most advice about screen time is about the clock, and the clock is the part that is easiest to look up. It is not the part that decides whether the next twenty minutes are worth anything.

This is about the other half: how to look at an app before it goes on the device, and what to stop worrying about once it is there.

Start with the hour

The numbers are real and they are not controversial, so it is worth having them in front of you before anything else.

The World Health Organization recommends no more than one hour of sedentary screen time a day for children aged two to four, and none at all under two. Its own wording is that less is better. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long put it at about an hour a day of high quality content for ages two to five, ideally with an adult somewhere nearby.

Take that hour as a ceiling. Nothing further down this page is an argument for going past it, and we would rather say so plainly than let the omission do the arguing for us.

What has shifted is the emphasis. The AAP's more recent position leans on content, context and conversation rather than the stopwatch alone, and asks families to build a plan that fits their own household instead of applying one number to every child. That shift is the reason this article exists. Twenty minutes of something that finishes, with you within earshot, is a different thing from two hours of autoplay alone, and no timer can tell those two apart.

An hour is the ceiling. The rest of this is about which hour.

Does it end?

The single biggest difference between one app and another is whether it has a finish.

An activity that finishes gives your child the moment where they did it, and it gives you a natural place to stop that is not you taking something away. A feed that never ends removes both. There is no completed thing, and every stop is an interruption.

So look for a shape: a puzzle, a round, a level, a story with a last page. Then "one more and we're done" is a normal sentence rather than a negotiation.

Is anything being sold?

This matters more for small children than it does for us, because they cannot tell the difference.

A four-year-old does not know that the bright thing that appeared mid-game is an advert. They know that they tapped it and something happened. Ads inside young children's apps are not a mild annoyance. They are aimed at someone with no defences at all, which is why apps for children carry privacy rules of their own that ordinary apps do not.

Worth checking before you hand a device over:

• Do ads appear during play?
• Can a purchase be made without an adult step?
• Does anything push urgency, such as timers, streaks, or "come back or you'll lose it"?

The last one is the sneakiest. It is not selling anything directly; it is manufacturing anxiety in a child who does not yet have a word for it.

Are you within earshot?

You do not have to sit through all of it. But the first few minutes change what the rest becomes.

Watch the start. Ask one question at the end (what was the tricky one?), and you have turned a solo activity into something shared, at a cost of about thirty seconds. Children also try harder on the parts they know somebody will ask about. This is the part the guidance is pointing at when it talks about context rather than minutes.

If they want to show you something, let them. Being shown is most of the value.

Six things to check

Before an app goes on the device:

The fifth is the one most often missing, and it is worth expanding. An app aimed at a child who cannot read yet, which puts its instructions in text, has quietly made itself a two-person activity. The second person is you, every time, at the exact moment you thought you had ten minutes.

What to stop worrying about

A number that varies. A rainy Sunday is not a pattern. Look at the week.

Repetition. Doing the same easy thing over and over usually means they are consolidating it, not stalling. It passes.

Preferring the screen to a toy. Screens are designed to be immediately rewarding. That comparison is not a fair one, and it is not a verdict on your child.

The thing genuinely worth watching is not minutes. It is whether the screen is replacing sleep, moving about, or being talked to. Both the WHO and the AAP put those three ahead of the clock, and so would we.

Where we stand

We build a learning app, so we are hardly neutral. But the six checks above are the ones we build against, and it is fair to hold us to them: activities that finish, no third-party ads during gameplay, purchases behind a parental gate with a question a small child cannot answer, everything read aloud, and nearly all of it working with no connection at all.

If you would rather look before you download, the activities are grouped by what they practise, and the questions parents ask covers the subscription and cancellation side plainly.