The Pixel Parenting Podcast
Green Flags and Red Flags in Kids’ Apps and Shows: How to Choose Quality Media for Ages 2-6
with Charlotte Anne Wright, children’s media researcher and learning designer
Everything in the app store says “educational”, and none of it is regulated. A learning designer gives parents six characteristics to judge any app, show or toy by, and three five-minute things to do after the screen goes off.
Listen to this episode
About this episode
Everything in the app store says “educational”. A lot of it says “expert backed” and “research backed” too. None of those words are regulated, and none of them tell you whether the app in your hand does anything for your three-year-old. In this episode I sit down with Charlotte Anne Wright, a learning designer and researcher at Begin, to swap the label for a framework you can use.
Wright taught young children for nearly a decade, then studied early childhood policy and spent almost three years as a LEGO Foundation Research Fellow working on playful learning with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She walks through six characteristics that learning scientists keep finding wherever powerful learning happens, and turns each one into a question you can ask while your child is using the thing. Then she gives us “ask, find, make”, three offline extensions that take about five minutes after the screen goes off.
What you’ll take away
- Why “educational” and “research backed” are unregulated claims, and what to check instead
- The six characteristics of playful learning, each as a question you can ask in the moment
- How to tell an engaged child from an overstimulated one
- What stars, coins and points are really doing to your child’s motivation
- What a good learning app does when your child gets an answer wrong
- The onboarding quiz, and why the annoying one is often the good sign
- How to check whether a company has real learning experts and real studies behind its claims
- Ask, find, make: three five-minute offline extensions after any show, game or app
In this episode
Timestamps are from the final edited episode.
One reframe to keep
“The gold standard for instruction in schools is differentiated instruction. So this idea that the teacher should be providing different instruction for every child based off of their individual needs, their interests, their strengths. And that’s really hard for a teacher. All teachers do their best to do it. There’s no excuse for technology not to do that, especially now.”
This is the sentence that changes what you look for. A good teacher adjusts to the child in front of them, and a screen has every advantage a teacher does not: it never gets tired, and it can watch one child at a time. So the question stops being “does this app cover letters” and becomes “does this app notice my child”. If it moves on after a wrong answer with no extra help, it is not teaching, it is testing.
Moments worth remembering
“Anyone can say their app or their show is educational.”
“Play is really how young children’s brains learn. They need to construct knowledge and the way that they’re doing that is through interacting with their environment in playful ways.”
On the difference between engaged and overstimulated:“Children can seem engaged. What’s really happening is that they’re just overstimulated by so much noise and sound and flashing colors and lights.”
“The gold standard would be that the child is motivated enough by what they’re doing that they don’t need this external, this extrinsic motivational factor.”
The easiest green flag to spot:“A green flag that I love is that your kid wants to show you something or wants to ask you a question about it or tell you about it after.”
“Sometimes you just have to put your kid in front of the TV and get something done and that matters too. Your mental health matters just as much.”
About the guest
Charlotte Anne Wright
Charlotte Anne Wright is a learning designer and researcher at Begin, an early learning media and technology company for children and families, and a former president of the Bay Area chapter of the Children’s Media Association. She was an early childhood educator for nearly a decade before returning to graduate school to study early childhood policy, where she created the Explanatory Rubric for Play in Early Childhood (ERPEC). She then spent nearly three years as a LEGO Foundation Research Fellow working on playful learning and parenting alongside Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and has published research with collaborators including Sesame Workshop.
Resources and links
- Begin – the early learning media and technology company where Wright works
- ERPEC, the Explanatory Rubric for Play in Early Childhood – the tool she built to distinguish types of play and their outcomes
- Children’s Media Association – the industry body whose Bay Area chapter she led
- Charlotte Anne Wright on Google Scholar – the studies she mentions, including her LEGO Foundation and Sesame Workshop work
- Her writing for BOLD – the Blog on Learning and Development
- Common Sense Media – the review site she points parents to for a fuller picture of a show, game or app
- Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek – her mentor, and the researcher behind much of the playful learning work discussed
- Dr. Roberta Golinkoff – her longtime collaborator on the playful learning characteristics
- Charlotte Anne Wright on LinkedIn
Help shape this work
If you are a parent of a child aged 6 to 17, we are running a survey on how families in different countries use AI for kids’ learning. It is anonymous and takes about ten minutes.
Keep the conversation going
Six characteristics is a lot to hold in your head at 7pm on a Tuesday. Get science-backed strategies and practical tools for the media your family already has, straight to your inbox.
Want to bring this conversation to your school?
Pixel Parenting offers parent education workshops and student programs – practical, research-informed, and tailored for your community.
Or reach out directly: contact@pixelparenting.org