Curation Club 2025 for Mothers & Others

Eight insights about the joyful practice of curating digital media for kids

Many parents I know are overwhelmed by the complexity of curating digital media for their kids. I love kid-focused curation and have some very specific standards. Happy to share my roundup of insights and a few Mitra-approved apps to help get your 2025 off to a good start!

1. Curation requires a nonzero amount of time.

First, if we want to uplift our kids’ engagement with tech, we need to put time toward proactive digital media curation. Even if you can commit to 1-2 hours per month doing search, discovery, playtesting, it will make a difference!

2. ChatGPT is your friend, but you have to ask right.

Here are a couple examples of very specific prompts I used to find good stuff for my nephew. Through the dialogue I discovered some wonderful stuff!

What is an aesthetically beautiful, uplifting, lively and not-boring app that a 10 year old boy will enjoy that has no violence or advertising, that he could play for 10-20 minutes at a time while we are transitioning between activities, as an alternative to mindless arcade games like Slither.io?

Are there interesting multiplayer video games for a young boy that have multiple levels and many different worlds and challenges, that are totally nonviolent and not about sports, that are creative and require a lot of teamwork, that have beautifully made aesthetics and encourage exploration and building?

3. Replace mindless games with enriching apps that serve the same role

There are moments in the day when unfortunately programming or space don’t meet children’s needs. We need them to stay with us and be relatively still, but we can’t directly engage them. Lowest common denominator games compete for kids’ attention during this time, but we can curate better options. Being able to provide developmentally appropriate, enriching experiences via a screen can be helpful in those moments.

Here are a couple new apps I’ve discovered, playtested, and gotten kid approval on:

• Hidden Folks by Adriaan de Jong. A totally hand-drawn, hilarious and challenging Where’s Waldo world that has an insane level of attention-to-detail and is full of interesting puzzles. ($4.99)

• Mandala Maker by Damien Bell. Kids can make extraordinarily sophisticated utterly unique radially symmetric designs with all kinds of pens and colors. Ten points for creativity and immersiveness. ($5.99)

  • All the illustrations for this post, like the below, were created by my nieces between 4 and 6 using Mandala Maker!

Mitra’s criteria for apps:

Characters, players, creators show kindness, respect, curiosity,
and helpfulness toward each other.

You can make your own things that nobody has imagined before.

Attractive, well-crafted; there is attention-to-detail, yet they are abstract, inviting imagination.

Invite you to learn through engaging with complexity and real, relevant challenges.

Let you get absorbed in a process without interruptions, can be paused without penalty.

4. Instead of counting screentime, assess your kid’s create-to-consume ratio.

There are many different kinds of screentime, each with a different amount of value.

Screentime in which screens are used as tools to enable creativity is 100% okay with me. My definition of creativity is making things that nobody has imagined before — not, for instance, coloring in boxes that someone else has drawn.

To unleash creativity, it’s helpful to consume inspirational and instructional content. Let’s say you watch two 10-minute videos that show you how to use an app-based tool. Then you spend 40 minutes creating something of your own using the app. That’s 60 minutes of screentime. But more important, it’s a 40:20 (2:1) create-to-consume ratio. If kids are working this way, I have no problem with their screentime.

Here’s an example: me and my nephews watched this wonderful tutorial from Octo Studio (go Zoe!), and then they spent the next forty minutes figuring out how to make their own (very cool) ball-game using their two iPads.

5. Skip YouTube

I’ll go ahead and just say it: I’m open to being debated, but right now I don’t think there’s a place for YouTube in little kids’ lives. Short videos are attention-fragmenting, it’s prohibitively difficult and time-consuming to find kid-appropriate content, and it’s likely to spark arguments. That said, YouTube would be appropriate if:

• Kids are using YouTube to learn how to do or make things;

• Kids are creating for YouTube, then it makes sense that they look at YouTube videos for inspiration;

• Parents or educators are using YouTube to teach media literacy skills, like how to create search prompts or how to evaluate/interpret content; or,

• Kids and caregivers are cowatching curated content.

6. Don’t expect perfect curation

I had some curation fails this holiday season, like when I over-relied on a recommendation instead of doing my own research; or when I prescreened a YouTube channel too superficially; or chose a game based on wishful thinking instead of reading between the lines of the online reviews. Oh well! Curation is a muscle that grows with practice, and I’ll keep trying.

7. Montessori wisdom strikes again

It can be helpful to ground all these tips into a sane, practical, yet big-picture perspective on kids and tech. I loved Raising children in a time of technology, a short course by Simone Davies and Junnifa Uzodike. It offers hands-on guidance for incorporating technology into the home, including how it’s different for each stage of child development.

8. Making things together trumps digital media

This Christmas, nobody asked for a phone while we were icing sugar cookies, building a labyrinth out of 600 dixie cups, drawing on tote bags, playing Among Us in person, collecting acorns at the garden, crafting original tiny books, finding sea-glass, inventing new forms of trampoline basketball, or playing board games.

There are lots of low-cost tech-free things to do together, and I’ll keep sharing my ideas here this year as we get ready for Phone Free February followed by March’s Global Day of Unplugging!

What discoveries and insights have you had while curating digital media for kids? Please reply to me, I’d love to hear both about your struggles and victories, helpful ideas, and especially any apps, tools, or games you and your kids are excited about.