Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Earlier this year, we took a critical look at our kids’ screen usage, which has increased from zero (pre-pandemic) to…a lot more than zero.
Despite our best efforts, we were unhappy about the level of spammy and inappropriate in-app ads, as well as the low quality of a lot of kids content. So, I spent the last few months figuring out ways to improve our kids’ tech experience. A couple of useful tips:
Protect Your Kids From Ads
We were particularly concerned about the level of advertising we came across. Many of these ads are extremely intrusive, particularly in-app ads that are almost impossible to click past even after the ad finishes. We’ve been able to cut our kids ad exposure by >80% in two steps:
Apple Arcade is simply the best value I’ve found in any subscription service. It offers a huge selection of high quality kid-appropriate games for each age group, with no ads or in-app purchases. And at $6.99/month, with a one-month free trial (three months with a new Apple device), and the ability to share your subscription across up to five users, it’s an incredible value. Since subscribing, we only allow app installs from Apple Arcade and PBS Kids Games, which is easy to do since Apple parental controls allow you to require approval for any installations. And the selection is so good (Apple Arcade has ad-free versions of many of the most popular games), our kids haven’t had any complaints.
If you can, pay for ad-free streaming for any services your kids use often. While it might cost an extra $5-10/month (depending on the service), that’s a small price to pay if it’s keeping your kids from seeing an hour or two of ads per month.[1] If you simply can’t afford ad-free Netflix or Disney+, make sure to set up a Kids profile (on Netflix) or a Junior profile (on Disney+) as the services currently don’t serve ads on those profiles.
Find Appropriate Content and Block The Inappropriate Stuff
I’m assuming most readers have set up kids profiles on their major streaming subscriptions. If you haven’t, please make sure you’ve done so.
Beyond that, we’ve found quality content in a few ways. First, before watching a new show, we visit Common Sense Media, which has tens of thousands of reviews of most popular movies, TV shows, and apps. The site allows you to view up to three reviews per month for free; a monthly subscription is $3.99/month.
Next, we significantly limit our kids’ access to streaming platforms without robust content filtering. On our smart TVs, we’ve implemented password protection to install new channels and have locked all channels other than a few of the major services.[2] We also prohibit YouTube Kids which, unfortunately, we’ve found to have some extremely low quality content. While we allow occasional supervised YouTube usage, access to it on our smart TV is locked with a PIN.
Similarly, we’ve implemented many of the tips in Camille Hartsell’s masterpiece of a post—Tech stuff for Ten-yr-olds—to limit content on our sons’ iPads and Kindle. Apple Screen Time’s “Block at Downtime” is a fantastic feature, and setting it to lock our kids’ iPads at 7:45pm each night has reduced evening electronics battles considerably.
Readers, do you have any tech tips you use to safeguard and improve your kids screen experiences? I’d love to hear from you.
And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
My wife and I never watch or play golf, but we’re hooked on Full Swing (back for Season 2), a fun and engaging look at the golf world. The second season covers the high drama as the Saudis enter the golf world with billions of dollars, creating a huge rift among the players.
Also:
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.
[1] Netflix says they serve “about four minutes” of ads per hour of programming, so if your kids watch 30 minutes of Netflix per day, that adds up to about an hour of ad-viewing per month. In our experience, our kids don’t tune out ads the way we do, and sometimes even pay more attention to them than the program itself.
[2] Here are some good places to start for Roku TVs and Samsung Smart TVs
Good tips! YouTube Kids is such a disappointment. I posted once about my frustration trying to curate what was included and someone (who had had previous experience working on kid media viewing accounts!) commented that they had tried to get involved as a PM for YouTube Kids and told the team that it had to have whitelist/blacklist functionality for kids' safety. And they were dismissed in favor of only doing it only algorithmically. Yuck.