American parents snap up apps to make their children less horrible

Raising children

Apps for brats

Oct 26th 2013 |From the print edition

 Eat up and I’ll let you play on my iPad

CARROTS don’t work. Nor do sticks. Nor, even, do carrot sticks. How, American parents wonder, can they get their fussy children to eat healthy food? Since even little horrors who never listen to Mom and Dad usually pay attention to flashing screens, many parents hope that apps may succeed where they have failed.

Things that are good for children—such as vegetables, maths, chores and looking both ways before crossing the road—are no fun. So any app-makers who can make them more enjoyable ought to turn a tidy profit. Tidier, at any rate, than a typical six-year-old’s bedroom.

Sales of educational software, digital content and related services in America are perhaps $7.8 billion a year, estimates the Software & Information Industry Association. Schools are the biggest customers, but parents are piling in.

Some apps appear to work. Several studies suggest that mobile or online games can fool children into eating more fruit and vegetables. This is necessary: more than 12m children and adolescents are obese in America, and obesity rates are triple what they were in 1980, though they have levelled off. Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity outfit gives high marks to Easy Eater, an app that lets kids record what they’ve eaten on an iPad and earn points for bolting broccoli. Eat enough greenery and the app tells your parents to reward you. Easy Eater 2, a new version to be launched in November, will urge children to feed an interactive character (a cute micro-organism) with healthy items. It will also ask kids to watch how many fizzy drinks they swill.

Other apps seek to encourage helping around the house. A 2011 survey found that 58% of American children do no regular chores; 37% do some, but feel they should do fewer. Between 1981 and 2008, the time sprogs spent helping at home declined by 25%—to just 24 minutes a day.

Many parents blame electronic gizmos for making their children so lazy. (Most kids would indeed rather lie on the sofa shooting zombies than take out the rubbish.) But Chris Bergman, the creator of an app called Choremonster, argues that digital devices can promote diligence, too. Mr Bergman, who admits to having been “a jerk as a kid”, says his app has encouraged children to complete more than 1.4m household tasks since its launch in 2012. Parents create a list of chores; the app gives their children points for completing them. It also helps parents pick age-appropriate tasks. A three-year-old can help dust, put napkins on a table and tidy away his toys. The app gives no age at which children can be sent up chimneys, but no tool is perfect.

With maths, as with mowing the lawn, the key is to make a chore seem like a game. Kyle Counts, designed by a former White House economic adviser, helps children spot number patterns as they guide a cartoon Kangaroo through the outback. “I like it because it’s both a game and kind of useful,” says one young user. Stack the States, which teaches children the names of all 50 and where they are, led to one boy “nibbling an oatmeal bar into the shape of Wisconsin”, says a proud mother in Chicago.

Some of the best educational apps are free. Dumb Ways to Die, for example, began as an Australian public-safety campaign that sneaked dull rail-safety messages into a song about amusing ways to expire (“Eat medicine that’s out of date/ Use your private parts as piranha bait”). It went viral and then became a game app. In less than a year, it has taught more than 50m people not to walk across a railway line—or set fire to their hair.

From the print edition: United States