Why Diversity is Important for Kids Apps

We all want our children to become good, successful and well-adjusted adults. We do our best to teach them the right values and skills to navigate the world. Today’s children live and grow up in a very culturally diverse landscape and they have to learn how to fit in a multicultural world. To help them succeed it is very important to teach them to avoid prejudice and stereotypical thinking, as it can oftentimes put unnecessary barriers in their development and the development of others. Studies have shown that children as young as six have already developed a certain type of bias and stereotype thinking, so the key to helping children break the barriers that stereotypes keep putting in front of them is to start young.

What can developers do?

As developers that create educational apps for preschool children, what we can do is build characters that are as diverse as possible and that children can relate to. At GazziliWorld we have used characters of diverse cultural heritage and of different genders to animate our apps. What we hoped to achieve through this was showing children that no matter what their cultural heritage or gender, they can learn everything that they want to. Our six characters : Mimi, Tyler, Kenji, Lily, Benito and Purple all have different backgrounds and are all included in each of the five apps. Of course, when it comes to diversity and making a product more inclusive, there will always be more than can be done and not everyone will be pleased with the outcome. One of the things we learn ever since our first app is that there will always be critics, but the important thing is to stay true to our values. In our efforts to make the content of our apps more inclusive, we decided to include pictures of different types of families to depict the word „family” in our vocabulary app GazziliWord. Behind that decision was the belief that children need to see and understand that families and people are different and that is OK. When the app went live on the app store, besides positive reviews we also received negative comments regarding our depiction of the world family. We received emails and messages from our users that believed we should take the word out of the app or just show an image of a mother, a father and a child for that particular word. Many tried to convince us that our depictions were inappropriate for children between 2 and 6 years of age (our target audience) and we probably lost some of those users by choosing to stick to our decision. Even so, we believe that the decision we made was the right one. As an educational apps developer, we try to help children learn and become successful grown-ups and part of that mission is helping them understand and navigate the world that they live in. We can only do so by showing them how the world really is and by helping them understand it.

In the end, children, being young and eager to absorb information, register and internalize the subtle messages that the entertainment or edutainment industries show them. Therefore it is our responsibility as developers of apps for children to strive to make our products as inclusive as possible and to champion messages of diversity.