Facebook’s Messenger Kids is dangerous. Here’s why I recommend it.
A reader asks:
I know you’re warning parents about Facebook, but what about Facebook’s new Messenger Kids app? Is that good or bad? I was thinking of trying it.
I’m glad you asked, because I’ve been checking it out myself. Here are my thoughts.
Recap: my concerns about social media
In my post “Why parents should be worried about Facebook”, I laid out the problem as I see it: it’s not privacy that should keep parents up at night, but rather social media’s corrosive effect on all of us:
Social media may be eroding our families’ privacy, but the far, far more important problem is that social media is destroying our families’ freedom.
As Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, puts it, “The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely.”
In his words, Silicon Valley has “put a slot machine in a billion pockets” by making smartphones into devices that provide just the right frequency of reward to keep us coming back.
The social media slot machine also amplifies complex personal dynamics. That amplification can have a seismic effect on kids, given how all-encompassing issues of identity, belonging and reputation already are in adolescence (and even earlier).
There are studies that suggest kids experience more body image issues and more depression the more they are pulled into the game of who appeared in what photo with whom, who liked what post and who didn’t, who kept up your streak in Snapchat or didn’t.
Social media can be awesome
You hear complaints like mine frequently about Facebook. But here’s a reason you should take my criticism with a grain of salt: the main place I turned to to share it with people I know was… Facebook.
The fact is, Facebook is really, really good at connecting us to people we care about. So are other social media networks like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Twitter, WeChat, Line, Kik, Telegram, and whatever new hotness is too cool for me to have heard of yet.
And for all the alarmism about the ill effects of social media, it’s important to remember that what we don’t know dwarfs the little that we do know. As Anya Kamenetz points out in her excellent book The Art of Screen Time, most kids seem to do just fine navigating technology and social media natively.
“Social media” is a very broad category; apps can vary widely in their usefulness, their tendency to emphasize exclusion and status, and their cravenness for attention. Snapchat is probably the worst offender; Facebook Messenger one of the most innocuous, and most legitimately useful.
Social media in the real world
In my ideal world, social media would never be addictive and kids would have the autonomy they had a generation or two ago, together with only the good things about the Internet. No one would stare at a screen feeling empty instead of living life.
In the real world, kids are finding their way to social media apps on their own. Which means parents only have a brief window to influence how their kids first encounter social media, before the cat is out of the bag.
Facebook officially requires users to be at least 13 years old. But they’ve long known that tens of millions of younger users get in by simply lying about their birth year. (I wanted to tag my kids in photos, so I registered them with false birth years long ago.) According to Facebook’s own research, most parents report that children start using messaging and social media apps well before 13 — often at 7 or 8 years old.
Facebook’s answer to this dilemma is Messenger Kids, a recently launched app designed from the ground up with kids, and parents in mind.
Where Messenger Kids excels
Messenger Kids has a purple theme and friendly, large icons and buttons, for a much simpler interface than Facebook Messenger. It’s easy to post photos and to start Facetime-style video chat sessions. And it integrates seamlessly with regular Messenger. So if your kids have access to a tablet, phone or computer, you can easily message them, and vice versa:
Its big selling point to parents, as Facebook emphasizes, is parental oversight. Parents must approve specific friends before their child can message with them, and parents can see whom they’ve been chatting with and choose to delete contacts at any time.
The big selling point to kids, really, is Snapchat-style live video masks (which regular Messenger has too). Kids absolutely LOVE these:
But I think the even bigger deal is that this isn’t Facebook. The choice to make a simplified version of just Facebook Messenger, and not the main Facebook experience, means limitations that parents should welcome:
- there is no endless feed
- posts won’t be seen by everybody you know
- lower frequency of notifications and responses
It’s essentially glorified SMS texting, plus an updated way to call your friends — and don’t we all have fond memories of that?
Where Messenger Kids falls short
Parents who aren’t heavy users of modern messaging apps might not realize how often messaging chats these days involve not just two or three people but a good dozen at a time. So while Messenger Kids avoids some of the troubling dynamics of performing on social media in front of the entire world, it will run into smaller versions of the same problems of gossip, exclusion, bullying and compulsive reputation management.
Shortly after the app was released, there was a public letter of protest signed by an impressive array of organizations. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the ACLU of Massachusetts, Common Sense Media, the Badass Teachers Association, Inc.(!) and others all urged Facebook to kill Messenger Kids, arguing:
Younger children are simply not ready to have social media accounts.
They are not old enough to navigate the complexities of online relationships, which often lead to misunderstandings and conflicts even among more mature users.
They also do not have a fully developed understanding of privacy, including what’s appropriate to share with others and who has access to their conversations, pictures, and videos.
They also make the good point that the cutesy design of Messenger Kids belies Facebook’s claim that it has the preteen set in mind:
Facebook claims that Messenger Kids will provide a safe alternative for the children who have lied their way onto social media platforms designed for teens and adults.
But the 11- and 12- year-olds who currently use Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook are unlikely to switch to an app that is clearly designed for younger children.
Messenger Kids is not responding to a need–it is creating one. It appeals primarily to children who otherwise would not have their own social media accounts.
Facebook, its defense, points out that they created the app in consultation with an advisory board of multiple child-focused nonprofits. But at least four of those groups receive funding from Facebook.
Must everything be so freaking appealing?
When I tried out Messenger Kids on my iPad, I had read that protest letter. But I was struck by a totally different problem that these critics didn’t mention: the app is “gamified”, with goals and badges for checking out various features, cute characters rooting for you to use the app, and incoming messages with a notification whose irresistible “ba-TING!” was surely tested for maximum appeal.
This is a shame, because as far as the rest of it goes, I appreciate what Facebook is trying.
The case for a kids’ messaging app
My home doesn’t have a landline phone anymore, and few of our friends do. When I was eight years old, I’d frequently call friends and talk without our parents knowing the details. But if my eight-year-old wants to reach out to a friend on a rainy day, how exactly does she do that? It becomes a game of literal telephone, with parents in the middle.
Messenger Kids provides a way that kids can message each other directly, with what I feel is just the right amount of parental oversight — enough that I have some sense of what’s going on, but not so much that I’m hovering like a helicopter.
Most importantly, as a messaging app, it’s not a bottomless abyss for attention; unlike Facebook or Snapchat, you can’t spend long in the app unless you’re in an active, deliberate conversation.
As this official staged Facebook promotional screenshot attests, Messenger Kids is completely harmless and not using it constitutes elder abuse in Florida
My verdict
Of course, Messenger for Kids is still running on a tablet or smartphone, and that means problems with screen time and device worship. Even if this app isn’t turning your child into a zombie, when a ping summons your child to the iPad, there’s plenty of mindless fodder a few taps away.
I’m writing this during a time when we’ve taken the iPad away from our kids because they were getting too focused on it; I’m not eager to introduce a bright and snazzy new app. At least regular Facebook Messenger looks boring!
As for the social complexities, I can appreciate that concern. We’re seeing plenty of complex friend drama happening in third grade as it is. At least when there are arguments and breakdowns in person, it’s only experienced by the few people actually there, and there’s room for making up and coming back together. Those things just seem to be more prone to extremes with words on a screen, for reasons we are only just starting to understand.
Rachel Metz, writing in MIT Technology Review, argues that “we’re running a huge experiment with our children. We haven’t had enough time for a generation of kids to grow up with online platforms and report back on how it’s affected them.”
At the same time, I think it’s important to acknowledge that children’s independence is going to look different in the current age then it looked a generation or two ago. Kids today, after all, have much less opportunity for independent, unstructured social interactions outside of school.
I think if your kids have access to a phone or tablet, the ability to chat with friends on their own, plus some social media literacy in a controlled environment, is worth it — even if it risks dealing with social complexities.
Facebook Messenger Kids: Recommended, with reservations.
Rating levels:
- Highest recommendation
- Hightly recommended
- Recommended
- Recommended, with reservations
- Not recommended
Ben Wheeler is a software developer and teacher in Brooklyn. He’s taught hundreds of people to program, helped foment a revolution (ask him sometime!), and makes a mean gumbo. His work has been published in The Best of Make Magazine.
