“They’re learning some kind of phone etiquette…like, you can’t take in your bedroom while you’re gonna go put your pajamas now.” “It’s kept them happy and able to see each other, which is important for their emotional health during all this,” Smith says. And in making these digital requests to come out and play, the friends must first ask each other if they have finished their schoolwork. In the guidelines the parents laid out, the app would be limited to late afternoon and early evening use-absolutely not after 8 p.m. “Everyone thought it was too much,” she says. Smith and her husband familiarized themselves with the parental controls embedded in their Facebook accounts and established some ground rules with other parents about when the kids could communicate on Messenger Kids. Two things happened in quick succession next. I think she’s going to be a theater major.” “They were on it like crazy, like they had just all been given cell phones-like they saw freedom,” Smith says. Meghan Smith watched her daughter, a first grader, glue herself to the Kindle Fire tablet running the app the day that the app was downloaded, eager to communicate with her friends. The app has been widely used in the Smith household in Emerson, New Jersey, too. “We don’t really talk about what we usually talk about now that coronavirus is here,” she says. These lighthearted frills have never been more needed: The conversations between Rebecca and her friends aren’t especially joyful. Among other favorites, she likes the ones that stretch out her smile and another that add unicorns around her. And the number of people Rebecca talks to on Messenger Kids has about doubled since schools shut down and Richards suggested the app to a group of local parents: “Just saying, Hey, if you want to do this, it really has worked well for her.”Īs some children memorize species of dinosaurs, Rebecca has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Facebook’s AR filters. “She had gotten pretty used to it,” her mom Margaret Richard says of the app. She was already on Messenger Kids before March, keeping in touch with friends from Virginia, where she and her family lived until last winter. “A lot of people got Messenger Kids when coronavirus started,” explains Rebecca Schmidt, an 8 year old who lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. "Some of them don't have Messenger Kids." Courtesy Rebecca Schmidt "I really miss all my friends," she says. unicorns, and keeping in touch with her pals. Rebecca Schmidt, 8, uses Messenger Kids for its augmented-reality filters, like this one that adds.
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