How a kid gets into the app
Children don’t sign up. They don’t have email addresses in our system. They don’t have passwords. They get into the app via a 6-digit code that you, as the parent, generate from your own signed-in session.
The process: you open the parent app, tap “Generate kid code”, hand the phone (or the family iPad, or the kid’s tablet) to your child, and they enter the code on the kid-mode screen. The device is now unlocked for that specific kid. You can revoke the unlock from your parent session at any time; we also auto-expire kid sessions after a configurable period.
This is deliberate. It means there’s no scenario where your eight-year-old can create an account, share their email, or have a chat session with anyone, because none of those concepts exist for them inside our product.
What the kid sees
Kid mode opens onto a single screen. At the top: the child’s name and avatar. In the middle: a big circular button that says “Start practicing”. Underneath: today’s goal in minutes, today’s progress, and a row of the past seven days as small dots (filled if a session happened, empty if not).
That’s it. There’s no settings menu the kid can reach. No way for them to delete their data. No way for them to add a coparent or send an invitation. No way for them to reach the open internet. The kid surface is a sandbox.
Starting and ending a practice session
The kid taps “Start practicing”. If they have more than one instrument, they pick which one this session is for (a one-tap chooser, not a multi-step wizard). The screen switches to the timer view: a calm count-up clock, today’s goal as a small reference, and a big “Stop” button.
The timer is silent. There’s no chime when they pass their goal. There’s no celebration animation. The screen doesn’t flash. We treat the timer as something the kid should mostly forget about while they’re playing their instrument.
When they tap stop, they see a short summary: minutes practiced, instrument, the day. They can optionally type a short note (“played the new piece three times”, “G major scale still hard”) which the parent will see in the history. Then back to the home screen.
What kid mode doesn’t have
No chat. No social feed. No leaderboards. No comparing your child’s practice to other people’s children. No in-app purchases. No ads. No external links of any kind (the only external action is “email a parent” which iOS / Android natively gate via the mail composer). No camera access. No microphone access. No location access.
When you submit a kid-targeted app to the App Store or Google Play, the platforms enforce a long checklist of what’s allowed and what isn’t. We’ve gone further than the platform requires, because we think the platform minimum is the floor not the ceiling.
Switching back to parent mode
To leave kid mode, tap the small gear icon at the bottom of the screen. You’ll be prompted for the parent unlock code, a 4-digit PIN you set in your parent surface. Enter the right code, and the device switches back to your parent session. Get it wrong three times, and the gear icon disables itself for a minute.
The point of the PIN is to stop a curious kid from poking around in the parent surface, not to defeat a determined adult. If you ever forget the PIN, you can reset it by signing in to the parent app on a different device.
Multiple kids on one device
If you’ve got more than one kid in the family and they’re sharing a device, kid mode shows a chooser screen first: tap to pick whose practice this is. The chosen kid’s home loads. They tap to start, do their thing, tap to stop, and the next sibling can take a turn.
The device unlock is family-wide; the per-kid selection happens inside kid mode. We don’t require you to re-enter a code between kids.