Culture
Crucial Urban Travel Apps for Families With Kids
Here’s some digital help for herding your crew around the city.
Smart phones and tablets are seemingly indispensible items in the modern parents’ toolkit, the ultimate path to peaceful car trips, bus rides, long waits, and meals out. But a new wave of apps are hoping not to distract your child, but to actively engage them in their surroundings.
To the extent that apps “facilitate children’s interactions with the world around them—and the people around them—they might be really interesting,” says Sarah R. Lytle, director of outreach and education at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under age 2 avoid screens entirely, and that older kids tune in to no more than 2 hours of digital content each day.