Companies and designers should recognize and explore children’s understanding of their well-being further in their own local contexts and design play experiences (content, stories, tasks) that reflect children’s understanding. Recommendations for industry include:

– Design age-appropriate play experiences, aligning content with specific ages of children and stages in their development. 
– Design diverse forms of play that allow all children the freedom to pursue their preferred play style. 
– Explore forms of hybrid digital–physical play that require children to engage their body actively in physical and even tiring ways. 
– Strive to incorporate (voluntary) social connection into play experiences, making play with others easier and more accessible. 
– Integrate parents into the play experience, fostering parent–child play, parent education initiatives, and parent–child discussions about appropriateness. 
– Pay attention to cultural context, employing awareness and sensitivity around gender, religious and other norms, which may also be carefully challenged. 
– Build products that are accessible, especially for low- and middle-income contexts, being mindful of internet access, data costs, advertizing, in-game currency and pricing.
– Invest in further cross-sectoral research in relation to the impact of digital technology on children and committing to share data, outputs and findings publicly.

Unicef

Unicef. (2022). Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children. https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/RITEC_Responsible-Innovation-in-Technology-for-Children-Digital-technology-play-and-child-well-being.pdf