A young child's hands using a tablet computer on a wooden table

Does Labeling an App ‘Educational’ Actually Make Screen Time Better for My Child's Reading?

Screens & Attention·October 16, 2026·5 min read·3–5 yrs6–8 yrs9–12 yrs

You've drawn a line on screen time, and then your child asks for the reading app, or the phonics game, or the one the school recommended. It says "educational" right there in the app store listing. It feels different from a cartoon — like letting it through doesn't really count against the limit you set. Is that actually true, or is "educational" just a word on a label?

Mostly, it's a word on a label. And the research on why is more useful than the myth it's busting.

The core finding: the app store doesn't check anyone's homework

In 2015, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jennifer Zosh, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and colleagues published a widely cited paper, "Putting Education in 'Educational' Apps," in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Their starting point: there were, at the time, more than 80,000 apps labelled "educational" in the app store, and no actual science-based standard deciding which ones earned that label. Developers can call an app educational the same way a snack can call itself "natural" — it's marketing language, not a certification.

The researchers proposed four things a genuinely learning-rich app should have: it should get the child actively thinking, not just tapping; it should be free of distracting bells, badges, and pop-ups that pull attention away from the content; it should connect to the child's own life and experience; and ideally it should involve some social interaction, even just talking about it with a parent afterward. Most apps labelled "educational" have none of these consistently — they're built to be sticky and entertaining first.

The bigger picture: someone actually checked, and the label didn't predict much

A 2021 follow-up study, led by Marisa Meyer with Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Zosh, and others, and published in the Journal of Children and Media, put this to the test directly. The team scored the top 100 children's apps from the Google Play and Apple app stores against those same four learning pillars. Most apps scored low. Being free or paid, or being labelled "educational," didn't reliably predict whether an app actually demonstrated meaningful learning design. In short: the badge on the icon and the substance underneath are two separate things, and you mostly can't tell which is which by the label alone.

Where it's genuinely uncertain

None of this means every educational app is empty calories, or that a good one can't teach a specific skill like letter recognition. Some clearly do, within a narrow task. What the research is actually honest about is scale: an app teaching one isolated skill in a gamified loop is a different thing from a book or a real conversation, which tend to involve more of those four pillars at once — thinking, focus, personal connection, interaction — without needing a label to prove it. The uncertainty is less "do these apps work" and more "work for what, exactly," which is a harder question than the app store listing suggests.

What this means this week

Check for the four pillars yourself, once. Does the app ask your child to think and respond, or just tap and watch? Is it full of reward sounds and badges, or fairly plain? That five-minute check tells you more than the word "educational" does.
Sit with it once before deciding. You don't need to supervise every session, but ten minutes alongside your child once will tell you whether it's actually engaging their thinking or just their thumb.
Let a book carry the "educational" weight your gut wants an app to carry. If the goal is language or reasoning, a shared picture book does more of that per minute, reliably, without needing the label.
Don't feel you have to ban the app outright. One decent app inside your existing screen-time limit is a reasonable use of that time — just don't let the word on the icon be the only reason it's there.

You don't need to audit every app on the phone tonight. Picking one book to read together, instead of reaching for the "educational" app on instinct, is plenty for one evening.

Sources

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Zosh, J. M., Golinkoff, R. M., Gray, J. H., Robb, M. B., & Kaufman, J. (2015). Putting education in "educational" apps: Lessons from the science of learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(1), 3–34.
Meyer, M., McLaren, C., McCafferty, H., Zosh, J. M., Robb, M. B., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2021). How educational are educational apps for young children? App store content analysis using the Four Pillars of Learning framework. Journal of Children and Media.