A note to parents.

An opening.

We have tried to write this plainly, the way we would explain it to a friend over coffee, because that is the kind of company we are trying to build. If anything on this page is unclear, write to us. We will read it. We will write back.

What we believe.

Childhood is not an engagement opportunity. It is not an addressable market. It is not a problem to be optimized. The way a child learns to read, to be patient with themselves, to handle the small frustration of not knowing a word — these are not metrics. We do not treat them as metrics.

We believe a piece of software for a child should feel like a calm, patient adult is sitting next to them. And we believe the same software should feel, to the parent who hears it from the next room, like something they are quietly relieved to have brought into the house.

We also know that technology is not neutral. Thoughtful software does not replace thoughtful parenting — it can only try to support it. We try to be honest with ourselves about that.

How we handle data.

We collect the smallest amount of information we can in order to make our products work. We do not sell data. We do not share data with advertisers. We do not run third-party tracking on a child's interactions with our products. When data is no longer needed, we delete it.

If you ever want to know what we know about your child, write to us at hello@anaplaylabs.com and we will tell you, in plain English, what is on file. If you want it deleted, we will delete it.

How we are honest about AI.

Our products use artificial intelligence. We will not pretend otherwise to you or to your child.

When ZigZu listens to a child read, we tell the child — in words a six-year-old can understand — that it is a machine listening, not a person. When ParentMind organises the parenting content you have collected, we are honest about what it is reading, what it is summarising, and what we are doing with the results.

AI gets things wrong. We will get things wrong. We commit to being honest about it when it happens, and to fixing it as quickly as we can.

How we think about screen time.

We do not believe good childhood products are designed to maximise screen time.

We design our products to be useful and then to get out of the way. ZigZu is built for short reading sessions, not long ones. ParentMind is built so that parents can find what they need and close the app.

We will celebrate when a child reads her first full sentence on her own. We will mark the small moments that genuinely deserve marking. What we will not add are streaks, badges, leaderboards, or any of the other devices that exist primarily to keep a child or a parent on a phone longer than they meant to be. The difference, in our minds, is between honouring a moment and engineering a compulsion.

If a child enjoys our software, we want them to enjoy it and put it down. If they ask to come back to it tomorrow, that is the only kind of "retention" we are interested in.

How we treat parents.

Parents are the senior partners in their child's experience of our products. Always. We design every product so that:

You can see what your child is doing.
You can pause, end, or remove the product at any time.
You can delete your child's data at any time.
You can write to a human — us — and get a human answer.

We do not believe parental controls are an "add-on" or a "premium" feature. They are the foundation. If a feature exists in our software, it has been built so that a parent can understand it, see it, and turn it off.

A closing note.

We are a small team. We will not get everything right. But we will tell you what we believe, write it down so it can be held against us, and try — patiently, the way we want our products to behave — to earn the trust you are extending us by letting us into your family's life.

If you ever want to talk to us about your child's experience of one of our products, please write. We will read it. We will write back.