Lingokids is a great option for parents looking to foster healthy gaming habits

This is the perfect way for gamer parents to get their kids into the hobby

“Why’s that Green Goblin guy love pumpkins so much?” my four-year-old daughter asked me recently, after sitting down for some time with her 7-inch V8 Contixo tablet, a budget device aimed at young children she got for her birthday. It came preloaded with an app called Lingokids, a platform full of “edutainment” activities for kids that I had never heard of before.

Lingokids has literally thousands of educational activities aimed at kids between two and eight years old. 20 million kids use the platform each month across mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. There’s a free tier of Lingokids that allows access to a limited but rotating assortment of games each week. Subscriptions cost $13.49 on a monthly plan or $71.88 annually (which breaks down to only $5.99 a month). That’s a lot cheaper than YouTube Premium, our other go-to for screentime, but this has the added bonus of offering some educational value as well. It also feels like a great way to introduce her to gaming, a precursor to an era when I pass my Nintendo Switch down to her.

My daughter really enjoys the seven educational Spider-Man activities that came to Lingokids in February, hence why she started peppering me with questions about Green Goblin and his love of pumpkins. Character models hover somewhere between traditional Spidey characters and the big-headed variants from the Spidey and His Amazing Friends series, which sometimes feels like you’re watching Funko Pops running and swinging around.

In one game, you use directional buttons to crawl around a window on an exterior wall to save a cat. That’s about as intense as these experiences get, and that’s perfect for this demographic. My daughter’s single favorite activity is a simple sidescroller where Spider-Man walks around and takes pictures of other characters. Ghost-Spider and Spin often feature in games like these, as does Green Goblin. (“Where are you, Green Goblin!? Come out, come out wherever you are!”) Having already seen a fair amount of Spidey and His Amazing Friends, where she first met these characters, my daughter’s enthusiasm for the show has doubled — mainly because she can’t stop taking pictures of the Green Goblin and making fan art collages in Lingokids. (“Green Goblin! Look what I made for you!”)

As an adult gamer myself, it’s positively delightful to expose my kids to the hobby in an age-appropriate way, especially when we’re talking about Marvel characters I grew up with. Why does Green Goblin like pumpkins so much? The question sent me down a rabbit hole of wiki research with vague, inconclusive answers. Norman Osborn is driven insane by an experimental chemical serum, so in his madness, he winds up leaning into this Halloween demon aesthetic to scare people and torment Spider-Man. He’s a terrorist on a hoverboard with a goblin costume, but how do I make that digestible for a 4-year-old?

“He just really likes Halloween,” I explained.

“Wow,” my daughter replied. “I really like Halloween, too. Maybe we can be friends!”

To my daughter, Green Goblin isn’t a chemically unstable billionaire who terrorizes Spider-Man with bombs. He’s just the funny-looking guy who likes pumpkins, not even a villain in the pleasant way Lingokids presents these experiences.

Lingokids says between 14 and 17% of kids who play its games encounter characters like Green Goblin for the first time there, and nearly 60 percent ask to watch shows based on characters they first meet in games. It’s a dramatic reversal of how most millennials like me discovered these characters through TV, movies, or comics — especially when you remember that 20 million kids interact with Lingokids each month.

When I was my daughter’s age, I don’t think we even had an AOL dial-up connection yet. As a parent, it can be challenging to navigate an increasingly screen-dominated world that, compared to my childhood, feels utterly alien. But there’s something encouraging about the fact that Lingokids leans into interactivity as a way to challenge and teach kids while they goof around with characters that everybody likes.

"Gen Alpha is a game-first, interactive-first generation — they don't just want to watch their favorite characters, they want to play with them," Lingokids Global VP of Brand, Maud Cariddi, said in a February release. "This generation spends almost two-thirds of their screen time interacting, not passively watching. That's why character discovery and conversion rates are so strong on Lingokids: We're built for how this generation actually engages with content."

It also makes me think of the endless barrage of crossovers we’re subject to these days. Fortnite — a game that also caters to a younger crowd — has everything from Kpop Demon Hunters skins to Star Wars and Marvel. Does this capture why crossovers are so successful? Because younger generations want to interact with their favorite characters and play as them rather than just experience more passive mediums?

Lingokids began a licensing partnership with Disney in November and launched nearly two dozen of these “edutaining” activities with various characters. Two of the earliest were Frozen and Moana — two of my daughter’s favorite movies. In early March, eight new activities were added featuring characters from Cars. Even more are due out later this year from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars.

My daughter has tried almost every game on the Lingokids platform and suddenly taken an interest in Pocoyo, a kids’ show she’d previously bounced right off of. While I’d love to share a mutual interest in Star Wars with her, I’m not about to let her watch The Last Jedi anytime soon. I feel guilty enough about that time she walked in on me watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and peppered me with dozens of questions until I described all of Tolkien’s mythos. (She loves Gollum, by the way, because of course she does.) The possibility of bonding with her over the inevitable Baby Yoda Lingokids game strikes me as pretty exciting.

The older my daughter gets, the more I think about introducing her to the shows, movies, and games that I love. Knowing how and when is really hard as a parent. Lingokids makes all of that a lot easier. I also can’t beat the convenience of being able to whip out my cellphone if the tablet dies and firing up the Lingokids app so my daughter can snap a few pictures of her best friend Green Goblin.