But COPPA is clearly ineffective. Three out of five American parents in a 2017 poll conducted on behalf of Facebook and the National PTA (one of the groups Facebook consulted while building Messenger Kids) said that their under-13-year-olds use messaging apps, social media, or both. If you take into account sneakier kids and more oblivious parents, the real figure is likely to be much higher.

The design of Messenger Kids is evidently meant to put parents at ease. It’s full of parental controls; kids must get a parent’s authorization (via the parent’s own Facebook account) to sign up and to add each new contact.

However, the app also has some of the very grown-up features you find on Messenger. For instance, if you send a contact a message on Messenger Kids, it lets you know if the person is online or how long it’s been since he or she was active. It will also tell you whether the person you’ve sent a message to has viewed it already and if so, for recently sent messages, when.

That kind of information can cause anxiety even in adults who’ve already spent years using apps. And habituating kids to always-on communication concerns Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who cofounded and runs the Center for Humane Technology. “It’s like Coca-Cola inventing a kids’ soda product,” he says. “It still has to sell sugar; it can’t really be genuinely concerned with the well-being of kids.”

Facebook

Social cues and tech blues

Researchers at San Diego State University and Florida State University recently found that teens who spent a lot of time using smartphones for things like social media were more likely to be depressed. The work, which shows teen suicide and depression rates climbing in the US since 2010, suggests that these issues are linked to the swift rise in smartphone ownership across the country.

The suitable messaging app for young children probably looks nothing like a mini version of Messenger.

That finding and others have alarmed health and education experts. Nineteen groups and nearly 100 individuals (including Harris) signed a letter in January pleading with Facebook to kill Messenger Kids. “Encouraging kids to move their friendships online will interfere with and displace the face-to-face interactions and play that are crucial for building healthy developmental skills, including the ability to read human emotion, delay gratification, and engage with the physical world,” the group wrote.

Larry Rosen, a psychology professor and author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, says children in the Messenger Kids age group are still honing communication skills, including subtle and nonverbal ones like understanding body language and posture. “I worry we’re introducing something to kids who really don’t need it,” he says, “and I think that the ostensible purpose is wrong, which is to get them started young.”

Parent perspective

Not all parents agree. CJ Kanash is an insurance agent in Erie, Pennsylvania, and a father of five. Four of Kanash’s children are between the ages of six and 10, and each of them has an Amazon tablet with Messenger Kids on it.