Children’s apps are increasingly being designed not just to entertain or educate, but to extract attention, engagement, and ultimately money from an audience that is fundamentally unequipped to understand what is happening to them.

Advertising within children’s apps is not comparable to advertising aimed at adults. Adults, at least in theory, can recognise persuasion, understand intent, and make informed decisions. Children cannot. They do not distinguish clearly between content and advertising, between play and manipulation, or between genuine rewards and engineered incentives. This imbalance creates an environment where monetisation strategies cross the line from marketing into exploitation.

Many apps aimed at children embed adverts in ways that are deliberately difficult to identify. These include:

- Ads disguised as gameplay or interactive content

- Time-pressure prompts encouraging immediate clicks

- Rewards offered in exchange for watching adverts

- Influencer-style messaging that blurs entertainment with promotion

These techniques are not accidental. They are rooted in behavioural design principles that exploit psychological vulnerabilities—urgency, reward loops, and social validation. When applied to children, this becomes especially problematic. A child is far more likely to comply with a prompt such as “tap now,” “don’t miss out,” or “only smart players will choose this,” without understanding that they are being steered toward a commercial outcome.

The result is a system where children are:

- Exposed to persistent commercial pressure

- Encouraged to engage in behaviours they do not understand

- Conditioned into habits of passive consumption and impulsive interaction

This is not a level playing field. It is a commercial environment where one side has been carefully engineered to maximise influence, and the other lacks the cognitive development to defend against it.

In most other areas of society, we recognise that children require additional protections. We regulate advertising in schools, restrict certain types of marketing on television, and enforce age-appropriate standards across multiple industries. Yet in digital environments, where children now spend a significant portion of their time, these protections are inconsistent, outdated, or entirely absent.

Allowing adverts in apps specifically designed for children effectively normalises the monetisation of vulnerability. It prioritises profit over wellbeing and shifts responsibility onto parents to manage systems that are deliberately complex and difficult to control.

This petition calls for a clear and enforceable standard:

Apps aimed at children should not be permitted to include advertising.

Children deserve digital spaces that are safe, transparent, and free from manipulation. Entertainment and education should not come at the cost of exploitation. Removing adverts from children’s apps is a necessary step toward restoring that balance and ensuring that commercial interests do not override the basic duty to protect young users.