Amazon wants to help parents talk to their kids better

Amazon isn’t the first to offer help understanding kids’ books, games and shows, but in true Silicon Valley style, they’re trying to do it best.

It seems increasingly inevitable that young kids are going to spend a significant portion of their time on a device of some kind. The sheer number of play, lesson and entertainment options offered by companies like Amazon is too hard for many parents to pass up. But parents face a visibility problem. You know what your child loves when she brings a Dr. Seuss book with her everywhere or leaves Candyland splayed across the living room floor. When it’s a tablet left here or there, it’s much harder.

Amazon has offered FreeTime as a subscription service for parents for many years. At its core, it’s an app that controls your child’s access on Amazon devices – the Fire Tablet, Fire TV and Kindle eReaders – and only offers them kid-friendly books, videos, apps and games. Parents can even curate which specific books and videos their child can access, much like you could a physical library or play room. Over the years, it’s become more advanced.

The latest update adds Discussion Cards to the Parent Dashboard. The dashboard already includes activity reports about how the device is being used: what books the kid is reading, the videos they’re watching, websites they visited. The discussion cards, in turn, are intended to help parents better understand this data.

The cards give a mixture of questions and conversation starters as well as activity ideas to build on the area of interest indicated by the child’s behavior on the device. They will even provide a summary if the material is entirely foreign to you. Amazon’s content editors write the cards – there are currently thousands, with more added every day – and they cover not only the most FreeTime titles, but also those added to FreeTime by parents.

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The fact this need exists is still rather tragic, but it’s really just a new reality.