In this guide
What is Moshi Kids?
Moshi Kids is a wellbeing app designed specifically for children aged 10 and under. The app aims to help children relax and improve their sleep. This is achieved through a range of games, music, and short stories.
Moshi Kids has a PEGI 3 age rating and is available to download on Android and iOS. The app is free to download and use, but a premium subscription is available, costing £7.99/month or £39.99/year. This subscription gives access to the full content library of the app, but the free version still has a wide range of content. A 7-day free trial of premium is available, so you can try out its features before committing to paying for the app.
How it works
Moshi Kids is meant to be set up by a parent, as it asks for your child’s name and age right after you open the app for the first time. After inputting these details, you can choose a ‘Moshling’ to be your child’s companion while using the app, with a wide range of fun and colourful creatures to choose from. Then you will be prompted to select your child’s goals while using the app, which can be focused on sleep, relaxing and healthy play.
Moshi helps children improve their wellbeing through various activities such as short stories, music, games, colouring in and memory games. The games are extremely easy, focused more on relaxation than challenging the user, but they should be engaging for younger children.
The lullabies and short stories are effective for helping children sleep, with the narrators of the story slowing down their speaking pace as they read to give a more calm and sleep-inducing experience. Moshi has some celebrity narrators like Goldie Hawn and Patrick Stewart, but it is unlikely that children will be aware of these celebrities or overly interested in their stories on name-basis alone.
Parents can play lullabies, stories, and music from ready-made or custom playlists. This helps keep children asleep when the sounds stop. As well as aiding sleep, Moshi can reduce stress and anxiety using meditation tools intended to calm down overstimulated children.
Moshi Kids parental controls
Moshi does offer some parental controls to allow parents to manage how their child uses the app. A Play Schedule feature exists that parents can enable which disables the ability to play games on the app at night. This means parents can leave their device with their child at night, allowing them to listen to lullabies and bedtime stories, without them being able to play games which might affect their sleep.
You can set bedtime reminders that will send notifications to the device as the child’s bedtime approaches.
There are age-gates on the app as well, which prevent children from accessing the app settings and from purchasing a Moshi subscription without parental permission. However, all these age-gates ask users to do is enter their birth year, with anyone aged 16 and over being old enough to pass. It would be extremely easy for a child to enter an age older than their own, so this is not a secure system.
Parents can set controls through the settings of the Android or iOS device they use for Moshi. These settings can limit how long a child can use the app each day and restrict them from buying a Moshi subscription. Explore our parental control guides to learn how to set these controls.
Benefits of Moshi Kids
- Colourful engaging design
- Can improve child’s wellbeing
- Free version is effective
- Sleep schedule tools
- Wide range of activities and resources
What to watch out for
Moshi Kids is overall a safe and positive app for young children to use. However, there is a risk that children could become over reliant on the app and become unable to fall asleep without Moshi’s audio. Managing your child’s screen time, so that they do not overuse Moshi, can help prevent them from becoming over reliant on the app.