Our story
We're a couple raising a small human in Amsterdam, working from home in the same rooms where she plays. For a while, that meant a toddler on our laps reaching for the keyboard: every meeting, every email, all those irresistible clicky keys.
We tried the usual keyboard-mash apps. She'd giggle for a minute, but nothing really held her. The thing that did hold her wasn't on a screen at all. It was us. We started naming the letters as she pressed them: M for Mom, D for Dad. She picked them up astonishingly fast, so we kept going, giving every letter a word to hold onto. She was only eighteen months old and couldn't read, but she was already starting to connect the pieces.
That was the wake-up call. She didn't need a distraction; she needed something to engage with, and the thing that engaged her best was a toy we were building by hand, in the moment, one letter at a time. plAyBC is our attempt to bottle that: a keyboard that answers back, so the curiosity she already had has somewhere to go.
"But aren't screens bad for kids?"
It's a fair question, and one we ask ourselves. She's our daughter.
Our honest take: it's less about the screen and more about how it's used. The research has been moving the same direction. Pediatric guidance has shifted away from rigid "X hours a day" rules toward what actually seems to matter: the quality of what a kid sees, and whether a grown-up is in it with them.1 The recurring finding is a split: a child parked alone in front of fast, passive content is a fundamentally different thing from a child and a parent doing something together, where the adult is pointing, naming, and reacting.2
For the youngest kids especially, nothing beats real-world play and a present parent3, which is exactly how plAyBC is meant to be used. On a lap. Out loud. "What's that? A dog! D for dog." It's a toy, not a babysitter. We don't picture your child parked in front of it for hours; we picture a few delighted minutes with you right there, the same way we started with ours.
Screens aren't magic and they aren't poison. plAyBC is just one more thing in the toy box (like blocks, crayons, or a xylophone) that happens to light up and make a happy sound when a small finger lands on a letter.
References
- American Academy of Pediatrics, Screen Time Guidelines. Household rules focusing on balance, content quality, co-viewing, and communication are associated with better well-being outcomes than rules focused on screen time alone. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/qa-portal/qa-portal-library/qa-portal-library-questions/screen-time-guidelines/
- Bammidi et al. (2025), The effects of screen habits on attentional skills and prosocial behaviors in 6- to 36-month-old toddlers, Scientific Reports. Toddlers aged 19–36 months showed significantly better sustained attention and prosocial behavior when screen use involved interactive co-viewing with a parent. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-29359-7
- American Academy of Pediatrics, Screen Time for Infants. Children younger than two learn best from exploring the world and interacting with adults, and struggle to understand on-screen content unless an adult explains it. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/qa-portal/qa-portal-library/qa-portal-library-questions/screen-time-for-infants/