We’re parents. And like a lot of parents, we made a decision that still stirs up debate at every playground and dinner table: we let our kids have screen time.

We want to say this clearly up front, because the screen time conversation has a way of turning into a referendum on whether you’re a good parent. If you’ve chosen to keep screens out of your home entirely, we genuinely applaud you. That’s a hard, intentional choice and we respect it. But it’s not the choice we made. Our kids have screens, and they watch videos, and we’re not here to feel guilty about it.

What we are here to do is take back control of what happens on those screens.

The good part

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: kids are wildly, wonderfully curious, and screens can feed that in ways that genuinely amaze us.

Our five-year-old, for example, is currently obsessed with how things work. Not cartoons about it — actual videos explaining how electrical grids deliver power to a city, and, yes, how sewage treatment plants turn wastewater back into something clean. Go figure. We never would have guessed that’s where his curiosity would land, but watching him light up over infrastructure is one of the small joys of parenting we didn’t see coming.

That’s the version of screen time we love. A kid following a thread of “but how?” all the way down. We don’t want to take that away. We want to protect it.

The part that doesn’t work

The problem is that the platforms where all of this lives — YouTube, TikTok — aren’t built for that kind of intentional curiosity. They’re built to keep watching.

So the same app that serves up a beautiful explainer on water treatment will, two videos later, autoplay something we’d never have chosen, surface a recommendation that makes us wince, or drop our kid into a comment section we’d rather he never see. And there’s no real way to say “yes to this, no to that.” You’re handed the whole firehose or nothing.

A few specific things we wanted, and couldn’t get:

• Content that matches where your kid actually is. Every kid is at a different stage. Maybe yours is learning to read and write, and you’d love some of what they watch to reinforce that instead of ignoring it. On the big platforms, there’s no way to express that kind of intention.

• A limit on endless scrolling. We’re cautious about how much time gets lost mindlessly swiping through shorts, so we want to limit them — not necessarily kill them. Other parents we’ve talked to want shorts gone entirely. Both of those should be possible. On YouTube and TikTok, neither really is.

• No guilt baked into the experience. No questionable recommendations. No weird comments. No quiet worry every time we hand over the phone.

None of this control exists in the apps our kids want to use. So we decided to build it.

What we’re building

Pixley is for the parent in the middle — the one who’s chosen to give their kids some screen time, but wants full control over the content behind it.

In Pixley, you decide. You approve the channels and creators your child sees, so the curiosity-feeding stuff comes through and the rest doesn’t. You can dial shorts down to a healthy limit, or remove them completely — your call, your family. And because you’ve already said yes to everything in the library, there’s no recommendation engine steering your kid somewhere you didn’t intend, and no comment section to worry about.

It’s not about more screen time or less. It’s about intentional screen time — the kind where you can hand over the phone and actually relax, because you already know what’s on the other side of it.

We built Pixley because we wanted it for our own family. We’re betting there are a lot of parents who want the same thing: the freedom to say yes to screens, without giving up the right to decide what’s on them.

That’s the whole idea. Where the parent controls the content.

The Pixley app hasn’t launched yet, but it’s about to! If you’d like to get on the waitlist and get access to our beta version, you can drop your email here.