Child registering for a service/app, parental concerns. Any experiences?

Question

I am working on a project where we require parent permission to register. In practice, we ask Parent email in registration, and the parent needs to confirm. The app is a single-user experience, and the account is used to store the players data.

However, when testing this, parents had some concerns, for instance, if I register, will my child hear other kids saying bad things online.

We are planning now to have a couple of bullet points for making clear:

• Why they need to register, and
• What happens after they register.

The problem is that you cannot write a novel in the UI and even with using "Read more", links, you need to keep them interested enough to click that link.

This will hopefully be good enough solution. However, it would be great to hear if other people have experience on the registration, requiring parent permit, possible parental concerns, and how to deal with them.

In this wire, the "Why you need to register" is not that clear yet. Something I am going to improve a bit. The "why-part" is only visible when you decide not to register now - the app gives information about what the user can still do without registering, and why they should register.

Answer 1

My initial concern is that children under the age of 18 most likely have an email address (most of them have Facebook, after all!), so they're going to enter their own email address and bypass the parental permission issue.

More to your main point-- I might create a hoverover or hyperlink with the text "What will my child be doing on this site?" or "Before registering your child, learn more about our site".

Hopefully the parents will do their own research into the site before letting their child use it. My guess is that the parents who don't want do research or aren't concerned enough to do research also won't investigate any "learn more" text.