Solving the Dilemma of Screen Time

Caregivers of young children can often feel overwhelmed by the pressures of navigating screen time for their kids, says Tanyella Leta, Ed.M.’25. This was a common theme that continually popped up in conversations with parents she knew, and she took note.

“Managing screen time is a huge source of daily stress for parents,” Leta says.

During her time as a master’s student at HGSE, she conducted more than 50 interviews with parents and caregivers about screen time and media. She found they were at a loss for sifting through endless content and monitoring time online while juggling the many responsibilities of parenting.

As a solution, Leta and her business partner Isabel Sheinman launched Maka Kids, a research-backed app that caregivers can trust to deliver healthy content to kids under six.

Leta’s career is rooted in early literacy. With Sheinman, she’s the co-founder and former CEO of NABU, a nonprofit that provides access to books in children’s mother tongue languages.

“I’ve seen how stories can be so powerful in shaping good humans,” Leta says, so after successfully growing NABU, she knew how to pivot to build the new venture. “I want to create a world where children’s media supports healthy growth and development. Maka Kids meets parents where they are in a nonjudgmental way, providing tools that help them include media in their families’ lives.”

The app is designed so caregivers can input their preferences for values like kindness, empathy, or sharing. They can also input the child’s interests and set an amount of time for a viewing session, and Maka delivers video channels, powered by its AI measurement system. The viewing experience is meant to be calming, without the overwhelm of ads, endless recommended videos, or overly stimulating effects.

“If a parent needs 15 minutes to make dinner, Maka sets a session that ends naturally, helping kids to transition off of screen — without those terrible meltdowns,” she says. The platform uses tools like “interstitial pauses,” which are small interruptions in the viewing. If a session has three videos, a character might come on screen before the last show to give the kid a heads up, readying the child for the transition off the screen for the night and removing that burden from the caregiver.

And once dinner is ready, caregivers can use prompts from the app to ask children questions about the shows, which can promote bonding over the characters and stories.

The approach to caregiver-child relationships is rooted in what she learned as a Saul Zaentz Fellow at the Ed School. The fellowship offered her financial support, a community of early childhood educators, and the opportunity to learn from leading early education scholars like Professor Stephanie Jones and Dean Nonie Lesaux, faculty co-directors of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative.

“The Zaentz fellowship was one of the most generative intellectual environments I've ever been in for thinking through the screen time problem,” Leta says. “The Zaentz staff were incredibly helpful in curating expert talks for our weekly roundtables and connecting me to past fellows and academics who were also exploring the intersection of media, early childhood, and technology.”

Leta also had the opportunity to apply what she was learning at HGSE and grow Maka Kids at the Harvard iLab. For Leta, it was the perfect way to invest her time and energy.

“Homing in on the iLab and taking advantage of the programming was the absolute best,” she says. “I was able to be in the space regularly and build relationships with the staff and the other entrepreneurs. I found a home there and got the support that I needed to bridge the academic side with the venture side and the builder in me.”

She spent her second semester at the Ed School refining her idea for Maka Kids with the support of a team and regular mentorship in preparation for the President’s Innovation Challenge, an annual competition in which Harvard founders pitch their entrepreneurial ventures.

Maka Kids was a finalist and Leta describes presenting onstage as a highlight of her time at Harvard. “It felt like a full-circle moment — coming to Harvard with so many questions and then leaving with a 90-second pitch that was an encapsulation of what I’d learned and what was becoming a real company.” Now as an alum, Leta has participated in the iLab’s flagship alumni accelerator, Launch Lab X, while continuing to build her venture. Maka Kids is a finalist in the President’s Innovation Challenge again — this time, in the Alumni Track.

It’s an exciting season for Maka: they raised considerable seed money and launched the prototype of the streaming app. “Over 750 families used it within two weeks. That told us the demand was real,” says Leta. “We now have over 2,000 families on our waitlist ready for early access when we go live."