Family finance apps are digital platforms that offer possibilities for reshaping children’s consumer socialization and economic agency. These finance apps incorporate functions for both parents and children through the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as the monitoring and management of children’s saving and spending. With these apps, children’s economic experiences and participation are increasingly platformed and datafied. That is, guided by functionality for data tracking and analysis. This paper offers a study of the datafication dimensions of these apps as a basis for further research in the emerging area of children’s fintech. The paper undertakes an analysis of features across popular child finance apps, exploring their role in the datafication of children’s financial and economic participation. This discussion is contextualized in relation to child finance and digital platform literature to understand how these apps mediate and craft children as financial subjects via affordances that provide regular allowance or pocket money payments and increased purchasing power. In turn, we consider how they construct children as financial objects through financial data management and monitoring by parents, platforms, and the financial industry. We argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables and exploits children’s economic lives, initiating conditions for and expectations of lifelong digital finance tracking.
Nansen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.