FINANCE APPS AND THE DATAFICATION OF CHILDREN’S ECONOMIC LIVES

Abstract

Children’s finances are increasingly datafied through the emergence and development of applications for managing chores, saving, and spending. These finance apps incorporate features for both parents and children, enabling the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as supporting and managing children’s saving and spending habits. The paper draws on and contributes to children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. This paper offers a novel contribution to these fields, applying the concept of datafication to children’s financial lives through a feature analysis of children’s finance apps. The feature analysis reviews information in Appstore descriptions, company websites, and product reviews to identify and map the range of features spread across these apps. Our analysis considers three emergent themes in which these apps are significantly impacting children’s financial lives: management of child household labour; mediation of children’s financial agency; and datafication of children’s economic participation. We argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables increased agency and control of children’s financial lives by initiating a lifelong digital trace.