Hi, I’m Mehrdad 👋

Kiddo.city didn’t start as a business idea.

It started at home.

Like many parents, I wanted my children to enjoy computers, games and technology, but I wasn’t happy with many of the choices available to them. Too often, children’s games are filled with advertising, pop-ups, subscriptions, distracting screens, unnecessary accounts, or systems designed to keep children clicking for as long as possible.

I wanted something different.

I built Kiddo.city for my own kids

My goal was to create a place where my children could play, think, experiment and learn without all the noise around them.

Games should be fun, but they can also encourage curiosity, reasoning, problem-solving, creativity and patience.

I also want my children to become comfortable using a real computer — not only tapping through apps on a phone or tablet.

Kiddo.city is my attempt to build that environment.

And because my own children use it, I approach its safety and privacy exactly as I would expect another parent to.

I’m an engineer first

My professional background is in software engineering, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, DevOps and platform engineering.

I have spent years designing and working with systems where reliability, architecture, security and data handling matter.

That experience strongly influences how Kiddo.city is built.

I don’t believe a children’s website should collect information simply because it can.

My approach is the opposite:

Collect as little as possible.

Privacy by design 🔒

Kiddo.city is designed so that most game logic runs directly on your device inside the browser.

When a child plays a game, the game itself doesn’t need to continuously send their actions to a server.

Where possible, progress and game state can remain on the local device.

Kiddo.city is intentionally designed without advertising technology whose purpose is to profile children.

I want to minimize the digital footprint created simply because a child wanted to play a game.

That means designing around principles such as:

No advertising.
No behavioral profiling.
No selling children’s data.
No unnecessary tracking.
No unnecessary personal information.
Local processing whenever practical.

The website still needs an internet connection to initially load pages, games, images, voices and other content from Kiddo.city’s infrastructure. But wherever I can reasonably keep an interaction on the child’s device, that is the architecture I prefer.

Security isn’t an afterthought

Because Kiddo.city is made for children, I treat security and privacy as fundamental parts of the product rather than features to add later.

I personally develop and maintain the platform and continually review how it handles data, external services, dependencies and infrastructure.

My rule is simple:

If Kiddo.city doesn’t need a piece of information, it shouldn’t ask for it.

Built by a parent

Kiddo.city is still growing.

I’m constantly building new games, experiments, stories and learning activities — often based on things I want to explain or teach to my own children.

Some ideas will work wonderfully. Others will change as I learn what children actually enjoy and what parents find useful.

But the principles behind the project will remain the same:

Safe. Calm. Curious. Private. Fun.

If I wouldn’t be comfortable letting my own children use something, I don’t want it in Kiddo.city.

— MehrdadDad, Software Engineer & Creator of Kiddo.city