Email for 3-Year Olds: The Perfect Holiday Gift?

While parents complain about spam and inboxes that seem impossible to tame, their 3-year-olds may be getting inboxes of their own this holiday season.

Toymail, the creation of Gauri Nanda SM '05, is an app-toy combo for children that ships this month after a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $80,000.

The toy is simple: it’s a small plastic pig, cow, or bear that runs on AA batteries. Inside, however, is a Wi-Fi receiver. Parents or relatives send messages in their own voices or in the animal’s voice via the free smartphone app. The toy has two buttons on it: play and reply.

In essence, Nanda has boiled down the challenges, stress, or security issues around giving one’s toddler a smartphone or access to email to a simple two-way talking box that parents control.

“The reality is that most parents are away from their kids more often than they would like, sometimes all day, sometimes days at a time,” says Nanda. “Toymail is for them. It's for grandparents, aunts, uncles, even people like me–I don't have kids of my own, but I am completely in love with my best friend's kids, and not a day goes by that I don't want to say something to them and hear all the crazy, brilliant things they might say back."

Toymail is not Nanda’s first venture into the playground. Clocky, an alarm clock on wheels that jumped from your nightstand and rolled away to keep you from hitting the snooze button, was Nanda’s debut into products aimed to make life better. She first conceived of it in her industrial design intelligence class at the Media Lab.

With Toymail, which retails in the $50 range, Nanda has a grander agenda.

"We didn't want to create another toy that puts a kid in front of a screen. We believe there's a better way to approaching technology for kids, and that's by making toys social," says Nanda.

Nanda has clearly struck a nerve with those who cringe to see five-year olds operating iPhones or kids under the minimum age for email or social networks—13, for most—blasting selfies to the masses.

“We’ve probably tested it out with 30 kids now,” Nanda said in a New York Times interview last week. “People have called it ‘genius’ and ‘the future of toys,’ so we feel like we’re onto something big. And we’ve been hearing that kids are sending replies all day long and really engaging with the product.”