How this is made.
Three stories a day, each written three times.
Tell a six-year-old that the president banned three news outlets from the White House and you will spend the next ten minutes explaining what a president is. Tell a fifteen-year-old the same thing and they will ask whether that is even legal, which is the better question anyway.
Same story, two completely different problems. Most news written for kids solves neither, because it picks one imaginary child somewhere in the middle and writes for them.
What changes between five and fifteen
Jean Piaget got interested in how children think by noticing that they got the same questions wrong in the same ways. The errors had a pattern, and the pattern changed with age. The three bands here follow the stages he described.
Ages 5–7 · the end of the preoperational stage
Thinking is still tied to what a child can see and handle. They reason well about a concrete thing and badly about an abstract one, and they tend to lock onto one feature of a problem and ignore the rest.
So the 5–7 script starts with something physical. A toll on a bridge. A permission slip. A rule in a game. Then it says who is handling it. The abstraction gets cut because it does not land at this age, which is a different reason from protecting them.
Ages 8–12 · concrete operational
Now a kid can follow a chain of cause and effect, hold a rule in their head, and notice when somebody breaks it. This is the age that asks why and actually wants the answer. It is also the age that objects to a punishment before anyone has named the rule.
So the 8–12 script hands over one mechanism they already understand, usually a referee or a thermostat, and one chain of consequence. Then it stops.
Ages 13–17 · formal operational
A teenager can reason about things that are not in front of them. A hypothetical. The distance between what somebody did and the reason they gave for doing it.
So the 13–17 script opens with a question instead of an explanation and leaves the answer open. Hand a teenager a conclusion and you have told them the thinking is already finished.
Read the kid, not the birthday
Piaget’s ages have been picked apart steadily since he set them. Later researchers kept finding children who could do things earlier than he expected once the task was put in familiar terms, and adults who reasoned inconsistently in the stage he assumed they had settled into.
A nine-year-old who reads constantly might want the 13–17 version. A thirteen-year-old having a rough week might want the 8–12 one. Every story here carries all three, and the control at the top of the page moves whenever you want it to.
The words go to you
Lev Vygotsky’s idea was that there is a band of things a child cannot do alone but can do with a more capable person next to them, and that this is where the learning actually happens. Understanding an unresolved news story sits in that band for most kids.
Which makes the useful thing to hand over the words an adult can say, rather than a simplified article for a kid to read by themselves. That is what the scripts are. The “why it works” line under each one tells you what the script is doing, so when your kid asks the question it did not anticipate, you are not guessing.
Why some stories say don’t raise it
Joanne Cantor spent years studying what frightens children about television and news, and found that the answer moves as they grow. Little kids react to how something looks and sounds. Older kids react to what it means: whether it is real, whether it can reach them, whether the adults have it handled.
The uncomfortable consequence is that a story a six-year-old finds boring can frighten a twelve-year-old, who understood more of it. So some stories carry a flag telling you not to bring it up cold, with words ready in case they have already heard. Whether to raise it stays your call.
Why every story ends in a question
Deanna Kuhn’s work on how people learn to argue points at something inconvenient for parents: reasoning improves through practice in real dialogue, not through being taught. Kids move from treating claims as plain facts, through a stretch where every opinion looks equally good, toward weighing claims against evidence. They get there by arguing with people who take their answers seriously.
News is good material for that. It is real, it is unfinished, and it usually has more than one defensible answer. So each story ends on a question that needs no background and has no settled answer. A six-year-old and a fifteen-year-old can both take a swing at it.
Where the news comes from
A fixed list of news outlets checked every hour, including AP News, BBC News, PBS NewsHour, The Hill, Semafor, Axios, KFF Health News, Science News, Defense One and Inside Climate News. Every story names its outlet and links to the original reporting, and no quote, number or name appears here that the reporting does not carry.
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons or public domain licence, and are credited in the Instagram post they run with.
This tool was built mostly late at night by me, a guy named Dan trying to figure out how to talk to my young kiddos about tough news while encouraging them to engage the world. The daily posts are produced with combined human and AI input. I am committed to not adding more AI slop to the world while also trying to stay technologically efficient.