The State of the Saudi Child's Experience 2026

Executive summary: ten findings

Each finding below ends with the evidence grade behind it, on the Dawani scale published on the evidence page: A for national data, B for several consistent studies, C for a legal text, professional standard or published guidance, and D for Dawani's own practice. The scale is ours, not an official classification.

• Saudi Child Protection Law defines a child as every human being who has not exceeded eighteen years of age, the same threshold the UK Children's code and the OECD Recommendation use. Yet GASTAT, in Population Estimates Publication 2024, publishes no single share of children in the total population: 33.5% for the under-15 group among Saudis and 8.6% among non-Saudis. The country counts its children by nationality rather than as one population. (A)
• Early childhood indicators moved within a single year. According to GASTAT, Early Childhood Development and Child Well-Being Statistics 2025, 82.4% of children aged 24 to 59 months are developmentally on track, and 90.0% of children aged 36 to 59 months live in a positive and stimulating home learning environment. (A)
• The book at home is further away than the screen. The same edition reports that about 60% of children under five have no children's books at all, and that 9.2% of them have three or more. The stimulating environment exists; the material it works with is missing. (A)
• Two kindergarten targets, from two publishers. Saudi Vision 2030, on its Human Capability Development Program page, targets 40% of the Kingdom’s children enrolled in kindergarten by 2025. The Ministry of Education targets a rise from 17% to 90% by 2030. Neither page publishes an achieved figure against its target, so both appear here with their publisher and their year, and neither is merged into the other. (C)
• The national frame names the family and Arabic, and does not name the child’s digital experience. Of the Human Capability Development Program’s sixteen strategic objectives, three concern this report: upholding the Arabic language; enhancing family involvement in preparing for their children’s future; and developing a positive, resilient and hard-working culture among our children. None of them mentions the digital environment. (C)
• The Quality of Life Program expands the supply of entertainment and names no child. Its page targets more than 600 new entertainment attractions and more than 6,700 days of cultural events by 2030, and neither the word child nor the word family appears in its ten objectives or its four targets. We read the Arabic and English pages in full before writing that sentence. (C)
• Age-appropriateness is a legal matter in Saudi Arabia, not a matter of taste. The Child Protection Law counts exposing a child to scenes unsuitable for their age among the forms of abuse, and its Article 16 requires every body to consider the child’s interest in each measure taken concerning them. (C)
• There is no children's-data article in the Personal Data Protection Law. It regulates the question through those lacking full legal capacity and through the legal guardian, and Article 4 of the Implementing Regulations requires the controller to provide privacy information in appropriate language where it knows the data subject lacks legal capacity. Anyone who has written that Saudi law mandates parental consent for children's data has gone past the text. (C)
• The international frameworks are design references, not laws in force here. General Comment No. 25 asks, in paragraph 42, that States prohibit by law the profiling or targeting of children of any age for commercial purposes. The UK Children's code sets fifteen standards and says of itself that it is not a new law. The OECD Recommendation rests on five principles, and Saudi Arabia is not an Adherent to it. UNICEF's Guidance on AI and children, version 3.0 of December 2025, sets ten requirements. (C)
• What is measured is not what is designed. No source we fetched tells us what a child does inside the hour spent in front of a screen, how often a child plays with an adult in a week, or how many Arabic children's apps are released in a year. Arabic is the content language of 0.6% of websites whose content language is known, per W3Techs on 6 September 2026. What we know from our own making is grade D: stated practice, not published research. (D)

And the Dawani Child-Safe Design framework, which this report's product judgements rest on, is an independent Dawani framework, not a government standard.

Any report on children begins with a simple question: who is a child? Saudi Arabia has an explicit legal answer. The Child Protection Law, issued by Royal Decree M/14 of 1436H, defines a child as every human being who has not exceeded eighteen years of age. The Ministry of Education, on its early childhood page, defines early childhood as ages three to eight, and its General Directorate of Early Childhood serves children from age three to grade three. Those two definitions settle an argument that recurs in product rooms: up to what age we design with care, and where a stage begins that needs different tools.

The count is harder. According to GASTAT, Population Estimates Publication 2024, the Kingdom’s population is estimated at 35.3 million in mid-2024. The same publication carries two shares for the under-15 age group: 33.5% among Saudis and 8.6% among non-Saudis. It publishes no combined share for that group across the whole population. The figure of roughly a quarter that circulates on third-party sites appears on no GASTAT page we fetched, and working it out as a weighted average would be our own derivation, so it is not written. The one accurate sentence here is that children under fifteen are about a third of the Saudi population.

In the wider age picture, per GASTAT 2024 data as published by SPA in August 2025, Saudis under 35 are 69.4% of the Saudi population and, counting residents, 61.4% of the total. A young country, on demography alone.

Then come the qualitative indicators. According to GASTAT, Early Childhood Development and Child Well-Being Statistics 2025, 82.4% of children aged 24 to 59 months are on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being. 90.0% of children aged 36 to 59 months live in a positive and stimulating home learning environment. Participation in organised learning one year before the official primary entry age stood at 73.0%. Enrolment in an early childhood education programme among children aged 36 to 59 months stood at 17.3%, and the edition says plainly that enrolment indicators now come from the Ministry of Education’s administrative registers, so a change of source is part of what explains the difference from the previous edition.

Against that, the same edition reports that about 60% of children under five have no children's books at all, that 31.0% own one or two, and that 9.2% own three or more. Put that beside a stimulating home environment at 90.0% and the two numbers read as they are: the family is present and the material is absent. That is a supply gap rather than a willingness gap, and an industry gap before it is a behaviour gap.

On screens specifically, the same edition reports that 35.1% of children aged five to seven use digital devices for one to two hours a day, and that 11.4% do not use them at all. The 2024 publication did print a headline that about 90% of children that age use them every day; the newer edition does not print it, and we do not derive it by subtraction.

What we do not know here matters as much as what we do: no published share of children in the total population, no data above age seven on device use in these two publications, and no disaggregation of these indicators by disability, which paragraph 30 of General Comment No. 25 asks for explicitly.

The Human Capability Development Program, one of the Saudi Vision 2030 realisation programmes, was launched in 2021, and its stated span runs from early childhood to lifelong learning. It sets sixteen strategic objectives, three of which concern this report: upholding the Arabic language; enhancing family involvement in preparing for their children’s future; and developing a positive, resilient and hard-working culture among our children. Among its 2025 targets, printed on the page: 40% of the Kingdom’s children enrolled in kindergarten by 2025.

The Ministry of Education, on its early childhood page, publishes another target: raising kindergarten enrolment from 17% to 90% by 2030. Two publishers, two years, two baselines. Neither page publishes an achieved figure against its target, so what a product maker holds here is a stated policy direction rather than a performance indicator.

The same ministry publishes «معايير التعلم المبكر النمائية» (Early Learning and Development Standards) for ages three to six, a descriptive guide to expected knowledge, behaviours and skills; runs a personal-safety programme against abuse with AGFUND and UNICEF; and uses the ECERS scale to improve kindergarten environments. For anyone designing for this stage, those standards are the local reference rather than an imported curriculum frame.

On the entertainment and culture side, the Quality of Life Program was launched in 2018 with ten strategic objectives, among them developing and diversifying entertainment opportunities to meet the population’s needs. Four targets are published, among them more than 600 new entertainment attractions and more than 6,700 days of cultural events by 2030. We read the Arabic and English pages in full: neither the word child nor the word family appears in the ten objectives or the four targets. That is an observation about what the page publishes rather than a judgement on the programme, but anyone building a children’s experience inside an entertainment destination needs it: supply is expanding against a stated target, and the child’s experience inside it has no measure.

The same holds in games. Per the September 2022 launch announcement of the National Gaming and Esports Strategy, the strategy targets a contribution of about 50 billion riyals to GDP, 39,000 new jobs by 2030, and more than thirty globally competitive games produced in the Kingdom’s studios. The announcement mentions neither children nor their safety. The strategy’s page on the Vision 2030 site refused us access on 6 September and had become a page-not-found response by 7 September, so we do not link to it and we cite the announcement alone.

The binding texts are clearer than any of the above. The Child Protection Law counts exposing a child to scenes unsuitable for their age among the forms of abuse, the text that makes age rating a legal matter rather than a matter of taste. Its Article 12, as amended by Royal Decree M/72 of 6/8/1443H, prohibits producing any work directed at children that would encourage behavioural or intellectual deviance. Its Article 6 gives the child the right to protection from all forms of abuse or neglect. And its Article 16 requires every body to consider the child’s interest in each measure taken concerning them, and to account for their mental, psychological, physical and educational needs in line with their age. That article is the Saudi counterpart of what other systems call best interests of the child, and it is the text to cite before any international one when addressing a Saudi body.

On data, the Personal Data Protection Law devotes no article to children's data: it regulates the question through lacking or having no legal capacity, and through the legal guardian. Article 13 of the Implementing Regulations requires the guardian to act in the data subject's interest and lets them consent to processing. Article 4 requires the controller to provide the required information in appropriate language where it knows the data subject lacks legal capacity, and it is the strongest Saudi text in favour of a privacy notice a child can read.

In cybersecurity, the National Cybersecurity Authority publishes a parental-controls page describing them as an effective tool for reducing cyber risks to children. It is an awareness page for parents rather than a regulatory control on products, and the difference matters to anyone reading this market. In July 2025 the UN Human Rights Council unanimously adopted a resolution submitted by Saudi Arabia on protecting children in the digital space, and in October 2025 the Global Cybersecurity Forum Foundation announced the Child Protection in Cyberspace Index with the DQ Institute. That index’s targets reached us through a page summary rather than reliable raw text, so we give its name and its date and none of its figures.

The Family Affairs Council’s strategy names the objective of strengthening children’s personal and professional skills, and a pillar of comprehensive protection for the family at home, in its surroundings and in cyberspace; in August 2024 it issued the «الحياة مهارة» (Life is a Skill) guide for parents of children aged seven to eighteen. We tried the Council’s childhood page on both days and it returned no extractable text, even in a real browser, so we name no programme of theirs we have not read on their own site. In November 2024 the Ministry of Culture launched the Child Culture Platform, with sections including «الكاتب الصغير» and «لنكتشف الثقافة معاً».

The picture this section produces is of a frame nearly complete at the edges: a legal definition of a child, a right to protection, a text on age-appropriateness, a data rule that reaches the child through their guardian, and stated targets in early education, entertainment and games. What it lacks is not a text but a measurement.

Before any quotation in this section, one sentence governs it: everything below is a design reference, not a law in force in Saudi Arabia. The binding text here is the Child Protection Law and the Personal Data Protection Law with its Regulations, as in the previous section. We read these references because they are read in design rooms worldwide and they shorten years of error, not because they oblige anyone in Riyadh.

General Comment No. 25 was issued by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on 2 March 2021, symbol CRC/C/GC/25, prepared with a consultation of 709 children in 28 countries. Paragraph 12 states that the digital environment was not originally designed for children, and that children’s best interests must be a primary consideration in its design, management and use; the decisive word there is design. Paragraph 17 asks that digital service providers actively engage with children, with appropriate safeguards, and give their views due consideration when developing products; it is the strongest international text behind testing with real children. Paragraph 70 requires privacy-by-design in products that affect children, and paragraph 69 permits interference with a child’s privacy only where it is neither arbitrary nor unlawful and upholds data minimisation.

Paragraph 42 asks States to prohibit by law the profiling or targeting of children of any age for commercial purposes, on the basis of a digital record of their actual or inferred characteristics. Paragraph 40 names the mechanisms: advertising features that steer a child towards more extreme content, automated notifications that can interrupt sleep, and the use of a child’s data or location to target them. Paragraph 110 names highly persuasive or gambling-like design features as a leisure-time risk. Those three are the international reference behind what our site says about daily streaks and random rewards.

One more passage matters in Arabic. Paragraph 107 asks that digital forms of culture, recreation and play reflect and promote children’s identities, in particular their cultural identities, languages and heritage. Paragraph 111 asks that age ratings not curtail children’s access to the digital environment as a whole. Paragraph 30 asks for regularly updated data, disaggregated by age, sex, disability, location and socioeconomic background, in the public domain. And paragraph 55 requires age-based systems to be consistent with data minimisation, the condition that stops "check their age" from turning into collecting more identity.

The UK Children's code, which its publisher also calls the Age appropriate design code, sets fifteen standards in this order: best interests of the child; data protection impact assessments; age appropriate application; transparency; detrimental use of data; policies and community standards; default settings; data minimisation; data sharing; geolocation; parental controls; profiling; nudge techniques; connected toys and devices; and online tools. It calls them flexible, neither banning nor specifically prescribing, and gathers four of them into one line: high privacy by default unless there is a compelling reason otherwise; only the minimum personal data collected and retained; children's data not usually shared; and geolocation switched off by default.

The code applies to information society services likely to be accessed by children, and covers apps, games, connected toys and devices and news services. The sentence that closes the escape hatch: if children under 18 are likely to access your service, even if it is not aimed at them, you are probably covered. It does not apply to schools processing under-18 data for education, and it may apply to providers of edtech used in schools. Its publisher allowed a twelve-month transition period before it applied.

The OECD Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment, adopted in February 2012 and revised in May 2021, rests on five principles: Fundamental Values; Empowerment and Resilience; Proportionality and Respect for Human Rights; Appropriateness and Inclusion; and Shared Responsibility, Co-operation and Positive Engagement. It defines children as every individual below the age of eighteen. It asks Adherents to promote measures providing age-appropriate child safety by design. Its companion guidelines for digital service providers call on them to take a child safety by design approach, to be transparent in clear, plain, age-appropriate language, to safeguard children’s privacy and data and their commercial use, and to demonstrate governance and accountability. Saudi Arabia is not an Adherent to this Recommendation, so here it is a reference and not an obligation.

UNICEF's Guidance on AI and children, version 3.0 of December 2025, sets ten requirements for child-centred AI: regulatory frameworks, oversight and compliance; safety for children; protection of their data and privacy; non-discrimination and fairness; transparency, explainability and accountability; respect for human and child rights through responsible practice; support for children's best interests, development and well-being; inclusion; preparing and skilling children for developments in AI; and an enabling environment. A correction of our own belongs here: we previously published nine requirements from the superseded 2021 edition. The count today is ten, in the third edition, dated December 2025.

Four practical references complete the picture: the seven Responsible Data for Children principles; Child Rights by Design from the 5Rights Foundation and the Digital Futures for Children centre at the London School of Economics, eleven principles built on General Comment No. 25; WHO’s 2019 guidelines, which recommend no screen time at all for infants under one year; and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Use Plan, which sets no hour count at all and recommends screen-free zones and a one screen at a time rule.

The table below summarises a judgement, not a dataset. The detail of each domain, with its figures, its evidence grades and what could not be verified in it, is published in Dawani Signals, September 2026, and is not repeated here. What this report adds is the status verdict in three columns: what we know with evidence, what we do not know, and what that means in practice for anyone making a product for a child in Saudi Arabia.

One rule governs the first two columns: the middle one is not filled with guesswork. We do not write "the long-term effect is unknown" as a phrase available everywhere; we write the gap we actually tried to close in the two registers and could not, and who could close it. Where the middle column runs longer than the first, that is news about the domain rather than about our effort in it.

The rule for the third column: a decision that can be acted on this week, not a general principle. "Design for the pair" is not advice but a screen specification: who appears first, who decides, and what happens when the adult walks away. Every decision in that column derives from a row in the two sections above rather than from a view about design.

Evidence grades fall out as follows in this report: grade A for GASTAT’s published statistics in the first three domains and in the population indicators; grade C for anything sourced from a legal text, professional guidance or a published policy target, with the target named as a target in the same sentence; and grade D for our own ordering of the gaps and for what we read into them for a product, which is our reading rather than any source’s finding.

This whole section is evidence grade D: Dawani's stated practice, not published research and not data. It carries no figure, because anything without a verified row in our register is not published as a number, even about ourselves. We write it because a report that reads everyone else's work and never says what it does itself is an incomplete report.

We start with a plain grey prototype. Before any final form, we build a version with no colour, no characters and no sound, because a child is polite about a pretty surface and is never polite about an experience. What we find at that stage is usually about comprehension rather than beauty: a rule that is never explained, or a step the child expects somewhere else. The stages and their gates are set out on our process page.

We test with real children, with their parents’ consent, rather than with adults imagining a child, which is what paragraph 17 of General Comment No. 25 asks for. What it has taught us is that one session with a small group of children reveals more than a long internal review, and that a child who goes quiet is not neutral but a child for whom we designed no way to speak.

We collect as little data as possible. The tools published in our knowledge centre run inside the reader’s browser and send no answer to a server, which is a design decision rather than a marketing policy. The same principle carries into what we build for others: every field asked of a child needs a written reason, or it is deleted. That is the practical meaning of the data minimisation principle in Article 11 of the Personal Data Protection Law, rather than a general ethical phrasing.

We design no daily streaks and no random rewards that measure success by a child’s inability to stop, a commitment paragraph 110 of General Comment No. 25 supports. The alternative we work with is that the end of a session should be designed as deliberately as its beginning.

Parents have a stated role in everything we make, rather than a hidden settings pane. Among our published experiences today: Jona and Nodi, two apps available now; Treasure Island, a savings experience presented in a number of Saudi cities; and a screenless device in preparation. What all of them have taught us is that a parent who understands what is happening on the screen becomes a guardian of the experience, and a parent who does not becomes its opponent, and one screen in the first minute is the difference between them.

The limit of this section is explicit: what is in it is stated practice, open to being overturned by evidence, not a measured result. We have published no controlled study comparing a grey prototype with a coloured one, and no quantitative measure of any of our decisions on a child. Anyone who wants evidence stronger than grade D should ask it of research not yet published.

This section lists what should be measured and is not, ordered by how close each item sits to a real product decision. It states what we will ask for again in the next edition, and what we will measure ourselves where nobody else does.

First: what the child does inside the hour. The time bands are published; what happens inside them is not. Creating or consuming, alone or with an adult, in their own language or in another. A single indicator of that kind would change the whole screen-time argument in Saudi Arabia, turning it from a moral argument into a design one.

Second: co-play. We know 90.0% of children live in a stimulating home learning environment, and we do not know how many times a week an adult sits with a child in front of a screen or a book. That number is what decides whether a product is designed for a child alone or for a pair.

Third: the supply of Arabic content for children. We know Arabic's share of web content per W3Techs, and we do not know how many Arabic children's books are issued in a year or how many Arabic children's apps are published. Without a supply figure, "the Arabic content gap" stays a phrase that is said and never managed.

Fourth: the child’s experience inside entertainment destinations. Quantitative targets for entertainment attractions and days of cultural events are published; no indicator is published for what a child lives inside them, whether they are designed for the child’s age, whether the child returns, and what the child learns or makes there. The Quality of Life Program page names no child, so the indicator is necessarily absent.

Fifth: data disaggregated by disability. Paragraph 30 of General Comment No. 25 asks for it among other breakdowns; the indicators published today are disaggregated by sex and age routinely and by disability rarely. So the child with a disability is missing from the figures anyone designs on.

Sixth: the methodology and the values of the Child Protection in Cyberspace Index. It was announced in October 2025, and we read its name and its date on the National Cybersecurity Authority’s page, and read neither what it measures nor how in primary text. An index published with its methodology would serve a product maker better than ten general recommendations.

Behind all six sits one gap that joins them: no body publishes an indicator for the quality of what reaches a child. Everything published measures volume, spend or enrolment. Until such an indicator exists, everyone building for children in Saudi Arabia will keep building on a policy target, a legal text and a judgement call, ourselves included.