Rungs / About

Who writes this

Rungs is made by Humble Loop, a one-person software studio. There is no team behind these pages, no child psychology qualification, and no law degree. This page says what they are built on, where they knowingly depart from the usual advice, and what happens to your child's name when you type it into the generator.

What these pages are based on

Four kinds of material, kept apart on purpose because they carry different weight.

Paediatric guidance, for the shape of the thing rather than for specific ages. The American Academy of Pediatrics does not publish an age at which a child should get a phone — it says readiness varies and that a written, discussed family plan is the useful unit. That position is the reason this site produces a document instead of a recommended age.

The family phone contract tradition. Common Sense Media's guide and Janell Burley Hofmann's eighteen-point contract are the two documents most of these templates descend from. They were read. None of their wording is reused, because it is theirs: every clause in the generator was written from scratch.

Peer-reviewed research, where it exists and where it is actually about the question being asked. It is cited on the page that uses it, with the finding stated rather than gestured at.

The legal instruments themselves, not news coverage of them.

Where a page makes a checkable claim it links the source, says which part of the claim that source covers, and carries the date it was last opened. Where no good source exists, the page says so rather than borrowing authority from one that is about something adjacent.

How the law is handled

This is the part that is most often wrong elsewhere, usually by rounding several different things into one number, so it is worth being exact.

No minimum age appears without the instrument named and a date it was checked. In Australia, age-restricted social media platforms have had to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s off since 10 December 2025, and parental consent does not create an exception — a parent cannot sign that away, so the generator moves those steps rather than pretending the family gets to choose.

Announced is not the same as in force. The UK announced the same threshold on 15 June 2026, expected to start in Spring 2027. That is an announcement. Choosing the United Kingdom prints a note saying it is coming and leaves your dates alone, because constraining a family's plan by a rule that does not yet exist would be the same error in the other direction.

Platform terms are not law. The familiar "you have to be 13" comes from COPPA, which obliges operators to get parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. It is a rule about data, aimed at companies. It is not a ban on children, and it is not a finding that 13 is when a child is ready.

Law and parenting are kept in separate columns. The ages on the ladder are a suggestion you can move. The legal minimum sits on top of them and is not yours to move. Blurring the two makes both less honest, so they are separate in the data, separate in the generator, and separate in the printed document.

Mechanically: each jurisdiction carries its own check date, the plan refuses to build if a legal claim has no source attached to it, and it warns when an entry has gone six months without being looked at again. That does not make it current — only checking does — but it means a stale entry cannot sit here quietly.

What is not claimed

Nothing here is legal advice. The legal ages are cited so you can go and read the source, which is the opposite of asking you to take our word for it.

Nothing here is a clinical or psychological assessment. The readiness sessions in the plan are conversations between a parent and a child. They are not tests, there is no score, and a child cannot fail one.

Rungs is not a safety product. It does not read your child's messages, it does not promise to catch anything, and it should not be the reason you stop paying attention.

And the document is not a contract. An agreement signed with a minor is not legally binding, so it does not call itself one in its own text — the word only survives in the web address, where it is what people search for. Whatever force it has comes from two people having signed something they both actually understood.

Where this differs from the usual advice

Three deliberate departures, each of which costs something.

Confiscation is not the default consequence

Most templates end with losing the phone. It is the wrong instrument for the most common failure: a child who tells you something went wrong. Taking the phone in response punishes the telling, and it removes the thing they would use to reach you next time. Consequences here are narrower — a capability steps back down a rung, with a date on which it returns.

No clause tells a child to delete an image

Some published contracts include one, and it is well meant. But an intimate image of a child is evidence of a crime committed against them; deleting it can destroy that evidence, and in some places destroying evidence is itself an offence. The clause here says the opposite: tell an adult, and do not delete anything.

For getting an image taken down there are two services built for exactly this. Take It Down, run by the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, is free and open to anyone who was under 18 in the image; it fingerprints the file on the device and shares only that hash, so the image itself is never uploaded. In the UK, Report Remove is run by Childline with the Internet Watch Foundation, for under-18s.

The plan does not assume day one

Almost every template is written for the afternoon the phone is handed over. That is not when most parents go looking for one. They go looking in the middle of an argument, two years in, when the rules have quietly stopped meaning anything — so the generator has a mode that starts from there instead, and it does not open by taking things away.

Nothing you type into the agreement is saved

The generator asks for your child's name, their date of birth, and the names of the adults signing. None of it leaves your browser.

There is no account and no server to send it to. The values are never written into the web address, so a link you paste to someone else carries nothing about your child. They are not written to your browser's storage either — which is unusual, and is the point: close the tab and they are gone, with no box to tick and nothing to go and delete later.

The cost is that if you close the page before printing, you fill the form in again. That seemed the right trade for a form whose fields are a child's name and birthday.

The one thing this site does keep is separate and optional: if you join the waitlist for the app, it keeps your email address and whether your phone and your child's are Android or iPhone, sends one email when Rungs works on your phone, and then deletes your address. The details are on the privacy page.

If something here is wrong

Write to info@ajansmba.com and it gets corrected. That goes double for the legal section: those rules are moving quickly, and a page that was right in September may not be right by spring.

Start here

Make the agreement — free, printable, nothing saved.
First phone rules: the four that do the work
What apps should a 10 year old have?

Sources

Pages opened and checked on 20 September 2026.