Play games all the way through to check for ads, pop-ups, and violence. (Mary McFadden found this out the hard way. A tame-looking app for her grandson, she says, "started out with cute little cartoon people [that] turned out to be bloody murderers.")

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
Kristen Chase, reviews kids touchscreen applications at coolmomtech.com, plays games on an iPad with her four children, Drew, Margot, Bridget and Quinlan.