The Scary Reality that Sparked Our Mission

“Everytime my daughter got upset my mother had to play Youtube shorts”

“My son made it impossible to get any work done without watching Diana and Rose”

“My daughter would scream, beat, cry unless she had her tablet in her had”

These are just 3 of the millions of parents facing the same issue.

Picture this. A 4-year-old using an iPad with the ease of a 40-year-old tech executive. It's impressive but terrifying.

I’m certain almost all of us reading this have experienced a foggy brain, the inability to focus, and the strange emptiness after hours of doom scrolling or mindless gaming.

Now, imagine that happening to a young developing 4-year-old brain.

Parents Are Not the Enemy—The Lack of Real Solutions Is

I'm not a parent, which is why I spoke to over 200 parents with children aged 16 months to 13 years old. The findings from the conversations suggested they’re distressed about the dependency on tech but feel trapped. They feel lost for choices when their child sees a friend with an iPad and wants their own, when a digital device replaces a pacifier, and when their child doesn’t look up from the phone while talking to them. Once a kid gets that first taste of screen time, capturing their attention completely, taking it away feels impossible.

Here's the thing: digital devices can be productive!

Our findings also suggested that many parents loved having their kids learning from online learning platforms during controlled iPad time. We love this too. But here's the reality, us adults also struggle letting go of our screens. How do we expect a 4-year-old to?

Higher screen time among young children is associated with lower emotional understanding and increased risk of emotional and behavorial problems, such as anxiety and aggression[1].They quite literally have a reduced ability to understand facial expressions.

The Language Learning Window is Closing Fast

Your child's brain is a language-learning superpower, but only until age 10 [2]. After that, the window starts closing. The same kid who could effortlessly become trilingual at age 4 will struggle with elementary Spanish at 14-years-old.

Here's what excites me: kids are language learning machines. Their brains are wired to absorb new sounds, patterns, and meanings with ease. While adults struggle with Duolingo streaks, a 4-year-old can pick up a new language through play and stories.

Learning languages young doesn't just add a skill—it rewires the brain. These kids become little global citizens, developing cognitive flexibility, enhanced problem-solving abilities, and cultural awareness that might serve them their entire lives.

But here's the important bit: Children don't learn their first language through lessons. They learn it through conversation. So why do we believe that mobile applications and flashcards are the answer for learning languages?

Solution Hidden in Plain Sight

Watch any child with their favorite toy. They whisper secrets, create elaborate adventures, and build entire worlds. They're already having deep, meaningful conversations—maybe not with adults and definitely not with screens. Kids already have perfect conversation partners. They're called toys.

Instead of competing with a child’s natural instinct, we decided to support it. What if that trusted teddy bear could actually respond? What if it spoke Spanish, French, or German? What if it remembered their stories and built on them?

Built by Older Siblings, Reinforced by Experts

We're college students building this for our younger siblings, nieces and nephews — because we watched them become iPad experts at the age we didn’t even have a cellphone. They could navigate phones faster than adults but struggled to find the interest to talk about their day.

We're not doing this alone. We're working with child psychologists and language acquisition experts from universities such as Duke University to ensure every interaction supports healthy development and is not intrusive. As we continue our journey, each feature is tested with families from our community.

Stories, Not Screens: Creation Over Consumption

We built our talking teddy bear around a simple philosophy: creation over consumption. While screens enable children to be passive consumers, conversations require an active creation of ideas, stories, and connections.

Bern follows a "seasons and episodes" approach that taps into how children naturally engage with content. Each season is a week-long theme-based magical world with a different episode each day where your child unlocks adventures. Each episode is a 20-minute long quest which creates excitement without overwhelming them. Children feel a familiar feeling and comfort of playing with their favourite bear while actively building language skills through natural conversation.

No vocabulary drills. Just a cuddly friend who happens to speak multiple languages and loves talking about dragons, spaceships, and magical kingdoms.

What We're Really Building

It is important to understand that this isn't just an audio language learning application. It is a conversation partner that happens to be multilingual, cuddly, and makes learning feel like play.

When children talk to their Bern teddy, they end up developing the skills that will stay with them for a very long time. These include social-emotional learning, empathetic communication, creativity, curiosity and confidence.

Our Promise to the Next Generation

The mission is simple.

Bern helps children express their ideas openly and confidently through a smart and trusted guide that encourages learning through play. And the best part? They strengthen their fluency in a language they know or even better, pick up a new one.

Curious, Creative, Conversational. Bern is building the foundation for the next multilingual generation.

There have been many wise, cuddly bears that have supported childhood through generations. Winnie the Pooh, Baloo the Bear, and Paddington are just a few of the many. Join us in building a future with the newest bear on the block - Bern.

Built by college students who refuse to accept that screens are the only way to learn. Currently helping families raise multilingual, imaginative kids—one teddy bear conversation at a time.

- Avihan Jain | Founder, Bern

[1] “Screen Time and Emotional Problems in Kids: A Vicious Circle?” Apa.org, 2025, www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2025/06/screen-time-problems-children.

[2] Trafton, Anne. “Cognitive Scientists Define Critical Period for Learning Language.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 May 2018, news.mit.edu/2018/cognitive-scientists-define-critical-period-learning-language-0501.