There's no 'autodiscovery' process running before or outside EmulationStation. The gamelists are written by EmulationStation when stopping/restarting (by default, but you can choose in the option to write it immediately). The location of the gamelists for most of your system (in the games' folder) indicates you either ran a scraper outside of EmulationStation or you copied the games folders from another system (including the system's gamelist.xml). That shouldn't be a problem though.

Did you restart EmulationStation after adding the kidgame tags and before turning on 'kidmode' ? I'm wondering if there isn't any bug that when turning on kid mode doesn't save the metadata on exit (because of the kidmode being selected).
Did you modify the options for metadata saving/reading in EmulationStation ?

@marcoabm there is a way to do this so that someone has to press the back button (usually coded as B) to get out of the favorites list. I BELIEVE though I am not in front of my pi right now that if while in emulation station you hit the start key to get to the emulation station menu you have to change two options (btw I have this set up on my bartop this way for the reason you mention). First there is an option for start on system or something similar and you can choose “favorites”. This way when the pi boot it will go right to
Favorites. Then there is another option. It might be called quick system select or quick carousel or something. You can disable that and now someone can not switch systems by moving left and right they have to press the button to physically back out of the favorites menu and back to the top menu. I will try to find the exact name of the option later if you can’t find it.

EDIT: Ah! I found it online. It is in the emulation station menu as UI options, then “quick system select” you want to disable that. Also, if you want to go super extreme and don’t want to leave it as just difficult to go to the other systems but rather make it absolutely impossible to do that; you do the foregoing two steps and then also edit the configuration file that is related to the actual control buttons for emulation station and remove the back button. I am not a big fan of that personally because I still like to be able to back out sometimes but if you really want to do that I have done something similar (switched the button used for menu and back in emulation station) so could walk you through it.

@SnipedintheHead we have all been there. Sometimes it is impossible to spot your own errors. No matter how many times you review it! Walk away, or ask a fresh eye to look.

I mean i added the kid modes mod to my emulation station, but when i had it installed it gave some weird error i cant remember what it was, it was due to me having sub folders in my nes folder,

and then when i went to uninstall it, due to it, not doing what exactly i want i got errors with es_config, which evecially led me to load my back up for RETROPIE, so basically what i am asking, has there been any solution yet for https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation

I love this feature but if its gonna give problems with sub folders i am gonna pass on it, but hoping the sub folder problem can be resolved in time.

ii like keeping my folder structure like this
''Old Hacks
''New Hacks
''Public Domain
''Custom Games
and etc

I like to separate my games and keep Japan/USA only games together due to Universal Scraper reasons.

in completion i would like to see child friendly mode to read sub folders, and beable to add favorites, hide game and beable to interact with all the features in the future.