Should our kid have their own tablet?

Ownership matters more than minutes

Almost every conversation about tablets is about time limits. We think that is the wrong end of it.

An hour on a shared tablet in the kitchen, with a parent nearby, choosing what to watch and stopping when it ends, is a different activity from an hour on a personal tablet in a bedroom with autoplay running. Both are “an hour of screen time”. Only one of them is a problem, and time limits cannot tell them apart.

Ownership decides which one you get. A personal device becomes the thing a child reaches for when bored, and boredom is where a great deal of childhood happens. A shared device has to be asked for, which introduces a small pause, and that pause does most of the work you were hoping a timer would do.

This also happens to be the one thing you can still change after the tablet is already in the house. You cannot un-buy it. You can change whose it is.

What the reading evidence says

If part of why you bought it was reading, this is worth knowing. Across 39 studies of around 1,800 children aged one to eight, comprehension was lower from a digital book than from the same book on paper when the only difference was the screen. The children took in less.

That does not make e-books useless. The same research found digital books designed with genuine story-related features did better than plain scanned ports. But a tablet usually makes a worse book, one that also happens to do forty other things.

What this looks like in daily life

The tablet lives in a kitchen drawer. It is asked for and it goes back.

Turn off autoplay everywhere it exists. Turn off notifications entirely. Neither of these is a parental control, they are just switches, and they remove the two features specifically designed to extend a session past the point anyone chose.

No account of their own for under-tens. Profiles are fine, but an account with a recommendation history is a different thing, because that history is what starts choosing on your child’s behalf.

What each platform lets you set up, kid account included, is on the device settings page.

Sit with them sometimes. Not to supervise, to co-watch. It is the single best opportunity you will get for the conversations, because the material is right there on the screen in front of both of you.

What to say

When they ask for their own:

“We’ve got one for the family. What did you want to do on it?”

That question is not a stalling tactic. Half the time the answer is something specific and reasonable, and you can just say yes to that thing.

When another kid at school has their own:

“Lots of kids do. In our house, it’s a family one. You can use it; it just lives out here.”

When this doesn’t apply

School-issued devices are not yours to govern, and fighting them puts your kid in an impossible position. Treat the school device as a work tool: it comes home, it gets used for the work, and it charges in the kitchen with everything else.

A tablet used as a communication device by a non-speaking child is that child’s voice, and nothing on this page applies to a voice.