Decision 3 of 7
Should our kid have their own tablet?
The short answer
Have one if it helps, but do not give a young child their own. The word "own" is doing all the work in that sentence. A shared family tablet that lives in a drawer in the kitchen and comes out for a reason is a genuinely useful object. The same hardware, personally owned, kept in a bedroom, becomes the default answer to every idle moment. Same device, completely different thing.
Three ways to do this
These all point the same direction. They are rungs on a ladder rather than options on a menu, so start wherever you can actually hold the line. A rule you keep beats a rule you announce.
Start here
Make the tablet a family object rather than a personal one. It lives in a shared drawer and comes out for something specific.
For families who already have a tablet in the house and would rather change its status than confiscate it.
Going further
The tablet stays, and so does the rule that it is used in shared rooms with someone else around. No solo tablet time behind a closed door.
For families who want the useful parts without the device becoming a private world.
All the way
No tablet for under-tens. Books, paper, a camera, an audio player. If schoolwork needs a screen it happens on the family computer.
For families who are early enough to skip the step entirely, which is easier than it sounds.
The question is ownership, not 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 is not usually a better book. It is usually a worse book that also does 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, an account with a recommendation history is a different thing, because that history is what starts choosing on your child’s behalf.
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 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.
Tablets used as communication devices by a non-speaking child are not screens in the sense meant here at all. They are a voice. None of this applies.
If you decided to buy something
Only worth reading once you have made the call above. Nothing here is required, and the cheapest answer to most of these problems is no purchase at all.
Yoto Player
Audio without a screen, controlled by physical cards a child can choose from a shelf, which keeps the choosing analog.
Player around $100, cards from about $10
Downsides. The card library adds up fast. The device is a screen-free win, but it still creates a small collecting habit worth watching.
Instax Mini
A camera that prints, so a photograph becomes an object on a wall instead of the ten-thousandth file in a roll nobody opens.
Camera around $80, film about $1 a shot
Downsides. Film is a running cost and it adds up quickly with an enthusiastic seven-year-old. Buy film in bulk and set a per-week limit before it becomes a source of conflict.
Daylight Computer
A tablet with a paper-like display and no colour video, aimed at reading and writing rather than watching.
Around $730
Downsides. Costs as much as a laptop and is a niche purchase. For most families a library card and a paperback do the same job for nothing.
Talk about it too
Rules do half the work. These are the conversations that do the other half, written for every age from four up.