What kind of parent tries to pacify a toddler with an iPad?

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News just in from the Department of Things Mums Already Know But Which Must Be Officially Discovered by Scientists: toddlers who use tablets regularly have more tantrums than those who don’t. Let me know when the paper on what bears do in the woods comes out.
According to a study of 315 children over three years, those using tablets more often at the age of three showed more “expressions of anger and frustration” by the time they were four. They were also likely to be spending even more time on those devices a year later, as parents tend to deploy screens to defuse the flare-ups brought on by … screens.
This chimes perfectly with my own hard-won research, conducted over seven years of observing meltdowns in suburban soft-plays. It isn’t just that screens = tantrums, it’s that handing them over in the earliest years leaves children incurious and defenceless in the face of their feelings. You are actively teaching them to ignore their surroundings and other people, removing an opportunity to just sit and work things out. There is nothing more depressing than a two-year-old in a buggy glued to a screen while life happens around them.
• Letting upset children use tablets ‘may cause more tantrums’, study says
Call me a snob but I don’t think it’s a class issue: affluent families in which each child under ten has their “own iPad” is one of my biggest icks too. According to Ofcom, a quarter of British children aged between five and seven own a smartphone, and three quarters use tablets. The fallout from tiny people using addictive devices is so clearly going to be the next public health issue we find ourselves dealing with. I’m not talking about kids with special educational needs and their parents, who carefully use tablets to calm and de-escalate, but about children whose screens take the place of interaction.
I know I sound like some puritan home schooler knitting my own Mary Whitehouse complex, but my kids watch plenty of TV. It’s great for winding down, then the programmes end and the telly stays in our house. When sometimes we watch something or swipe through photos together on a phone, the difference is soon clear. This isn’t passive entertainment, it’s endless vortex-like immersion — and there is usually a moment of friction when the time comes to take it away.
Just as babies have to learn how to soothe themselves to sleep, so toddlers need to experience empty time or grumpiness to work out how to cope. Handing over a screen to keep them quiet is as bad as giving them one of those sugar dummies that rotted preschool teeth in the Eighties — except this time it’s happening to their brains.
• Britain is a nation of phone addicts. How did we get here?
My daughter uses a tablet at school sometimes, but I can count the number of times we have opened our ancient home iPad on one hand. Sure, there are maths apps and ebooks on there, but she has the rest of her life to be addicted to dopamine apps. My husband and I want her to develop the pre-internet attention spans that we have both lost. I am determined to make my children more resilient to tech than I am.
So, out and about, we chat and point at things. We take colouring or a game to restaurants, maybe some tabletop toys. Hardly rocket science, I know, but I am always amazed by parents who don’t seem to have anything other than a phone in their arsenal. Old-school activities that distract but still require concentration have taught our children, aged seven and three, to behave considerately around others — going out for a meal with them is, at this point, genuinely fun.
Sometimes people even remark on how chilled our kids are. I don’t feel smug, but I do take it as a compliment: all of us have worked really hard to look this calm.