When Should a Kid Get a Tablet?

Later than the store thinks, later than the other parents at preschool think, and probably later than you’re hoping I’ll say.

The specific version by age is next, because you searched for it and you deserve a straight number. The number is still the least important thing in this essay. The reason is what you need to leave with.

Should a 2-year-old have a tablet? A 4-year-old? The ages

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidance, from its 2016 statement Media and Young Minds, is the clearest thing anyone official has said, so start there. Under eighteen months: no screen media at all, with video-chatting with grandma as the one exception. Eighteen to twenty-four months: if you introduce anything, it’s high-quality programming, and you watch it with her, because a toddler doesn’t learn from a screen alone. Two to five: no more than an hour a day of high-quality content, co-viewed when you can. And, the line I’d put on the refrigerator, avoid using media as the way to calm your child, because a kid who is soothed by a screen doesn’t learn to soothe herself.

So: should a two-year-old have a tablet? No. Not her own, not shared, not “just for educational apps.” Should a four-year-old have a tablet? Also no, and here’s why the AAP’s hour-a-day ceiling for that age is not the same as a green light for a device of her own. A four-year-old can watch a show on the family TV with you and stay well inside the guidance. A four-year-old with her own tablet is a four-year-old with a machine engineered to be impossible to put down, in her hands, alone. Those are different things and the guidance was written about the first one.

My own number, for what it’s worth after eleven years of watching the end of this story, is that a child does not need a personal tablet in elementary school at all, and a smartphone waits until high school, and even then it’s a conversation rather than a birthday present.

Since you’ll wonder, here’s what that looks like in my house. My kids are eleven, nine, seven and five, and none of them has a tablet. There is one iPad, and it’s my husband’s, for work; it has one or two apps on it my kids use to learn music and graphic art, and that’s the whole list. They don’t “play” on it and they don’t do “educational apps.” They use it the way you’d use a piano or a set of paints, as a tool for learning something real, and then it goes back to being his. My oldest is eleven, and most kids his age have a smartphone. He doesn’t, and he won’t for a long time. He has a watch that lets him text and call me and a few contacts we’ve approved, which covers every actual need an eleven-year-old has for a phone and none of the manufactured ones. For schoolwork, when they need a computer, they use a MacBook, and when they read they read on a Kindle Paperwhite, which is a screen that does one thing, can’t do anything else, and has nothing on it engineered to pull them back. That’s the distinction I’d offer you instead of an age: not screen or no screen, but is this a tool for something real, or is it a device built to hold her.

Why the number matters less than the reason

The question underneath “should a four-year-old have a tablet” is usually “is it going to hurt her,” and a tablet is not poison. What it is, is a machine built by some of the best-paid behavioral engineers in the world to hold attention for as long as possible, because attention is the product being sold, and it does that job on a four-year-old more effectively than on anyone else alive. Autoplay, the next video queued before this one ends, the bright reward when she taps the right thing, the endless scroll of thumbnails. None of that is an accident and none of it is for her.

And here is what it takes, which is the part that matters. A four-year-old’s actual work, the thing she’s built to do all day, is play: pretending, building, digging, negotiating with another kid over who gets to be the dog, getting bored and turning the corner into her own idea. Every bit of that needs empty time and an unoccupied mind, and the tablet is designed to make sure she has neither. It doesn’t compete with the afternoon for a slice. It’s built to take the whole afternoon, and it’s very good at its job. I’ve written about what boredom is for here and about what happens to a kid who never gets any here; the tablet is the most efficient way ever invented to make sure neither of those things happens.

That’s the displacement argument, and it’s the whole case. Not that the screen damages her. That it replaces the thing she needed to be doing instead.

What I saw at the other end

I taught the fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old version of the kid who got the tablet at four. Nobody selling you the device will describe what that looks like from the front of the room, so here it is.

I had kids come to me begging me to tell their parents to take their phones away, because they could not stop and they knew it. I watched lunchrooms full of teenagers sitting shoulder to shoulder, staring down, unable to have a conversation with the person next to them. I watched them storm the front of the classroom at the bell, shoving each other to be first to the bin their phones were in. I saw kids walk into walls. These were not bad kids or unusual ones. They were the ordinary product of a childhood in which the device arrived before the capacity to resist it did, and by fifteen the device had won, and they knew it had, and they were asking a teacher for help their parents didn’t know they needed.

Nobody hands a four-year-old a tablet intending that. But that is where the road goes, and I’ve stood at the end of it.

What I did instead, and what you can

I have never once handed one of my kids a screen to end a meltdown. Not in eleven years, not in a house with more than one neurodivergent kid, not on an airplane. I’m not telling you that to be superior about it. I’m telling you because the AAP line about not using media to calm a child sounds impossible until you’ve done it, and it isn’t impossible. It’s just hard the first twenty times, and then it isn’t, because a child who has never once been handed the screen to stop crying doesn’t ask for it. The asking is learned. So is the not-asking.

The house rule that made the rest of it easy: when you’re bored, you know the options, and a screen isn’t one of them. That sentence takes the negotiation off the table, and once there’s nothing to campaign for, they go do something.

So if you’re standing in the store, or standing in front of the “educational tablet” ad that found you because you searched this question, here’s what I’d do. Don’t buy it. Not yet, and not as hers. Keep the shared family screen in a shared room, keep it inside the AAP’s hour for a preschooler and watch it with her, and give the money and the afternoon to the things the tablet would have taken: a box of blocks, a yard, a library card, a mud kitchen. When the meltdown comes, and it will, sit through it with her instead of ending it with a screen. You will hate it. It works.

And if your kid is already in school and already has the device, and you’ve started to notice that she reaches for it the way those teenagers did, that’s a different essay, but the first step is the same. Take the gap back. Ten minutes at a time.

One thing

Tonight, count the hours between when your kid wakes up and when she goes to bed, and then count how many of them a screen was in her hands. The gap between those numbers is her childhood. Protect it.

If your kid is in school and the screen question is part of a bigger feeling that something about her days isn’t working, You’re Not Imagining It is a free assessment I built for that feeling. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.

If you’re wondering about screens and AI at school too, I wrote about AI in the classroom. And once your child is reading chapter books, here’s why my kids get a Kindle e-reader and never a tablet.

Sources

• AAP Council on Communications and Media, “Media and Young Minds,” Pediatrics 138(5), 2016. Link