At what age will you give your kid an ipad?

[Eug]

My 4 year old gets to use our old iPad 2 for Netflix and YouTube.

I'm thinking 14? Before that I want him outdoors, swimming in lakes, riding bikes, and catching bugs.

Doing that and having an iPad are not mutually exclusive of course.

 

[Paladin3]

A football, fishing pole or Red Ryder BB gun are better gifts for a kid.

 

[purbeast0]

My niece is 5 years old, she's never played a game on a phone or tablet, never watched movies or skits either. She's only seen some pictures - basically family pictures - on the phone. No TV save for some football and a cooking show here or there that my sister watches with my brother in law. She is turning out fine. I'll ask my sister this week when they will introduce her to technology and how, and then report, cause I am curious.

When I go to some gigs, and the clients are home, I often see little kids glued to a tablet or computer watching videos or playing games.

See, there are extremes both ways, and this is a bad extreme in the opposite direction. Having no exposure to that stuff is just as bad as having too much exposure to it IMO. Balance is the key and not over exposing.

With the amounts of educational tools available for tablets right now you would almost be doing a disservice to not give some time to young children on one. Our son is almost 2 but doesn't have a tablet or anything, but when we fly with him in 2 weeks he sure as shit will have one glued to his hands to keep him quiet on the flight as much as possible. That is where I will make an exception. I'll put on a show he likes and hope he sits quiet or sleeps the rest of the time.

I think by the time my son is 3 or 4 we may have a tablet that is "his" and dedicated to be a toy for learning purposes and stuff. Not something he can use all the time but in spurts for some fun learning activities. We also have the TV on a lot just as background noise and stuff, but have been turning it off more just for his sake. I also am on a laptop a lot at home so he sees that too. As long as it's balanced I am okay with it.

 

[Sho'Nuff]

I have two kids, a 5 year old and an 8 year old. We introduced the ipad and similar technology to my son at age 3, and my daughter at about the same age. My son also plays video games on the PS4.

My view is that in this day and age, insulating kids from technology completely is not feasible. My wife and I have therefore tired very hard to teach our kids how to use and enjoy technology responsibly. For the most part, that means teaching our kids when it is ok to use technology and when it is not, and, to a great extent, limiting how much "screen time" our kids get. At present our kids get about 1/2 an hour of screen time a day during the week, and that is right before bedtime (7:30 - 8PM). There are some exceptions, such as when my son was researching a topic for school (in which case we let him use the ipad to look up facts about his chosen topic with adult supervision). On the weekends, the kids usually get about 90 minutes of screen time a day. An hour in the morning (before mom and dad wake up), and the same 1/2 hour before bed. We do give some leeway for my son as well when he is using the ipad/iphone to further learning. For example, he plays a lot of math games on the ipad - and when he is doing that it is hard for us to tell him to quit. Particularly as he already has a solid foundation in math topics that are taught in 4th and 5th grade (he is in second). It is similarly difficult to tell him to stop reading when he sneaks a flashlight under his covers at bedtime and is caught reading hours after he was supposed to go to bed.

Interestingly, the hardest part about teaching our kids how to appropriately use technology has been preventing ourselves from inappropriately using it in front of them. My wife and I are both professionals and we both have smart phones with work email, etc. on it, and clients that expect us to respond quickly. So it is very difficult not to have the phone sitting there at dinner, or always in my pocket, etc. And its even more difficult not to answer when said phone rings, beeps, or otherwise triggers the pavlovian response.

 

[ultimatebob]

My kid has had a tablet (Kindle Fire) since she was 2.

BAD IDEA. Now she'll just sit on the couch and watch super stupid YouTube videos on them. It's amazing how many bad parodies of Frozen and Trolls are out there, and kids love that shit because they recognize the characters. I've had a lot of my auguments with my wife about this, since she seems to think that it's OK for her to watch this mind numbing crap.

Seriously. Don't do this.

 

[Eug]

A football, fishing pole or Red Ryder BB gun are better gifts for a kid.

Well, I won't be buying my kids BB guns any time soon. No thanks.

My view is that in this day and age, insulating kids from technology completely is not feasible. My wife and I have therefore tired very hard to teach our kids how to use and enjoy technology responsibly. For the most part, that means teaching our kids when it is ok to use technology and when it is not, and, to a great extent, limiting how much "screen time" our kids get.

Exactly. It should be noted that in the past, that screen time was TV. These days it's tablets. My kids watch exactly zero broadcast TV, but do watch some Netflix and YouTube, controlled by us.

BTW, I haven't had to resort to this yet, but the Bell modem that came with my TV service is also a gateway that can control internet and TV receiver access on an IP by IP basis, according to a schedule that you can set for each client device.

 

[luv2liv]

i wouldnt give anyone i care an ipad or any apple products.
from personal experience, they are intentionally crippled after 2 or 3 years.
remember the iphone 4s? super fast phone when it came out. now slow as dirt. ipad 1 was awesome for news, now i cant even open cnn.com. ipod touch 3g played music fine. after an OS update, it randomly skips songs. apple genius gave me new replacements cause they were under warranty. after awhile he told me to never update. ummmm ok....
getting back on track, i wouldnt give my own kids electronics till at least 8 or 10. cant believe some elementary schools are really pushing this onto kids much earlier. im pretty sure if i learned ABC and 123 on paper, other kids can too.

 

[Eug]

i wouldnt give anyone i care an ipad or any apple products.
from personal experience, they are intentionally crippled after 2 or 3 years.
remember the iphone 4s? super fast phone when it came out. now slow as dirt. ipad 1 was awesome for news, now i cant even open cnn.com. ipod touch 3g played music fine. after an OS update, it randomly skips songs. apple genius gave me new replacements cause they were under warranty. after awhile he told me to never update. ummmm ok....
getting back on track, i wouldnt give my own kids electronics till at least 8 or 10. cant believe some elementary schools are really pushing this onto kids much earlier. im pretty sure if i learned ABC and 123 on paper, other kids can too.

Sorry, but the original iPad was crippled at launch. I specifically didn't buy that one because it was short on both CPU speed and RAM.

I bought the iPad 2 on launch day and it's still in active use. Yes it's slow now... after 6 years (!) on iOS 9, but it's still fine for Netflix, which is what the kids use it for.

BTW, they learn ABC 123 on paper. But schools these days aren't stuck in 1972 so they have other tools to use too.

 

[purbeast0]

Someone is really complaining that an iPhone 4s is slow now?

A 6 year old phone is slow now?

You don't say...

 

[luv2liv]

hey man, if it works fine when i got it, why wouldnt it work now?
for comparison, my 10 years old desktop is still working fine for what i need it for, Word, Excel, web, movies. it couldnt do 4k vid editing now, but obviously it couldnt do that when i got it.
people has subconsciously accept this from apple as proven by Jimmy Kimmel every year.
it's not a problem if you are rich and buy newer models every year. it's a problem for me cause i tend to use things until im dead or they are dead. fyi, still driving a camray 1997, 220k miles.

 

[purbeast0]

hey man, if it works fine when i got it, why wouldnt it work now?
for comparison, my 10 years old desktop is still working fine for what i need it for, Word, Excel, web, movies. it couldnt do 4k vid editing now, but obviously it couldnt do that when i got it.
people has subconsciously accept this from apple as proven by Jimmy Kimmel every year.
it's not a problem if you are rich and buy newer models every year. it's a problem for me cause i tend to use things until im dead or they are dead. fyi, still driving a camray 1997, 220k miles.

It will work exactly like it did when you first bought it if you run the same software on it. The problem is you aren't running the same software and operating systems on it and they require more power.

Word, Excel, and the web browers are pretty much the same software as before and in general are pretty light weight. And if you really think that a modern website with a shitload of stuff going on runs "just as good" on your 10 year old PC as it does on a newer PC, you're kidding yourself. It may work just fine for you but it will run better for people with a more powerful machine.

Also, comparing the PC market which has been stagnate for nearly a decade now, to mobile, that has come a long way in the past decade, is pretty dumb.

 

[Eug]

When the iPhone launched, it loaded up the New York Times' front page in about 10 seconds.

One curious reporter tried doing the same recently with the modern version of the New York Times. It took the same iPhone 3 minutes to load it, because the page has gotten that much more complicated.

BTW, in Geekbench my iPhone 7 Plus gets 5403. The iPhone 4S gets 485.

https://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks

That means that not even including the GPU speedups, my iPhone is 11X as fast as the iPhone 4S. It also has 6X the RAM.