My in laws kindly purchased this for my 2.5 year old daughter to help with long distance car trip entertainment (if we ever go anywhere again), etc. I did a little research and agreed that it seemed like a good idea for her to have her own device as she’s mistakenly clicked into my messages and email
on my iPad many times while watching the PBS Kids app and I was worried for the day my boss would get a weird cryptic message from her or my iPad would be locked for 10,000 years. What I don’t like about this tablet: - It comes with a free year of the Freetime kids app which is essentially a “kid-friendly” interface of tens of thousands of pieces of content (movies, games, books, etc). Apparently after a year you have to pay for this which already just feels like an annoying corporate scam. -You can choose your age range to filter “age appropriate” content only. It gives literally tens of thousands of choices. We are very particular about the 5 or so shows that my daughter is allowed to watch and have actually taken time to pre-screen these 5 choices. Call me crazy, but I don’t feel a 2.5 year old needs full reign of 10,000 options of crap. -There is a way you can search for specific to titles and block chunks of content. (Ex: If we don’t want her watching Barbie or Spongebob), but there are still thousands upon thousands of pieces of content that that we haven’t pre-screened nor would be able to or frankly want to. You can manually delete these but let’s be honest, as full time working parents while taking care of a toddler at home during a pandemic, this is the last thing we want to do with our 30 mins of our own “free time” before bed before we have to clean, prep, and pass out on the couch of exhaustion. - There seemingly is no way to turn off aspects of Freetime like books (call us crazy, but we just read them the old fashioned way with our daughter still instead of on a screen) or games (she barely understands the plot of Sesame Street and why some parts have cartoons and some have real people- she’s not ready for games yet). -You can’t pin your favorite content to the top so she at very least could just see that. - The user interface was (obviously this is a personal opinion) terrible. Maybe I sound like a snob because for being an Apple person, but it took me ages and several blog posts just to figure out how to get to the manage permissions section. Overall, I get why this is appealing for some people- turn on the thing and let your kids go. There are time limits and goals you can set up which are perhaps good for older kids who aren’t being monitored in their use as much, but for a young child you’d be there anyways monitoring and saying “5 more minutes before we go out and play!” (So that you can get the fun times of them audibly groaning at you, while also knowing that you- a real human parent- sets limits, not just a machine). For us, it was just WAY too much content for little eyes to have access too and frankly that makes it not “age appropriate” (again one woman’s opinion). It’s nice to have this as a tool to help in those situations where you just need to get one flippin’ thing done without 300 “Mama!!!”s in a 60 second span, but also not have a tool that gives your toddler more content that they could possibly even comprehend. Why not give them a few more years before that?? In the end, I figured out how to add a guided control on my iPad so it locks the app she’s in. And I’ll buy a thick case and screen protector and call it a day. After going through the rigamarole, we decided that our 2.5 year old doesn’t beed her own device, yet.
...
show more
