He asked him for advice, and got mad when he was honest!

Before you become a parent, you have a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas about how you’ll raise your future children. Those ideas might include eliminating screen time entirely or not allowing them to access social media until they’re 18. However, once you actually have kids, you realize why parents let them play on their iPads for 8-hour car rides. It’s not easy to keep a kid entertained for 14 hours a day every day, and sometimes you have to do things that make everything easier for you as a parent.

Many parents use an iPad to occupy their kids, allowing them to step away from supervising for 20 minutes a day while they do the dishes. Some purists might not think that’s acceptable, but it’s certainly better than letting your kid spend every moment on an iPad when they’re bored. Kids need the skills that come from playing with objects with their hands, and using a tablet for hours on end doesn’t allow them to be creative or ingenious. Considering how easy it is for anyone, child or adult, to become addicted to their devices, parents should be grateful if their little tykes choose to forgo the technology for something more hands-on.

Another reason not to let your kids use an iPad 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is that it can lead to behavioral issues. Much like TV before it, kids who have unlimited access to their own devices get pretty cranky when they have to do something they don’t necessarily want to do, like attend their cousin’s high school graduation or sit still at the dinner table for 30 minutes. The kids in this story are struggling because their dad won’t take their iPad away from them, and their uncle is the one person who is willing to be honest about it.