Most weeks I’ll have a parent at our club say some version of the same sentence. They’ll mention it casually, half-laughing, usually while we’re standing by the mat. “He’s an absolute nightmare when we try to take the tablet off him.” Or “She loses her mind if the iPad goes off mid-episode.” Or — my favourite, because it’s the most honest — “I don’t know who to blame, me or the iPad.”
I hear it so often that I started paying attention to the research. And what I found has, frankly, changed how I think about screens and small children — because what’s actually happening at the moment you switch the iPad off is something much bigger and much more concerning than a tired toddler having a tantrum.
Let me be honest with you, because I think you’d rather have honesty than a soft sell. Tablets and iPads, in the hands of children under five, are not a neutral piece of technology. They are doing something. They are quietly rewiring the way our small children handle wanting things, waiting for things, being bored, being alone with their own thoughts. The meltdown when the iPad goes off isn’t just a tantrum. It is the visible bit of a much bigger pattern — and the research that’s been coming out over the last couple of years is starting to make that pattern impossible to ignore.
This piece is about that pattern. Why it’s happening, where it leads if we don’t pay attention, and — most importantly — what we can actually do about it.
What the researchers expected to find — and didn’t
A team of child psychologists published a study in 2024 looking at 654 five-year-olds and their parents. (You can read it here if you fancy a proper dig.) They wanted to know what kind of child copes well when the screen goes off, and what kind of child collapses to the floor as though they’ve been told the dog has died.
So they tested loads of things.
Did the brainier kids cope better? You’d think they would, wouldn’t you. Bigger brain, more self-control, better at handling disappointment.
Did the kids whose families read together at bedtime cope better? Or the families who sang in the car? Or the ones who got the colouring pencils out on a Saturday morning? All the parenting books say those things matter.
The answer to every one of these questions was: no. None of them made a measurable difference to how a child handled the screen being switched off.
Only one thing did. And it’s the thing that, once you see it, you can’t unsee.
It was whether the child could really, properly play with real toys.
Not how many toys they had. Not how often they played. How they played. Whether they could lose themselves in it. Whether they made up a story about the dinosaur and the fire engine and what happened when they got married. Whether they could sit alone with a stick and a piece of string for ten minutes and turn it into a swamp adventure. Whether, when an adult sat down on the floor with them, the adult actually got into it — or whether they half-watched while scrolling Instagram.
The kids who could really play with real things were the kids who didn’t lose their minds when the iPad went off. The kids who couldn’t were the kids who did.
Why this is hopeful, not depressing
Now — and this is the bit that genuinely changed how I think about all this — the same study tested the kids’ actual brain machinery. The bits that handle impulse control, self-soothing, the ability to wait for something you want. The proper grown-up self-regulation stuff.
Those bits didn’t predict whether a child would tantrum at iPad o’clock.
Play did. Brain machinery didn’t.
This matters because it means the kid who currently loses their mind every time you take the screen away is not broken. There’s nothing wrong with their wiring. They haven’t been damaged. What they’re missing is the practice of being absorbed in something real.
And that is a skill. Skills can be learned. Skills get better with time and repetition. Your child can build this one.
The loop nobody warns you about
There’s a second piece of research worth knowing about, because it shows you exactly how the trap closes. A team in Canada followed 315 small children for three years. (Summary here.) They found that an extra 73 minutes a day on the tablet at age three-and-a-half led to a 22% jump in anger and frustration a year later.
And — here’s the bit that hurts to read — the more the child tantrumed at four-and-a-half, the more screen time they got at five-and-a-half.
You can see what’s happening, can’t you. The tablet causes the dysregulation. The dysregulation makes the child harder to manage. The parent, exhausted and at the end of a long day, reaches for the only thing that reliably stops the screaming. Which is, of course, the tablet. Which deepens the dysregulation. Which makes the next meltdown bigger. Which leads to more tablet.
This isn’t a moral failing on anyone’s part. No parent sets out to do this. The loop is the product working as designed — these devices are built, by enormous companies with enormous research budgets, to be very, very hard to put down. Adults can’t put them down. We shouldn’t be shocked when three-year-olds can’t either.
But once you see the loop, you can’t unsee it. And the question becomes: what does this look like when these children are eight? Twelve? Fifteen?
Where this is heading, if we don’t do something about it
I want to be careful here, because nobody can predict the future and I’m not interested in scaring you. But the early data is troubling enough that I think it deserves saying.
Children who grow up unable to be absorbed in real things don’t suddenly acquire the skill at age ten. They become the children — and we are already seeing them in classrooms and playgrounds across the country — who can’t sit through a lesson, can’t lose themselves in a book, can’t tolerate the small frustrations of a board game with their cousins. Their attention spans shorten. Their capacity to be alone with their own thoughts shrinks. Their tolerance for boredom collapses to zero.
By the time they’re teenagers, the tablet has been replaced by a smartphone, and the same pattern plays out at higher stakes. Research from King’s College London has linked problematic smartphone use in 13–16-year-olds to roughly double the rate of anxiety and nearly three times the rate of depression. Two-thirds of older teenagers in the same studies said they had already tried to cut their phone use down. They wanted to. They couldn’t. They had never learned how to be absorbed in anything else.
This is not, I should be clear, a story about technology being evil. Technology isn’t evil. It’s just very effective. The problem is that the skill of being absorbed in the real world — of being a person who can find the inside of an experience, who can wait, who can sit with a feeling, who can entertain themselves with their own imagination — is a skill that has to be built. It is built in early childhood. It is built almost entirely through play.
And every hour a small child spends being entertained by a screen is an hour they are not spending building it.
Right — so what do you actually do?
Five things. All small, all things I see working in the families at our club.
One. Sit down on the floor more often than you think you need to. When your child is playing with their stuff — Duplo, dolls, dinosaurs, whatever — and you have a choice between joining in and “just quickly checking this email,” join in. Not every time. Nobody can do it every time. But more often than you currently do. When a parent really gets into the play, the child learns that the real world is the kind of place worth being absorbed in. That signal — this matters because mum thinks it matters — is one the tablet can’t send. And it’s the signal that, over months and years, builds the skill we’re talking about.
Two. Resist the urge to “rescue” a bored child. This one is hard. When your three-year-old says they’re bored, every instinct says to fix it. Don’t, not always. Boredom is the doorway to imagination. The child who has to invent their own next ten minutes is the child who’s building exactly the muscle we want them to build. Sometimes the best parenting move is to say “I’m not in charge of fun, you’ll think of something” and walk into the kitchen.
Three. Have one toy out at a time. A floor covered in fifteen toys is overwhelming, and overwhelmed children flick between things like adults flick between TV channels. One basket, one set of toys, swap it out every few days. Children play with one thing for much longer when it isn’t competing with everything else they own.
Four. Don’t end screen time without warning, but don’t bargain either. The research is clear that abrupt cut-offs make tantrums worse, but so does negotiating (“five more minutes… ten more… okay, just till the end of the episode”). What works is a calm, predictable signal — same words every time — and then following through without drama. “When this episode ends, we put the iPad in the drawer.” Then it ends, then it goes in the drawer, then you change the subject. The drama you don’t bring is drama the child won’t bring either.
Five. Replace, don’t subtract. This is the big one. “Less screen time” is a subtraction, and subtractions are very hard to live with. “More of this other thing” is an addition, and additions are easy. Don’t try to take away the iPad. Try to add something so absorbing that the iPad has to compete with it. A weekly judo lesson. A trip to the woods every Saturday. A mucky-paint session on the kitchen table. A class somewhere where they get on the floor with other children and use their body.
(This last one is, full disclosure, what I do for a living. I run a judo club for three- and four-year-olds in Woking. I’m not going to pretend that’s not relevant to me writing this. But the principle applies whether the something is judo or swimming or forest school or anything else — and if you find your version of it somewhere that isn’t us, I am genuinely glad. The point is the something, not the where.)
The bigger picture
A child psychologist called Vygotsky, working nearly a hundred years ago, wrote that play is “the leading activity” of small children. He meant something specific by that. He meant that real, physical, imaginative play isn’t a break from learning — it is the learning. It’s where small children practise wanting something they can’t have yet. It’s where they practise being part of a story bigger than themselves. It’s where they learn to manage the gap between what I want nowand what I’ll get if I wait.
The iPad is the opposite of that. The iPad delivers what you want, instantly, every time, with no waiting and no friction. That’s not an accident. That’s the entire business model. But a child raised on instant delivery doesn’t have anywhere to put the wanting when the delivery stops. And that’s the meltdown. That’s all the meltdown is — a small person who hasn’t been given the chance to practise the most important skill of being a human being, which is the ability to handle the gap between wanting something and getting it.
So the next time the iPad goes off and the screaming starts — because it will, in every house, including the ones with the calmest-looking parents at the school gate — try not to make it about the iPad. The iPad is a symptom. What’s underneath is more important, and more fixable: there aren’t enough other things in their life worth being lost in.
Give them more of those. Whatever shape they take. The kids who have them don’t fight you when the screen goes off. They’ve got somewhere else to go. And in fifteen years’ time, when they’re teenagers being handed a smartphone, the skill they built at three on a living-room carpet is the one that will save them.
IIf you’d like to come and watch a Tigers class, or bring your little one along to try it on a 14-day VIP pass for £1, you can fill in a form and our team will help you with the next step. No pressure. We just think it’s the kind of thing that helps.
And if judo isn’t your thing — genuinely, it’s fine. Find your version. The science is on your side either way.
— Vince
