Parents are increasingly buying themselves a quiet meal out by hooking the children up to iPads and other tablet devices. Is this right? asks Henry Yates.
Pizza Express, Cheltenham branch. Lunchtime, any given Saturday. This should be a scene of cheerful anarchy. Children should be jousting with breadsticks, rutting the salt cellars with plastic dinosaurs, interrupting their parents, irrevocably staining their clothes and suddenly needing the loo just as the starters arrive. Essentially, it should feel like a circus with refreshments.
Instead, though the restaurant is packed with families, there’s silence. After six years soundtracked by thin, reedy shrieks, you might imagine I’d embrace this. I don’t. It’s eerie, like a deleted scene from Children of the Corn.
The cause is clear. At the tables all around us, children’s glazed faces are lit by tablet screens. Inanimate, bar a flicker of frustration when an Angry Bird overshoots its target, interacting with their parents in grunts and shrugs, this is a family enjoying lunch together in its loosest, most depressing sense.
In this context, my own kids – scribbling away on colouring sheets with standard-issue Pizza Express crayons – look quaint and anachronistic, one evolutionary step from cloth-capped Victorian urchins playing with peg dolls. Maybe so, but I’m still convinced they’re getting the better deal.
This is the age of the tablet. These are boom times for Apple’s iPad,Google’s Nexus and Amazon’s Kindle Fire (and the endless variants thereof). According to a spokesman for parent company Dixons, there were days on the run-up to last year’s so-called ‘tablet Christmas’ when PC World and Currys were shifting one every second. Faced with those kind of numbers, you suspect that resistance is futile.
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