Tablets for Toddlers: A practical guide for choosing between an iPad and a Kindle Fire Kids Edition

My husband and I first let our son use a tablet when he was about 18 months old. Now, a year and a half later, we have substantial experience managing our child’s use of both an iPad and a Kindle Fire Kids Edition. This guide is intended to help parents of young children anticipate the pros and cons of each of these two options.

iPads: Great for control over content, bad for your wallet

iPad pros:

1. The iPad provides rock solid content control: what you see is what you get. With the exception of those weird Apple apps that won’t go away (I always stuff them into a folder called “Apple Crap” and ignore them), nothing is visible unless you purposefully put it there. This means you can develop a carefully curated collection of apps & games. In terms of video, you can choose whether or not to install and give kids access to streaming services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) and can use parental controls to restrict access to video sites such as YouTube. If you choose not to install video apps and restrict access to web browsing with parental controls, your kid shouldn’t be able to stumble on videos they (and you) have never seen.
2. It is easy to organize apps so kids know where to find them, in their own home screen or folder (or both).
3. It is easy to tell what content is downloaded onto the machine versus not. Other than video apps or player-to-player games, most apps should be useable without Internet access (for example, while traveling).

iPad cons:

1. Even the smaller model is heavy, and oh, that fragile glass…
2. It is a bit expensive (the smallest ones with the least storage space are $399) for something that is going to get dropped through slippery toddler fingers, thrown in a fit of toddler rage, drooled on, smeared with Pirate Booty dust, and so on.
3. There is no real bundle option for getting streaming access to content specifically for kids (unless you use a video app mentioned above). The lack of a bundle option for apps is a real drawback compared to the Kindle. You will end up spending money on apps, games, and ebooks. You may also find yourself stuck making in-app purchases (this sucks — ask Kanye).
4. Warranty plans and repairs are costly too. This is a noteworthy drawback compared to the Kindle’s generous replacement policy.

Kindle Fire Kids Edition: Good for your wallet, poor for content management, absolutely awful for offline use

Kindle Fire Kids Edition pros:

1. The Kindle Fire Kids Edition is substantially cheaper than the iPad ($79.99 gets you a tablet, a case, and a year of Amazon FreeTime content).
2. It is lighter and more durable than the iPad (probably — only time will tell).
3. For two years, you can get a new one basically for free.
4. There is a very cost effective bundle option, called FreeTime Unlimited, with lots of content, including videos, books, and apps/games. The content is pre-arranged based on age level (more on that later). The collection of kids’ ebooks is an especially nice touch. The option to basically “stream” access to hundreds of apps is particularly appealing given that it is very difficult to tell if an app will match a toddler’s skill level and attention span before you buy it. It also helps you avoid spiraling into an in-app purchase vortex.
5. It works well if you already have Amazon Prime and use it for other things.
6. Amazon organizes content by age level, although it isn’t clear how exactly they determine which shows and apps fall under each age category — more on this below.

Kindle Fire Kids Edition cons

1. It is very difficult to manage your kid’s access to content in any meaningful way, regardless of whether you use FreeTime Unlimited.
2. It is very tricky for kids to use the Kindle Fire in airplane mode, even if you do your homework and prepare beforehand.

Given that my child was only 18 months old when he started using tablets, I wanted to be careful about what he watched. In terms of how to manage content, my ideal scenario would be to opt in to shows by hand (for example, start him with Sesame Street and add things as needed). This is what I did with our iPad up until he was about 2.5 years-old and our old iPad bit the dust.

So far as I can tell, there are only two options to block content on the Kindle: (1) If you have FreeTime Unlimited, you can select your child’s age group (e.g., 3–5, 6–8, 9–12), and it will only show Amazon’s curated content for that age range. Amazon provides no meaningful information on how they develop these age-based categories. (2) Alternatively, you can search for shows, apps, or books by hand and block them individually. However, in a given age range in FreeTime Unlimited, there are hundreds of shows and apps available — Amazon brags about this. I do not have time to pre-screen all of these shows and apps. No parent does. No human does. Amazon’s answer to this is to say “no problem, we pre-screened things for you and arranged everything into age groups. All you have to do is choose the right age range for each kid and BOOM! Hand the kid that Kindle and go mix yourself a drink! You’re free! That’s why we called it FreeTime, get it?”

The Kindle Fire with FreeTime Unlimited feels like walking into a Toys R Us and setting your kid loose with a limitless credit card; there’s some high quality, educational stuff in there somewhere, but it’s mixed in with a lot of junk, and your little buddy doesn’t know the difference. Little buddy is just going to pick whatever is loud, shiny, and at eye-level.

Take our kid for example. When we first started with the Kindle Fire, we opened up Sesame Street for him. But the home screen on the Kindle Fire displays several different shows, and within minutes our son had found Daniel Tiger, Dora the Explorer, and Team Umizoomi, none of which I had ever seen. All three are developed for young children and are probably fine. But going into owning a Kindle, I was not prepared for how much freedom my son would have to watch whatever he wanted (within the hundreds of options presented within his age range). We used to live in a Dora-free world. Now I’m going to have the backpack song in my head for the rest of my life and it’s Kindle’s fault.

In order to rein things in, I tried temporarily unsubscribing from FreeTime Unlimited for kids and instead outright purchased and downloaded a few episodes of Daniel Tiger, his new favorite. But even if you only purchase one episode of a show, the Kindle displays the entire season of the show with nothing to indicate which one you bought. So then you get the fun job of (a) trying to remember which one you bought (they all look the same), and (b) trying to help your toddler cope with the reality that they can only watch a subset of the episodes that appear on the screen, something that is difficult for them to understand and guaranteed to elicit frustration.

And now — the problem with airplane mode. This isn’t an issue if you have constant reliable internet access. But if this is not true — say, if you are traveling — oh boy are you in trouble.

From an adult account, it is fairly straightforward to view which episodes of a show you have downloaded onto the Kindle: they will have a small trash can symbol to the right, whereas those you haven’t downloaded will have a small downward arrow symbol. But from the child account, there is no way to view which content is downloaded — and thus useable in airplane mode — versus not.

I knew right away that this would be a problem for my not quite three year-old on a recent trip to visit family. We were in airports and on airplanes with no Internet access for the majority of the trip, and it was very difficult to explain to him that although everything on the Kindle looked exactly the same as it does at home, it wouldn’t work the same way. It is inherently confusing to him that he can see the icon for an episode of a show he likes to watch or a game he likes to play but not be able to watch that show or not be able to play that game. This conundrum puts too much pressure on his self-regulation skills, which for a toddler are nascent at best.

I was determined to avoid this frustration on our trip home. One solution to this problem would be buying or downloading content ahead of time. Buying an entire season of a show from the adult account is easy. There’s a pretty yellow button for it and everything. But downloading an entire season of a show? Even one you already paid to have access to with a Kindle Free Time account or an Amazon Prime account? That requires clicking on a tiny little icon for each episode and babysitting the Kindle as you wait for each episode to download one by one. And yes, it stops downloading if the Kindle goes to sleep. Is there an option to download an entire season? NO.

But here is the kicker: the apps don’t download when kids use them either. Having unlimited access to so many apps and being free of the worry regarding in-app purchases is, I think, the most compelling feature in the Kindle’s favor. But you are really streaming the apps in a way, not downloading them, unless you go out of your way to do so from an adult account on the device.

This was my plan for the plane: if the videos were a bust, at least we could play games. When you are using the Kindle while connected to the Internet, a little check mark appears in the corner of the app’s icon, which led me to believe it had been downloaded onto our machine. Nope. In order to actually download an app onto the machine, you have to find it via the adult account following a process similar to videos. I really couldn’t believe it when I clicked on an app we had used dozens of times before (Elmo’s 123) and got the error message about being in airplane mode and not having access.

But here is yet another problem: the content is presented in a different way while logged into an adult account versus a child account. Since there is no way to filter into a “child view” when logged in as an adult, and since you cannot download anything from the child account, adults are forced to search for things by hand to download them for offline use, just as they are forced to search for things by hand to block them. This creates an overly burdensome process that had me wondering why I bought the Kindle Fire in the first place.

In conclusion, here is my advice:

Buy an iPad if:

• You want precise control over what your toddler can view and play.
• Your toddler will frequently use the iPad in settings without reliable internet access.
• You have $$$.
• You have extra $$$ for a good case.

Buy a Kindle Fire Kids Edition if:

• You don’t feel strongly about controlling your child’s access to specific content (other than by target age range) OR you are willing to take the time to block specific shows and apps by hand. (If the latter is true, Godspeed my friend. You are a brave soul.)
• Your toddler will typically use the tablet in settings with reliable internet access OR you are willing to take the time to download specific shows and apps by hand before you leave for a trip (Again, Godspeed).
• You need to conserve $$$.
• Your toddler really cannot be trusted not to break the thing (no one is judging here. This is a safe space.)