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Parents buy their under eight’s tablets

by on17 January 2014



More than a quarter of toddlers own one

More than 27 per cent of British children aged under eight years old now own tablets and nearly four million children mastering touchscreen devices aged three and under.

This daft statistic was compiled by price comparison uSwitch.com polled 1,740 adults in the UK to find that around eight in ten of those who were parents forked out to buy gadgets for their family last year, spending an average of £462 each, or £5.6 billion in total. But the alarming figure is that while kids should be playing in SAS style confidence courses in parks, they are instead dragging their sweet sticky paws across a tablet.

And what kind of three year old is going to need to use a tablet? If parents want to teach their kids something useful at that age, they should be teaching them how to read or write rather than banging a tablet in front of them and hoping to distract them. Some of the problem is that kids are getting tablets because they ask for them.

Around £3.2 billion was spent in the run up to Christmas alone. Ernest Doku, telecoms expert at uSwitch.com said: “Once the gadget of choice for high-flyers and tech fans, the price of an entry-level tablet is now under £100, making them an attractive – and affordable – piece of kit for the whole family.

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