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Would you buy your kids iPads?

Apparently Steve Jobs thought his kids shouldn't have iPads. He thought they were addictively dangerous.

Well, so are books. When I was a kid in the 1950's, I was addicted to reading. Oh, I did other things too, but books were my main focus and where I spent most of my time. Are iPads and their ilk different?

I'd say they can be, but it depends on the child. I could have been spending most of my time reading trashy comic books rather than good books, but I didn't. We had plenty of comic books, and I certainly read them, but the adult books were what really interested me. Today, a child could spend all their time playing pointless games, but an iPad or other tablet is also a powerful educational tool that could open up more worlds than I could find with books.

Our kids grew up in the seventies and eighties, so no iPads for them. But if I were raising my kids today, yes, absolutely they would have iPads and iPhones and more. I'm sure they'd play games, but I'm also sure they'd do their homework and explore knowledge on their own. I'm sure of that because that's what they did: they had TV's and phones in their rooms, we had primitive game computers (first Pong and then a Radio Shack Color Computer). They still did well at school and still had other interests. MTV may have been blasting while they studied, but they did study!

I think Steve was dead wrong about that.