When I was young, our parents wanted to protect us from predators outside of our home, because they said kids were not safe outside.
But today, we seem to worry more about the predators who extend their snatching jaws from within the home, or to be more specific, right inside from the phones and tablets. Yes, cyberbullying, online pornography and explicit content seems more dangerous than the good old fashion kidnapping. Not even Facebook, Fitbit and Google Docs are completely kid friendly, according to a WSJ report.
What can you as a parent do? The most effective way to protect your kids against harmful content is to just stop them from using the Internet at all. This means that you should keep phones and tablets away from them. Your kids will only have access to the toys and entertainments that you yourself had when you were young. This method, while being super effective, is sadly no longer viable in today’s Covid-plague world. Everyone is talking about online distance learning and Google Classroom. Cutting off Internet from the life of your kids is tantamount to cutting off their future. Well… I might be exaggerating, but the hard reality is that Internet is and will always remain an indispensable part of you and your future generation’s life.
So the wolf is here, learn to dance with it.
Which is why we are glad to bring on Fire HD Kids edition as a means for parents to curb the influences of those “harmful materials” on their kids.
Truth to be told, all tablets now come with some form of parental controls, but Amazon does it the best. First, as a parent, you can block your kids from mature contents in the kindle store by setting up the appropriate kid’s profile for them. Yes, Kindle store is not as kid-friendly you think it is. As the “biggest bookstore” in the world, Kindle store must allow for every kind of kinky materials, or else it simply can’t be the biggest.
You might think that that’s all what the kid’s profile does, but no it’s not.
Exposing pornography and grueling images to kids is not the worst thing that can happen to them. I’m pretty sure before the last century, given the lack of privacy and the prevalence of violence, the kids in our parents or grandparent generations were exposed to bedroom sex and human mutilation a lot more often than you care to imagine, and the sheer intensity and the frequency of the exposure would definitely make a lot of today child psychologists cringe. Still, a lot of them grew up to be well-adjusted and fit enough to raise our generation ( and generations prior), so it can’t be all that bad.
What is more insidious, is the pure screen time the kids have when they are being left alone with the electronic gadgets. Now electronic gadgets are recent inventions so we don’t yet know the long term effect on the children’s future. But too much screen time is already proven to shorten the kids’ attention span (until it’s shorter than a goldfish’s?). Not only that, the screen time disrupts their schedule and make them irritable and irascible when their parents tell them to STOP ( speaking from my personal experience as the father to two kids). I would say this is a far more serious problem than bad content.
Amazon solves this problem elegantly by enabling the parental control on kids profile; so the once the allocated time is over, bang! you got signed out mercilessly and mechanically. No more YouTube and Mobile Legend, sorry kiddy. Time to go to sleep! What? You are not happy? go and talk to the tablets then, don’t come to your daddy for I don’t forcefully wrestle the tablet away from you. And don’t throw your punch and anger at me, I’m not the culprit, HAHAHA!
The worse enemy is not the online predators, but rather yourself.
Some kids might really vent out their frustration at the Fire Tablet and hurl it against the ground ( horrible kids!). No worries– here comes another shining feature of the Amazon Kid HD tablet— we have 2 years warranty, and if you break it — for whatever reason– we will replace it, no question asked.
If you ask me if kids should be given a smartphone/tablet, I would say no. At their age, kids should go play in the nature, read books and do homework in the good old old pencil and paper way. But then, like I said previously, now is the New Normal and everyone is expected to be Internet savvy, so having a tightly controlled tablet is a coopt-out. Fire HD tablet seems to fit this bill perfectly.
Some more, at RM 690, it’s a premium tablet at a non-premium price. If you are really looking for a tablet for your kids, this is an option I can heartfeltly recommend.
