PBS’s New Tablet Puts Your Kids’ Screen Time to Good Use

Kids love touchscreen devices like smartphones and iPads. Whether you should actually let your iPad babysit your child is another matter. But as long as you’re going to introduce your child to the technological sedative that is a tablet, it might as well be a little educational. You probably can’t go wrong with something made by PBS, which is launching a new tablet for the holiday season, as Tech Crunch reports.

The Playtime Pad comes pre-loaded with kid-friendly educational content, including more than 100 hours of PBS KIDS videos (including songs), around 30 educational apps, and 25 educational games, all in a tablet designed to withstand the rigors of kid use. It was designed with the technology company Ematic, which sells a variety of Android tablets and e-readers, and comes with plenty of parental control options.

Though systematic research on how many children use tablets regularly is hard to nail down, a 2014 study of 350 kids in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of kids had their own mobile devices by age 4. A UK study of 2000 parents of toddlers found that 31 percent of kids under 5 years old have their own tablet. If you’re one of the many parents who use tablets to calm cranky kids, you could do worse than queuing up some PBS sing-alongs.

The $80 tablet goes on sale on November 6 from Best Buy, Walmart, and PBS.com.

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